Mayor Wilson Defends Northwest Shelter Plan Against Upset Neighbors

At a town hall on Tuesday night to discuss his sweeping plan to add 1,500 shelter beds by the end of the year, Mayor Keith Wilson responded to community backlash around the latest planned shelter in Northwest Portland.

“We have to address the suffering, and I believe that we can find a bed for every person in Portland in need every single night,” Wilson told a crowd of 500 at The Armory.

It’s been weeks now that a group of neighbors in Northwest Portland has vehemently and publicly opposed the shelter. The campaign is largely led by Todd Zarnitz, president of the Northwest District Association, who’s taken interviews with television stations to air his concerns and has hosted community gatherings to protest the shelter.

This is the first organized and persistent opposition that Wilson has come up against in his quest to add 1,500 beds to the shelter system by the end of the year. While pushback on the siting of a homeless shelter is a tale as old as time, this represents the first time Wilson has seen up close the strength of a neighborhood district’s opposition.

It appears Wilson will push ahead with the shelter despite it.

The shelter is set to open in September in an old office building at Northwest 15th Avenue and Northrup Street. The space can hold up to 200 shelter beds, though the city will start with 40 and add more gradually from there.

Wilson, who was joined by Portland Solutions director Skyler Brocker-Knapp, responded evenly to the criticisms and questions lobbed at him. Among them: What would the city do to control for drug use and alcohol around the perimeter of the shelter?

Brocker-Knapp emphasized that the shelter will be low barrier; that means people seeking a bed won’t need to be sober upon arrival, nor will they need to show ID.

Meeting attendees were handed slips of paper upon arrival that listed recent statements made by the city and the mayor about shelters, including that crime has actually decreased, not increased, around newly opened shelters. The list offered a rebuttal to each point.

“Each point can be refuted with hard data and the lived experience of residents near other existing shelters in the city,” the paper read.

A second slip of paper, provided by the mayor’s office, took a different tone: It laid out Wilson’s plan for the remainder of the year to aggressively build nighttime shelter beds.

Wilson is largely having to execute the overnight shelter expansion without assistance from the city’s partner in addressing homelessness, Multnomah County, which found itself with a gaping budget deficit at the end of last fiscal year.

All four of the District 4 city councilors attended the town hall, though they only had to respond sparingly to audience questions at the end—and not questions specific to the Northwest shelter. Each expressed support for the mayor’s larger shelter plan.

“I voted for the mayor because he was offering an innovative approach to housing that no one had been trying,” Councilor Mitch Green said. “I voted for a budget because I wanted to give that mayor the resources to execute.”