Mayor Wilson Says City’s Emergency Shelter Bed Utilization Rate Is Between 50% and 60% Nightly

Mayor Keith Wilson on Tuesday told the Metro Council that his ambitious plan to stand up 1,500 emergency shelter beds by Dec. 1 is working.

“I’m a dog with a bone,” Wilson said, ever-positive. “I’m not a quitter.”

One important nugget revealed during Wilson’s presentation: between 50% and 60% of the 810 emergency beds opened since the beginning of the year are occupied on a nightly basis. That’s low compared to utilization rates at county shelters, which hover around 92% on a nightly basis.

The director of Portland Solutions, Skye Brocker-Knapp, offered that statistic during questioning of shelter occupancy rates by Metro Councilor Ashton Simpson. Brocker-Knapp said that utilization rates are expected to increase as the weather turns, and said that as more data emerges, the city can “surge” the system up and down to adapt to seasons and upticks in demand.

“My team looks at those percentages every single night,” Brocker-Knapp said. “That will help us toggle the system.”

Metro is the regional government composed of Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties. It oversees and distributes money to the three counties from the supportive housing services tax, which funnels hundreds of millions of dollars each year into homeless services. That’s made it a frequent stop for the city of Portland when it wants additional homeless funding, like this spring when Metro gave the city $15 million for Wilson’s ambitious shelter plan.

The mayor has pledged to end unsheltered homelessness by standing up shelter beds, moving people into permanent housing, connecting people to jobs and reunifying people with family out of state.

Still, in recent weeks Wilson revealed to city councilors that his homeless plan faced an $11 million budget shortfall, a gap he’s insisted he’ll close through creative cost-cutting methods. The Portland City Council is set to discuss the budget gap in a Wednesday work session.

Wilson said that later this week he’d announce the opening of an additional 280 shelter beds, bringing the total opened under his plan to 1,090. The rollout of the shelters has, for the most part, been uneventful, save for a shelter in the Pearl District that neighbors opposed prior to its opening and continue to decry.

But despite the rosy picture Wilson laid out to Metro on Tuesday morning, there have been cracks in the shelters Wilson has opened so far: a day shelter that promised amenities to guests provided a bare-bones version of the vision this summer, and one of Wilson’s Salvation Army-run shelters had failed to provide employees with state-mandated training on handling bodily fluids.