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As many as 134 shelter beds funded by city of Portland will relocate or close entirely after the shuttering of the local contractor Sunstone Way, a nonprofit that’s been under a cloud following a whistleblower complaint that alleged fiscal mismanagement.
Skye Brocker-Knapp, the director of Portland Solutions, wrote to the Portland City Council on March 26, saying that two shelter sites currently operated by Sunstone Way would be closing in the coming months.
The pod shelter on Northeast Weidler Street in the Lloyd District will close altogether, and the city plans to move some of the 38 pods to other existing shelter sites and keep others in reserve if replacements are needed.
“This is the City’s smallest alternative shelter with just 38 shelter units,” Brocker-Knapp wrote to the council. “Given funding constraints and aging shelter units at this location, our partners will be working with the existing shelter participants on individual plans for housing.”
All 96 beds at a Centennial neighborhood shelter—opened earlier this year as part of Mayor Keith Wilson’s push to open 1,500 new shelter beds within his first year of office—will be decommissioned, Brocker-Knapp wrote, with the possibility that the facility could re-open next winter. On most nights, she noted, fewer than 20 people used a bed at that shelter.
The 55-pod alternative shelter along Southwest Naito Parkway will remain open but with new management. The city is working to have Transition Projects assume operations this summer.
As WW reported in March, a lawsuit filed by Kate Fulton, Sunstone’s former director of finance, alleged that leadership overspent on office space, staff retreats to Bend, and overpriced contracts with nonprofits that had connections to Sunstone Way’s top leadership. She alleges that after she brought these concerns up to the organization, leadership retaliated against her.
But issues long preceded the explosive lawsuit. In 2022, the Multnomah County auditor said that Sunstone Way leaders overbilled the county by $525,000. And last year, Sunstone Way lost the contract to manage the city’s 100-pod tiny village in Southwest Portland. The shelter it ran for the county in downtown Portland closed earlier this month.
A spokesperson for Wilson’s office, Rob Layne, says that the Homeless Services Department has “recommended keeping open the two Sunstone-operated County shelters” at a Delta Park motel and a motel in the Rockwood neighborhood of East Portland.
“HSD will soon begin targeted, expedited allocation processes to select new providers for those shelters and to manage Sunstone’s current housing placement contract,” Layne says.
