From Welcome Home coalition: Our coalition stands firmly in its value that everyone deserves a safe, stable place to call home, and ultimately, a shelter bed is not a home. With the Mayor struggling to open his 1,500 new overnight shelter beds, we ask you to join us in encouraging him to reinvest that funding into housing resources. Rather than growing our stock of shelter beds, we can free up more shelter space by moving people out of shelter and into a safe place to call home.
Only 1 in 5 people in Multnomah County are moving from shelter into stable housing. These numbers are even more disappointing at mass shelters managed by the City of Portland. As it stands, only 12% of people living at city-run mass shelters were connected to housing. This means that the majority of people who accessed city-run shelters returned to homelessness. This system failure is due to a lack of resources that move people out of shelter and into housing. Ask the City to invest in what works!