Data on homelessness delayed by Portland, Multnomah County 'turf war' | The Story | April 15, 2024

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Published 2024-04-16

April 15 on The Story: Eight years ago, leaders at the city of Portland and Multnomah County formed the Joint Office of Homeless Services as a clearinghouse for both entities to coordinate their efforts to address homelessness. But that relationship has been fraught since the beginning. As Willamette Week recently reported, the joint office has been flying essentially blind, without consistent data to guide its efforts — and it stems from wrangling between the city and county that, until just this year, kept JOHS from working with a city-held database. Now that they have it, county officials are realizing that it's all but obsolete and won't be sufficient to gather and share the kind of detailed information that they need to track.

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All Comments (12)

@ruthiebenjamin1744 13 days ago

They need to do an audit just like California did.
@meowyimeow 13 days ago

Infuriating
@dannewth7149 13 days ago

This won't go away
@cvrart 13 days ago

Holy smokes! That's a lot of money to do apparently nothing.
@ruthiebenjamin1744 13 days ago

Anyone who's paid attention knows - just like California. It's been hard watching this meeting after meeting. I was beginning to question the intelligence and I'm not particularly brilliant. AHFE was useless. HMIS is supposed to be used for federal funds. Now there is MOTS - Measures and Outcomes Tracking System. There are training videos from OHA.
@thomaskelly2430 13 days ago

Where is all the money 💰
@stevewinter8928 13 days ago

The Houston ideal is kind of stupid, putting homeless people in apartments. I own apartments and most of my tenants are young people that are having kids. I have a fenced backyard in my apartment compound and the kids play there. I can't imagine what a worse idea would be than to put a bunch drug addicts or mental cases in with the kids. One kid was born in my apartments about 4 months ago, they are young and a lot of times in the summer time they put a little pool for the kids to cool off , a blow up spash pool. Then to have an issue people runming around in the backyard with those kids. Shooting up drugs in the aluminum foil and probably getting high and thinking one of the kids is a football and kicking it out across the yard.
@crushedorchids 12 days ago

12:13 what is with the obsession with either or thinking in the USA? Deal with things on a case by case basis.
@KeoneStevans 13 days ago

someone needs to file a freedom of information request to get those documents. The grift runs deep and i’m sure they’re all hoping this will just go away. For a billion dollars you could buy 2 thousand houses at market value outright and turn them into group homes.
@forgottenman8629 13 days ago

lots of money spent but not one damn thing is done to resolve this issue -- and $$ has 'nothing' to with the solution...
@jamesklaatu9359 13 days ago

The homeless, vagrant drug addict, and illegal alien complex is alive and well in Portland Oregon. Enabled by the fiscal malfeasance and chronically inept city, county, and state government. Hey but everything's ok. As long as those non profits keep those campaign donations coming! Only one ideology and party to blame for the decay, crime, violence, and chaos we live with here. Only one. There's no one else to blame. But for the voters that keep reelecting it. Want change? Vote different or leave.