PORTLAND, Ore. — A program aimed at getting people off the streets and into housing in Multnomah County has come to an end, and some who benefited from it are now at risk of returning to the streets.
Multnomah County launched Move In Multnomah in the spring of 2022. It used supportive housing services tax money to cover most of a year's rent for more than 200 households. In turn, it was meant to incentivize landlords to rent to homeless families.
Brandi Tuck, who runs Path Home, a Southeast Portland shelter and homeless service provider for families, works with about 20 of the households participating in the program.
"It sounds exactly like a great program on paper," she said. However the reality she described pointed to some shortcomings.
"The reality was that the rent guarantee was great. We were able to offer 12 months of rent assistance for families. That's super," Tuck said. "The challenge was that we got a lot a lot of rent assistance but we didn't get any resources for case managers to help [the families] manage their budgets, learn new skills, get a better job or employment situation, where they'll be able to pay their rent after their rent assistance ends."
That wasn't the only issue with the program. Tuck said just a few months after it launched, the county told providers like Tuck it would end after one year.
"I would not call this program a long-term success," she said.
The county just gave the families housed through the program an additional three months of rent support. That runs out this fall.
"We will do everything we possibly can to ensure that none of our families end up back on the streets, but I think there probably will be some families who end up homeless again," Tuck said. "I wish that the county would have come to the providers and had dialogue with us about what we needed and how we could have made this program successful."
It turns out Multnomah County ended up building off the Move In Multnomah program with another, similar program called Housing Multnomah Now. The second program doesn't focus on homeless families, instead, it focuses on homeless individuals. Many of them camp in Old Town under the Steel Bridge.
RELATED: 'It’s actually amazing': Homeless people in Old Town get into housing through targeted outreach work
Back in June, outreach workers from Transition Projects submitted housing applications for more than a dozen people in that camp.
"The meat and potatoes of this process is developing that relationship, identifying their barrier to housing, and then working through those barriers," said William Kasting, the project manager for Housing Multnomah Now, in a June interview with KGW.
Toni Hunter, whom KGW also met in June, was one of the homeless people helped through Housing Multnomah Now.
"It's actually amazing," she said of the program.
Hunter was one of the lucky ones.
"They offered to help me, but it didn't happen. I'm still here," said a homeless man who is still sleeping on the streets of Old Town three months after the targeted outreach work there. "I’m still homeless, I’m still a drug addict and everything else. The program would be better if they would help more people."
RELATED: Multnomah County debates what to do with $65 million in unspent funds for homeless services
To help more people like that man in Old Town, homeless providers are asking the county to spend some of the $65 million they have yet to spend, funding that's meant for homeless services on programs like Move In Multnomah and Housing Multnomah Now, since they do have some success.
A county spokesperson told KGW they will be working with homeless providers to try and offer more long-term assistance to homeless households.