Members of the Ashland City Council in a meeting in March 2023.
Roman Battaglia / JPR
City councilors in Ashland voted 5-1 this week to close its 24/7 emergency homeless shelter. The city opened the shelter last November. Oregon state officials had offered Ashland $1.8 million for renovations and $800,000 for operational funds for the facility. But the councilors voted to decline the funding and shut the shelter down when the current state funding ends March 31. Meanwhile, the council is currently working on a master plan for addressing homelessness. Jefferson Public Radio reporter Jane Vaughan joins us to tell us more the decision to close the shelter and the ongoing need for homeless services in Ashland.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Four months ago, Ashland opened a 24-7 emergency homeless shelter. This week, the city council there voted to close the shelter despite the fact that the state was going to kick in more than $2.5 million for it. Jefferson Public Radio reporter Jane Vaughan joins us to explain what happened. Jane, welcome.
Jane Vaughan: Thanks for having me.
Miller: So let’s start with the big picture first. Can you just give us a sense for the scale of the homelessness problem in Ashland right now?
Vaughan: Sure. Ashland, like a lot of places, does have a fair number of homeless people. It’s always hard to get a really accurate or exact count, but we know that Southwestern Oregon, all of Oregon, all of the West Coast has been dealing with this problem and an increasing number of people experiencing homelessness. Jackson County has seen a 132% increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in about the last five years.
Ashland actually hosted the Southern Oregon Homelessness Summit back in early February to really educate people about this issue and its root causes which is mainly a lack of housing and under building housing, a lack of affordable housing. We have really high rent in Ashland. There’s a report from the city that says almost half of the households in Ashland spend a third of their income or more on rent. So rent is really expensive and all of these sort of trickle down factors have led there to be a lot of people here who are experiencing homelessness.
Miller: So that was behind the city’s decision to open this 24-7 emergency shelter just four months ago at the beginning of November. How was that funded mostly from money from the state?
Vaughan: Yeah, you’re right. It was the beginning of November. There are about 30 shelter beds and most of that money is grant money from the state. There was a grant from the Department of Administrative Services as well. And then a little bit, $200,000 of the money is from the city of Ashland General Fund, and that is specifically for the inclement weather shelter part of it. So this building, it’s kind of confusing and we’ll get more into it…but part of it is a 24-7 emergency shelter with beds, which you might think of as a homeless shelter. And then part of it is just the sort of inclement weather, severe weather part of it. So on nights that it’s really cold and snowy, a lot of places like cities or libraries will open severe weather shelters and that is also part of this building.
Miller: What was the idea behind this shelter when it opened?
Vaughan: The building was acquired in August of last year and that was when the state was under a homeless emergency order under Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. As you said, the shelter opened in November and really it was a state of emergency. We needed a place for people to go. And so the goal was really to provide emergency shelter for people. And also that secondary goal that I mentioned is to have a permanent location for the severe weather shelter to be. So it was kind of a solution to this emergency problem that we were facing.
Miller: Have people used it over the last four months?
Vaughan: Yeah, it seems like people have. It’s sort of a congregate living shelter. There’s open areas and some shared rooms which might not work for some people, but the shelter is run by OHRA which is a social services organization that stands for Opportunities for Housing Resources and Assistance. So I don’t know if all of the beds are full currently, but it seems like it has gotten some use.
Miller: But we’re obviously talking now because of the news from this week that city leaders turned down over $2.5 million of state money for the continued use of this shelter going forward. What would that money have been used for?
Vaughan: This decision was made on Tuesday night at the Ashland City Council meeting and they basically voted to close this shelter at the end of this month on March 31st. So the money from the state would have been used mostly for renovations, and the building needs a lot of renovations. They would need to install bathrooms, install laundry facilities and showers. The building currently does not have those things. They’re using trailers and porta potties to fill those needs. They would need to install a sprinkler system, upgrade the kitchen, install an alarm system, and potentially change the number of bathrooms.
The state had offered money to do those innovations. So that’s $1.8 million for the renovations itself. And then there was the offer of about $800,000 to be used for operational funds to sort of keep the shelter running long-term. And it’s important to note that some of these problems and codes were avoided during the emergency order. They were just not as important, but as we’re shifting from a temporary to a permanent shelter, the building needs to be upgraded for code compliance. They need a new permit, all these things. It hasn’t been a problem that the bathrooms and the showers are in trailers and that there’s no alarm system and no sprinkler system, but now that we have that shift at the end of the month, the state money runs out and so the building needs to be upgraded quite extensively. So the state has offered that money and the city council voted to turn it down.
Miller: Why is that? I mean, a lot of work had to be done, but the state was putting a good chunk of money towards it in addition to operations money, which is a kind of holy grail for a lot of nonprofits or municipalities. So what was the thinking on the part of five of six members of the city council?
Vaughan: They basically didn’t feel like there was a really clear plan for the shelter long-term and they wanted to sort of take a step back and analyze and make a plan. They talked a lot about how the construction would be expensive and take a really long time. They don’t really have a plan in terms of the designing and the building process, the architectural design. Mayor Tonya Graham was talking about how this long construction period for this large amount of money to make a building be what it was never designed to be. Those are her words. She didn’t feel that that made sense because the emergency, the real problem, is that people need immediate shelter. And so having this big long construction process did not make sense in her mind. I have a quote from her where she says “we shouldn’t be pushed into an investment because that’s the obvious one in front of us.”
And then some of the other councilors like Jeff Dahle were talking about, we really need to take a step back, take time, analyze, make a solid plan before we move forward. So they did talk about this for a long time. As you said, the vote was 5 to 1. City councilor Bob Kaplan was against it. They had a study session on Monday night about this and then voted on Tuesday night to actually close the shelter. There was some question about, can we use the money from the state for something else? This offer of money from the state? But the answer according to staff for that was no, the money was offered for this purpose explicitly and the council did turn it down for the construction money and such.
So the city decided that instead of closing the shelter, they’re going to work on transitioning the people currently living there into other housing options. They’ll work with local partners to do that. And then they said they want the city staff to work with ACCESS, which is a housing nonprofit to sort of explore other potential sources of state funding for other potential shelter options in the community. It’s a little bit unclear what specifically that money would be or what specifically those other shelter options would be. But they do want to continue the conversation.
Miller: Late last year, the city passed an ordinance restricting where people can camp.
Was this shelter tied to that ordinance?
Vaughan: Sort of. So basically the shelter opened first in November and then the ordinance, as you said, was basically tightening the city’s homeless camping ordinances. And the reason that they could do that was because of a state law that went into effect in 2023. It was passed in 2021, called House Bill 3115. And that says that if you’re going to regulate where homeless people can rest or sleep on public property, you have to be objectively reasonable in terms of where, when and how people can camp.
So that state law went into effect, everybody’s making up, writing their ordinances and figuring out how to do that. Ashland passed that ordinance and they have the shelter open. Because the shelters are open, there is a place for people who are experiencing homelessness to go because the city can’t effectively make it illegal for homeless people to be anywhere. But if they have a shelter, then there is an option for people to go to so they can enforce their ordinance a little bit more. So they did open the shelter, there’s a place for people to go and then they kind of restricted their camping ordinances in terms of where people can [and] can’t camp. There’s some rules on removing campsites and buffer areas around a lot of different things. Then they’re able to enforce that ordinance. People could be fined and things like that because they have a shelter that they can turn people to.
Miller: Does the city have a different site in mind right now?
Vaughan: Not really in terms of closing the shelters at 2200 Ashland Street and the severe weather shelter part will stay open, but the 24-7 shelter beds will close and they haven’t really pointed to a specific other shelter. They basically, like I said, want to take a step back, make a plan, figure it out. There are a couple other options in Ashland. There is a campsite, a lawn basically, that has certain rules that people can camp there. And there’s also the OHRA center here in Ashland, which is run by that social services organization. I mentioned it’s a former motel, so that’s I think 72 beds. So that’s another shelter option, but the city has not specifically said where specifically they’re looking next for another potential shelter option.
Miller: Did any city leaders express concerns that the state might think twice about
giving them money in the future, given that they’ve turned down over $2.5 million right now?
Vaughan: They really didn’t. They just kind of kept saying this isn’t the only grant. There will be other grants. We don’t want to just take this one because it’s in front of us and it’s a lot of money. So they really seemed pretty confident that they will have more opportunities in the future.
Miller: Jane, thanks very much.
Vaughan: Thank you.
Miller: Jane Vaughan is a reporter at Jefferson Public Radio in Ashland.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.