Portland Mayor Keith Wilson on ending unsheltered homelessness and protecting residents from federal overreach

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness in the city. He recently released a detailed “blueprint” for achieving that goal, adding thousands of shelter beds in the coming year. The city is also facing a $100 million budget shortfall. Wilson joins us to share his thoughts on the budget crunch, the details of the expanded shelter capacity, and how he’s thinking about the rights and well-being of city residents in light of recent executive orders from the president.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland Mayor Keith Wilson campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness in the city. He recently released his plan for how to achieve that goal, a proposal to spend an estimated $28 million in the coming year to add thousands of new emergency shelter beds. Meanwhile, the city is facing a $100 million shortfall for the coming fiscal year. Add on top of this, the unrelenting pace and scope of President Trump’s executive actions, and it’s been a dramatic first month for the new mayor. Keith Wilson joins us now to talk about all of this and more. Welcome back to the show.

Keith Wilson: Thank you, Dave. Appreciate this opportunity.

Miller: For people who missed the news of your presentations to city and county leaders last week, can you give us the basics of your plan?

Wilson: You know, it’s something that we’ve been formulating really, personally, for years. But the basics of the plan – and you hit it at the top – the goal is to end and shelter homelessness, which is really to address the encampments and the tents, makeshift shelters and RVs. But the focus is to really provide care for those that are suffering on the street. We do that by rapidly setting up a network of nighttime shelters and then day centers, so those individuals can be linked to services. And that’s the goal, to make sure we can give people an opportunity to reduce that suffering, and then we give people a place to come inside and sleep.

This, of course, allows that next step: we’re able to really enforce our community safety laws. We should not have open drug dealing, drug use … address camping and then the dangers on our street when you have community members living on that street. And then we’re able to provide relief to the neighborhoods and small businesses. We bring back that common sense where we’re providing for our most vulnerable, and we actually then are providing for all community members.

And that really gives breathing room to our homeless service providers and our long-term housing specialists to do that really difficult long-term work of providing housing for the homeless. Provide that basic nighttime safety today so nobody has to suffer and/or die on the streets of Portland.

Miller: If I understand the numbers correctly, the new money that you’re hoping city council members will approve would go for 1,500 new emergency shelter beds. And then those would be added to existing money for another 1,500 beds. Am I right, first of all, just about that basic math?

Wilson: Yeah, yeah. Let’s just take it from the math. The Homeless Response Action Plan, which is a partnership between the city and the county that was announced last year, calls for 1,000 new capacity beds to provide a continuum of support for 2,700 souls that are unsheltered today. So that’s 1,000. And that’s already in the process of being stood up. I think the county is about 318 units away from that, which is great.

We also are calling on the community, through a public-private partnership, to stand up 500 beds on their own. We’ve got communications with Blanchet House who wants to add 75 beds on their own, and that’s private. So we’re gonna help augment that, not financially, but through accelerated permitting, finding locations and such. And then the city is focused on 1,500 nighttime and/or other shelter beds capacity. So that gets you to that 3,000, which we need to create an opportunity where everybody has an opportunity to come in at night, out of the elements, and they don’t have to use our streets or doorways for toilets or anything like that, to really get back that dignity and decency to our community.

Miller: Do you have a ballpark figure for how many new facilities you’ll have to open, as opposed to added capacity at existing ones?

Wilson: Well, we opened two [facilities], two weeks ago, three weeks ago. And that was two facilities and 200 people. So just using that math, that’s 15 units or 15 facilities. Now, that’ll give or take based on size. We’re certainly going to look at 50-person shelters or 150-person shelters. It really is dependent on the facility and the operator. I wanna take a quick second, Dave. It’s not just nighttime shelters, but, in that budget that you talked about, it’s four distinct day centers in each district.

It’s also storage units, because you want to make sure that anybody unsheltered is connected with their belongings because that’s their past. You want to make sure it’s connected so they can move into their future, once we focus on that housing. So, there are definitely additional costs there, but partnerships … we’re getting so much support. TriMet stepped up and said they want to handle the transportation part and they want to grant those vouchers. So we’re getting an outpouring of support, both financially, facilities and transportation.

Miller: You have gotten some tough questions about the central premise here of nighttime shelters, many more beds there, and separate daytime shelters. The county’s homelessness response director, Jillian Schoene, questioned this and said basically, why have new nighttime and daytime shelters separately, instead of ones that are open 24/7 to keep people from having to move multiple times? She also did say at a meeting last week that the cost to operate one 24/7 shelter was equivalent to opening up two shelters limited to day or night use. What’s your response?

Wilson: Let’s just look at the numbers. As a shelter partner, when I go to the shelter that I partner with through Shelter Portland, and we welcome people in, in a normal functioning society – and Portland is not normal now – 53% of the people who are homeless are gonna go to work the next day. So when you think about that, why do we need 14 hours of a place not being used when somebody’s pouring your coffee or making your sandwich?

It’s a misnomer to think that everybody that is homeless is high, acute addicted, or suffering from behavioral health. You know, there are people that are just simply down on their luck that need a place to sleep at night, that don’t want to sleep in their car. That’s what we provide and that’s what’s being used mostly throughout the United States.

In Portland, we deemphasized our nighttime shelters. We’ve actually actively closed or defunded them. And if you look at the period of time when we made that move, that’s when unsheltered homelessness started to skyrocket. In 2017, we had 1,700 people on the street. Today, we have 5,300 people living unsheltered on Portland streets. So, it’s a … yes, you’re right. It’s a cost equation, but we can’t stand up ten 24-hour shelters, because each one of them takes about $4 million or $5 million just to put the capital into that structure.

But I tell you, we’ve got community centers, churches, businesses that are coming forward saying, “My facility’s empty at night. And it would be a great place to use for nighttime shelters.” And some of them have showers and all those accouterments that you need to give that dignity back to somebody, rather than providing a tent.

Miller: If your point is that in other cities, half of people who are experiencing homelessness have a place to go during the day, maybe a job or somewhere else and those, as you said, are more functioning places – Portland is not like that, you’re saying – what is your best estimate for the percentage of Portlanders who are currently homeless now, who do have some other place to go during the day?

Wilson: Now, I would just be taking a stab at the dark on that one, Dave.

Miller: Well, how do you decide, then, how many nighttime shelters we need, if you don’t have an answer to that question?

Wilson: We keep adding until we reach the point where everybody who wants a bed at night has one.

Miller: No, no, sorry, what I’m getting at is how do you know that we don’t need more daytime shelters?

Wilson: Oh, I understand. Well, when you look at it, I mean, people are using the libraries. There are dozens of day centers already – Blanchet House, it goes on and on. But we have very limited nighttime shelters. We have very limited capacity. Dave, if you go and walk through downtown today, right this minute, it’s noon, you’ll see a vibrant community. Come downtown at 10 o’clock at night or 11 p.m. at night. Go to 13th Avenue, go over by Blanchet House. You’ll see a completely different Portland, because we have enough resources during the day, but we don’t have enough resources for those individuals at night.

We’ve created a homeless service system that’s open between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., that’s convenient for those that are housed in the working force. But we don’t have enough capacity for those that are suffering at night, and in turn, we’re providing tents and saying, “go sleep outside,” as opposed to a safe, dry place at night.

Miller: As of now, this plan goes out for two years. And in fact, it’s built into your proposal that nighttime shelters will begin reducing capacity relatively soon, in early 2026. That’s when the ramp-down would start, which suggests that, in your thinking, the need for shelters will decline really soon. How do you propose to accomplish that?

Wilson: In other communities that I’ve visited and such … like, when you look at Boston, they have 119 people unsheltered. Philadelphia, 788, but they’re a city twice the size of Portland. Boise has 115 people unsheltered. Portland has over 5,000. When I worked with the Boise mayor, he was very clear. He said, “By allowing those encampments and not enforcing your community safety laws, you actually created people coming from the housed community. You actually had people coming from outside the regions of the community.” It wasn’t until he ended in-shelter illnesses by surging up and providing nighttime care for his community, did he see the numbers rapidly fall.

With that same premise, we’re expecting that same sort of diffusion – we help people get back home through reunification. Now, if you’re in Portland, we’re gonna provide a workforce, we’re gonna provide that care for you. We feel pretty confident that, with our research, there are a certain number of individuals that come from other communities. We’re just gonna help them get home, or we’re gonna help them get shelter and welcome them into our community.

Miller: Did I understand you correctly, that you heard from the Boise mayor that, because camping bans weren’t enforced, he says, and you believe, that people who were housed made the decision to live on the street?

Wilson: Yeah, it was an epiphany for him.

Miller: Wait, do you believe this? It just doesn’t pass the smell test to me, that if you have a home, you would give that up to live on the street because you don’t have a fear that police will move you along?

Wilson: My partner here, Director Skyler Brocker-Knapp, she’s in charge of Portland Solutions. Last week, we heard of eight people camping by 13th Avenue. And we wanted to address that. We had one of our senior leaders in the state call up and say, “Please go find out, businesses are concerned.” So we sent Skyler out and she interviewed those eight people. Five of them had apartments and shelter beds. They were in tents because that was the lifestyle that they chose. There was addiction there as well, and mental illness.

But you see, Dave, the assumption is that, if you have an apartment or you have a shelter bed that you’re gonna take that over living on the stress. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case in some circumstances. And again, Dave, I don’t want to make this a monolith. If there are 5,000 people on the street, there are 5,000 different reasons. But that answers your question, anecdotally, on what’s happening on our streets.

Miller: Shelter providers have talked to folks at OPB, who have talked about why it is that, in some cases, people are staying longer than 90 days, currently, at 24- hour shelters. I bring this up because part of your proposal calls for the reimposition of stay-limits – three months and you have to move on. What we’ve heard is that there just isn’t enough housing available even for people who are engaging with services and trying to get out of homelessness, in some cases. How do you plan on ensuring that there is a place to go for people who are trying to get out of unsheltered homelessness, trying to get out of a shelter?

Wilson: Well, Dave, first of all, if someone’s trying, then provide them the basic decency of a bed that’s safe at night rather than the unsanitary, unsafe, dangerous circumstances of living on the street. You’re not gonna get out of anywhere, living on the street.

I know you were talking about the stay limits. Now, those won’t be applied until we start rapidly setting up those nighttime shelters, which we’ve done. Dave, 30 days ago, we added 200 units. And I’m really happy to report today, and we’re announcing we just secured 50 more beds. And these are recovery beds in a partnership with Bybee Lakes [Hope Center.] That’ll be opening in the coming weeks. So this is our announcement today to Portland. We are rapidly setting up shelters to care for those in need on the streets.

Miller: Right, but I’m talking about what comes after that, because what we’ve heard is that, in terms of root causes, there is simply not enough permanent or supportive housing for people who want it and who need it. So, what happens after the stay at the shelters?

Wilson: That’s really where we partner with the county on rapid rehousing, rental assistance and vouchers. We’re moving people through the continuum, and we’re doing a good job through our SHS [Support Housing Services] funding for that. You’re talking about overall capacity, we are working on capacity with the state legislature, for a host of different reasons, a host of different opportunities, to grow our affordable housing stock.

But you’re right, it all has to work in conjunction, but we can’t wait to build housing. We have people that are waiting for housing. It takes five years, in some cases, to build affordable housing. We cannot ask our citizens to wait on the street.

Miller: What is your best understanding now, of when you actually ramp up enough capacity that the enforcement can itself be ramped up? What do you think that enforcement is going to look like?

Wilson: Well, we need hundreds of empty beds at night. We’ve got to keep growing our resources. Enforcement is simply allowing our outreach workers, our community members to go out and say, “I want to help you. What does it look like, but you can’t stay here.”

Our law is clear. You cannot remove an encampment if you don’t have a shelter bed available. So let’s create a shelter bed available for those guys. I mean, that’s a virtuous focus. It is not a law-and-order focus, but in the same regard, Dave, it’s not sitting back and doing nothing. That’s a false choice. You cannot follow it. We’re gonna set up shelters. We’re gonna provide assistance. We don’t need law-and-order. We do not need to put people in jail, but we cannot allow people to be in tents, makeshift shelters and RVs in our community, which is against our community safety laws.

Miller: You didn’t mention police officers there, but what does it mean to have a community member say, “You can’t stay here”? I mean, what authority do they have to say that? How is that not the appropriate role of the Portland Police Bureau?

Wilson: We don’t involve the police in our camp removal right now. We have our Impact Reduction Program. We will post the camp and give them 72 hours to 14 days before they remove. The Impact Reduction Program will show up, they will vary in a trauma-informed way, with outreach workers, work with those souls and then remove the camp.

But all we’re doing is handing that person another tent and saying move 500 feet away. That is the most irrational approach. And so no police officers are involved in that, Dave. The good thing about this next step is, when we remove that encampment, because we have a shelter available, we explain to the person, you cannot move 500 feet away now and re-establish a new encampment because we have shelter for you.

We’re working in the confines of the laws, but the laws are there to support us, so long as we’re caring for our community members by providing a safe, sanitary shelter or a bed for somebody. And it doesn’t have to be a shelter. If somebody’s suffering from behavioral health and they can’t be in a congregate shelter, then we assess that person, and it might be to a tiny village, or a small, Safe Rest Village, or something like that. You know, it’s not a one size fits all. It’s what that person needs to ensure that they’re not gonna be left outside.

Miller: Where will the money for all of this come from, given that the city is also facing a $100 million budget shortfall for the coming year?

Wilson: We’ve started opening those shelters with existing funds that we have right now, and our team has been great. We are looking under every couch cushion, by the way. But more importantly, the fiscal year begins July 1. And I’ve talked to the county, I’ve had a conversation with the governor, the state legislature. We have a presentation to Metro tomorrow. This is a regional approach to caring for Portland, because we’re the community and jurisdiction that’s suffering, and everybody is focused on assisting us.

TriMet has focused on helping us with grants. We’re talking to everybody. Before the budgets are booked, we’re getting support from other communities and jurisdictions to help us fund this. So, I do not believe it’s going to be just a Portland lift, and we’re getting indications from multiple jurisdictions that they’re in it to help us out.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of the drop-in services overall that Portlanders should expect starting on July 1?

Wilson: You said drop-in services? Can you explain that?

Miller: There’s $100 million a gap between what the city has to spend and current service levels. That’s what I’m talking about.

Wilson: Well, that’s premature. I’m not ready to really talk about the budget. We’re certainly deep in it right now, and we certainly inherited a challenging circumstance. We had a $27 million budget shortfall that was notified in December. Since that time, we’ve got ongoing labor negotiations, staffing for both the council and the mayor’s office. And then we have livability programming, which I talked to you about, that $28 million.

But we’re in scenario planning right now, and we’re looking at a host of different options to pursue. But one of the things I just want to be clear is that the budget must prioritize public well-being and solving the unsheltered homelessness crisis.

We’re going out in March and April to provide district-by-district listening sessions to the public. I think some of the polls last week were crystal clear. People want to have our homelessness crisis addressed and we are focused on doing that through the budget. So, we’re in the middle of it. We’ll have some great solutions. We’re looking at some restructures here, but the last thing we want to do is drop services and we’re working our hardest to ensure that that’s not the case.

Miller: Just briefly, this morning the city announced it had approved a land-use compatibility statement for Zenith Energy, which operates in Northwest Portland. That’s despite the fact that on Friday, two city council members introduced a resolution calling on you to investigate potential violations of the company’s franchise agreement with the city, and then to report back to them within 90 days. Why did your administration go forward with this statement?

Wilson: We have been reviewing this for the last 60 days. And this actually predates January 1, when my council colleagues and I took over. We asked the previous administration to hold it over and let us address it in our council, on a new day. So we reviewed it, it was an administrative function. Then counselors Green and Morillo brought a resolution last week and said, “we want an investigation on the franchise for Zenith.” I absolutely agree with that.

So, we’re gonna move their resolution forward and whatever they need, I’m going to support them, administrative-wise. We’re gonna look into the matter, in a more deep manner, instead of just through a check box on an administrative matter. We want a more holistic approach to look at this in its entirety.

Miller: Just briefly, we have 45 seconds left – what’s it been like to take over as the chief executive in Portland when there’s been so much chaos and uncertainty from the federal government?

Wilson: The chaos is manifested in fear in our community. So, I’ve been very clear that, with that chaos and crisis, we are going to support the values that make Portland, Portland. We’re gonna focus on DEI. We’re gonna focus on our LGBTQ+. We’re not gonna change our values because the administration changed. We are and we are going to be [taking] care of Portlanders through and through. That’s whether, what comes from them … obviously, you’re talking about federal overreach with turning off grants and things of that nature. We’re gonna work through that, Dave, but you’re right, it’s chaos. And it’s gonna be an interesting next four years, to say the least.

Miller: Keith Wilson, thanks very much. We’ll talk again.

Wilson: Thank you, Dave. Pleasure, sir.

Miller: That’s Keith Wilson, the mayor of Portland.

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