Natalie Kiyah kisses her 5-month-old baby while standing on the Oregon Capitol Mall with fellow advocates on Jan. 11, 2024. Kiyah is a single mother of four who previously became homeless when she couldn't afford child care.
Natalie Pate / OPB
The biggest determining factor in whether someone will become homeless is if they have ever been homeless. Keeping children out of homelessness, so they won’t become homeless as adults is one of the big reasons the Portland-based nonprofit Path Home exists. And as Oregon has the highest rate of children experiencing unsheltered homelessness, the need for the kinds of services the nonprofit provides is greater than ever.
Executive director Brandi Tuck says the nonprofit is committed to the “housing first” approach to solving family homelessness, which includes providing trauma-informed temporary housing to families and connecting them with services and individual support they need to stay successfully housed. She says with the housing shortage and high cost of housing, it’s also important to note — especially during budget shortfalls — that housing whole families can be far less expensive than many kinds of shelters, which can run thousands of dollars a month, per person. We talk with Tuck about Path Home’s mission — and its evidence-based approach.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon has the highest rate of unsheltered homeless children in the country. Brandi Tuck is working to change that. She is the executive director of the Portland-based nonprofit Path Home, which is committed to responding to and preventing family homelessness. She joins us now to talk about the root causes of this homelessness and proven solutions. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Brandi Tuck: Thank you so much.
Miller: Can you, first, just give us a sense for the scale of family homelessness in Oregon?
Tuck: I can try. There’s really bad data about who experiences homelessness in our country and especially in our state. Our local government uses a figure from the Point-in-Time Count to show how many people experience homelessness. And it’s about 7,000 people per year. There is another figure that we look at from the Oregon Department of Education, and that’s how many students experience homelessness. In the last school year that we have data for, 2022-‘23, over 4,000 students experienced homelessness in Multnomah County alone. Statewide, that number was more than 22,000.
So when you think about all the little siblings, the little brothers and sisters who are not yet in school, plus their parents, it’s probably 10,000 kids and parents every single year, just in Multnomah County, who don’t have homes.
Miller: Why do you think we have the worst rate in the country for unsheltered homeless children, 14 times higher than the national average?
Tuck: I think it’s because we do not invest in providing services and providing policy solutions for families with children. In Multnomah County, when we look at the Joint Office on Homeless Services budget, less than 10% of our overall community spending goes to homeless families. That’s not to say that other people don’t need that support. They certainly do. But these are kids and families who are, in my opinion, the most vulnerable.
Miller: How much of this has to do with visibility? If families are couch surfing, or staying in a motel or in a car, I think it could be very hard to even see them. Does that play into this?
Tuck: Absolutely. I call families the “invisible” homeless population because you don’t see them. We get our Point-in-Time Count numbers by having a whole bunch of outreach volunteers go and scour our city looking for people who are outside. The families are intentionally hiding. They’re hiding because they’re afraid someone’s going to take their kids, whether it be the state through child protective services, or a kidnapper.
They are intentionally hiding from people like the very outreach workers that are trying to count how many people don’t have homes. So I think that’s a big piece of it. This is the forgotten and invisible group of people who are homeless.
Miller: How do you find them?
Tuck: Families find us. We don’t have to look for families. There are so many homeless families with children in Multnomah County that there’s a really large waitlist, hundreds of families, waiting to get into services in Multnomah County.
Miller: So often, when we talk about homelessness on this show, and I think when people talk about it just amongst themselves, we/they end up talking about behavioral health issues like substance use disorder and mental illness. How prevalent are these factors among the families that you’re working with?
Tuck: It’s not as prevalent among the families. Certainly, it’s an issue. The families have behavioral health challenges for sure. But a lot of times, it’s way less severe and persistent. There are things like anxiety and depression that many, many of us suffer from every single day. In our programs at Path Home, we don’t see a lot of people who are suffering from schizophrenia, or delusional, paranoid, psychotic disorders, or anything like that. So it’s not nearly as prevalent. And the same for substance abuse disorder.
We have some families that struggle, absolutely. But it’s a minority of families and it’s by certainly no means the majority of the people who we work with.
Miller: If you think that these factors can be overemphasized, maybe especially for this population of people experiencing homelessness, what do you think doesn’t get enough attention?
Tuck: I think what doesn’t get enough attention is that these are families. These are parents with kids, who care about their kids. They love their kids. Most of these families have experienced some sort of economic or generational homelessness that has led them to the situation they’re in. And they want to get back into housing. They’re highly motivated.
Many of the families that we serve in our shelter work the whole time that they are in shelter. They just work really low paying jobs like at Taco Bell or AutoZone, or a hotel housekeeper or something like that. But they’re really motivated to get their kids back into housing. And if we prioritize our services in the right way, we could, relatively quickly, end homelessness for families with children in Multnomah County and in Oregon.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for median wages, the minimum wage and median rents for families, and how those interact?
Tuck: Housing is considered affordable if it costs 30% of your income or less. The average two-bedroom apartment in Portland is about $1,600 a month. So that would only be affordable to people who make about $57,000 a year or about $27 an hour. When we look at minimum wage, we know that people are bringing home about $15 an hour, about $2,000 take home per month after taxes. For families who are having one minimum wage earner income in their household, they need to find a place to rent for around $800 a month, which just isn’t a reality. If you have looked for housing, whether you’re renting or buying any time recently, you know that you can barely rent a room for $800 a month anymore, let alone a home for a family.
Miller: You mentioned that that’s with one wage earner in the household. Is that common among the families that you’re dealing with – one parent, one mother, one father?
Tuck: Yes, we have a lot of single parents. Many of them are single moms. But we also have quite a few single dads as well.
Miller: If you wanted to be able to estimate which communities around the country were going to have the highest rates of homelessness, what kind of data would you be paying the most attention to? If you had no names of these places, but you had a lot of access to economic, sociological, demographic data, what would you pay attention to?
Tuck: I would pay attention to two things: rent price and vacancy rate. In communities where rent price is high and vacancy rate is low … those two go together very closely because of the laws of economics. When supply is low and demand is high, prices go up. So I would pay attention to rent price and vacancy rate. And in communities where those are factors, where rent is very expensive and there’s very little affordable housing available, that’s where we experience homelessness.
Miller: So far, we’ve been talking about the big picture here: root causes of homelessness. How does it affect the way you approach the work you do?
Tuck: Path Home only serves families with children. We’re one of the only organizations in the area that exclusively works with families with children. So we really see the whole family. We see the individuals, the kids and the parents as both deserving and needing services. We structure our programming to be able to fit the needs of the kids and the parents.
Miller: You can’t increase median wages as a nonprofit. You cannot single-handedly boost production of housing. What kind of services can you provide?
Tuck: We offer a shelter. We operate the first shelter in Oregon that features trauma-informed design and architecture, which helps families heal from the crisis and trauma of homelessness, and leads to better outcomes like shorter shelter stays and greater success moving into housing. In 2024, 98% of the families that stayed in our shelter moved back into permanent housing. And it took an average of only 115 days of a shelter stay to help families move through into housing.
Once they’re housed, we surround the families with wrap-around support services. We do case management, employment training, mental health counseling, domestic violence advocacy, whatever families are needing. We connect them with those right services and we stick with the families. We totally believe in the housing-first model. We’ve seen it work for a very long time. And 93% of the families we serve are able to keep their housing long-term.
Miller: What do you mean when you say housing first? In the past when I’ve heard that – maybe code word is not the right phrase – I’ve often associated it with, even if you’re not sober, let’s get you into housing. Let’s get you stability. And then we can figure out everything else. But first, let’s get you into housing.
That seems like an important piece but maybe simplistic and maybe an incomplete version of what “housing first” means. So what am I missing?
Tuck: Housing first has three components. First, you minimize the amount of time that someone experiences homelessness and you move them quickly back into housing. Second, you provide a period of rent assistance to help people stabilize in that housing. And those first two components [are] what most of the organizations and the governments in our community are doing.
They’re calling it housing first, but it’s really not housing first because there’s a third component to the evidence-based model. And it’s the most important. That’s the long-term, relationship-based case management and services that people need. So once families or anyone is in housing, then the real work starts and you have to provide intensive services based on their level of need.
And this whole housing first model really comes down to brain science. It understands what happens in the brain when someone experiences something as stressful as homelessness. When you are in a situation where you don’t have a home, your brain is in survival mode: fight, flight or freeze mode. Your brain releases some chemicals that turn off your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that’s responsible for critical thinking, logic, rationality, decision making, speech and language, all the things that we need to learn, to grow, to follow the rules. Those are turned off when you are in a survival mode stress response, like happens when you experience homelessness.
So when we’re trying to get people to get sober, get jobs and take classes while they’re in survival mode, the brain science tells us they won’t be able to benefit from any of those services. They need to get back into a home, which is where the brain can calm down, out of survival mode, and get to a place where it can really start to benefit from the services that we’re trying to provide.
Miller: What might the difference be, in terms of education, job possibilities, getting sober, if they’re experiencing … and in this case, when I say people, I mean families. If they experience homelessness, say, for a week versus six months, can you actually chart the differences?
Tuck: Yes, you can. There’s a big difference between a really short episode of homelessness and a long-term episode. When you are in survival mode for weeks, months or even years, your brain continues to stay in that fight, flight or freeze mode that whole time. The brain starts to rewire itself to be in a continual state of survival mode and it’s so much harder to get out of that, especially for the little kids.
This kind of survival mode is an adverse childhood experience that affects the development, the learning, the growth of kids, and leads to lifelong negative health outcomes like COPD, lung disease and heart disease, and a likelihood of experiencing depression. And kids who experience homelessness are 12 times as likely to die by suicide.
Miller: You said that the piece of the Housing First philosophy that we’re less likely to actually see in the Portland area is the last one, services to keep people in housing. What services are most effective?
Tuck: The services that are most effective are the ones that meet people where they’re at and tailor services directly to individuals. We know that people know their lives better than we ever will. So instead of prescribing a one-size fits-all kind of program, we have a unique, different, tailored experience for every single family. So sometimes that looks like intensive job training to get a living wage job. Sometimes it looks like getting sober and having drug and alcohol treatment. Sometimes a lot of the women have experienced domestic violence, so it might be getting domestic violence services and counseling. It’s really whatever’s going on in the lives of the individual families, and tailoring and creating a plan to work just for them.
Miller: Ten years ago, the city of Portland announced a homelessness state of emergency. In that time, Portland area voters put a lot of taxpayer money, their own money, towards supportive housing services through Metro and affordable housing creation. Yet, it really seems like everything is just getting worse. Why?
Tuck: I think things are getting worse because we’re not investing in the kinds of services that end homelessness for people. Over half of our community’s homeless services budget goes to shelter. And shelter ends homelessness for exactly zero people, unless you have a pathway out of shelter and back into permanent housing, and then have those long-term wraparound supports for people once they’re in housing.
As long as we continue to invest the majority of our resources in the most expensive, least effective intervention of shelter, we’re never going to be able to advance and actually make progress on ending homelessness.
Miller: But is even housing enough? If you were saying earlier that the root cause here is a question of market rate housing and wages, then how could there be any solution that doesn’t actually just mean that people are making more money and they can better afford the houses that are there?
Tuck: That’s really what we need. We need, for people who can work, to be able to train them to have living wage jobs. We need reform of our whole wage system so that we are paying people a living wage, so that they can afford homes. And I think that’s really what it’s got to be.
It’s true that we don’t have enough affordable housing in our community for every person who needs a place to live. But it’s not true that we don’t have enough overall housing. There are over 6,000 apartments available tonight in Portland, Oregon. But they’re market rate housing. They’re not affordable to people who make no or low incomes.
So for people who can earn income, we need to get them up to a level where they can earn enough money to be able to pay for these units, these apartments. And for people who won’t be able to work because of disability or because of chronic mental illness, then we need to be paying permanent supportive housing for them where we, the community – the taxpayers, the government, nonprofits – are paying the rent on these units, allowing people to live there.
Miller: How does the cost of some kind of rental assistance compare to the cost of a shelter or associated costs related to homelessness?
Tuck: At Path Home, we spend about $15,000 per household to help a family move from homelessness back into housing.
Miller: Total?
Tuck: Total.
Miller: That’s less than I might have thought.
Tuck: It’s about a year of rent assistance, about a little more than $1,000 a month or so in rent assistance. We do intensive services during that year to help people address whatever’s going on in their lives that led to homelessness.
Miller: But that is somebody … a family was experiencing homelessness. And then, by the end of that year, and at the end of $15,000 of expenditure, they have their own home?
Tuck: Correct.
Miller: What about people who are at risk of becoming homeless? They’re struggling to pay their rent for whatever reason. What services do you offer?
Tuck: We offer a homeless prevention program, where families who are about to lose their housing through an eviction, help keeping their homes. They never enter that survival mode, fight, flight or freeze response from experiencing homelessness. And it’s the most cost effective intervention. It costs around $3,000 to $5,000 per household to prevent homelessness before it starts compared to about $15,000 per household to end homelessness and help someone get back into a home. And we compare that to the cost of shelter. The average Portland shelter is about $20,000 to $40,000 per person that stays there.
Miller: Per year?
Tuck: Per year. And that’s certainly the cost that we experience at Path Home. It’s about $20,000 to $25,000 per family that stays in shelter. And when we think about the cost, sometimes it’s about $4,000 per month per person to shelter someone. And you know what’s cheaper than that? Rent, even on expensive market rate apartments. So the cost of the services that we are providing, if we provided services like rent assistance and case management to people, we could reprioritize our homeless services dollars, get people back into housing and help them stay there long-term.
Miller: You’ve been doing this job for 18 years now. What has kept you doing this?
Tuck: I get that question a lot. I believe housing is a basic human right. I think everyone deserves housing, and it has been my passion since I was a little girl. Since I was a kid, I felt like every single person deserved a home and I’ve dedicated my life to this work.
Miller: Brandi Tuck, thanks very much.
Tuck: Thank you.
Miller: Brandi Tuck is the executive director of the Portland nonprofit Path Home.
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