Require Twice-Annual Reports From Homeless Service Contractors

For five years now, city and county elected officials have sparred over how best to spend our taxpayer, federal and state dollars on the crises.

The debate over homelessness has only intensified as the Portland area has more cash on hand than ever to make a difference. (Brian Burk)
By Sophie Peel

Problem: No one knows how homeless service providers spend the public’s money.

Idea: Require twice-annual reports from contractors.

The most pressing problems we have in this city are also the hardest to understand and solve: the converging crises of homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse. For five years now, city and county elected officials have sparred over how best to spend our taxpayer, federal and state dollars on the crises.

The debate has only intensified as the Portland area has more cash on hand than ever to make a difference. In 2020, Metro voters approved a tax on high-income earners to fund homeless services, meaning that Multnomah County last year budgeted an additional $52 million to house, treat and shelter homeless Portlanders. This year, the county has an additional $107 million to spend.

Quarterly and yearly reports produced by the Joint Office of Homeless Services, the agency through which the county funnels its supportive housing services dollars, offer broad outcomes of all the collective work achieved with those dollars: 1,129 people moved into housing; rent checks saved more than 9,000 households from eviction.

But how each of the 57 providers that received SHS dollars last year spent the money is not clear.

The good thing is, the Joint Office says it does track this information. The bad news: The public can’t easily see the results achieved by each contractor.

That’s why we recommend that local officials require each provider that receives more than $50,000 from the homeless services tax to publish two reports a year showing how those dollars were spent and what differences the money made.

“Fundamentally, how we contract with providers has to change. There needs to be actual metrics and actual data, because there’s such a resistance to any real data collection from providers,” says Rob Justus, founder and former longtime CEO of JOIN, which serves homeless Portlanders. “How do we hold people accountable?”

The solution to this confusion is simple: require each nonprofit to tell the public, twice a year, what it’s done with the money.

See all 13 Big Ideas to Save Portland here.

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