A Pioneer in Homeless Services and Low-Income Housing Moves On

Rob Justus has spent the past 30 years in the trenches of low-income housing, first as the founder of JOIN, a pioneering homeless services nonprofit, and since 2009 as a founder of Home First, a development company that has built 1,425 new units, with 800 more on the way.

In the close-knit low-income housing industry, which is dominated by nonprofits, tax credit wranglers, and government bureaucrats, Justus is an outlier. That’s both because of his bluntness and because Home First has consistently built housing far more cheaply than nonprofit developers.

In the new year, Justus, 60, will step away from the company he founded. He says he isn’t retiring but is still deciding what to do next. WW caught up with him for an interview that has been edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: You founded and ran JOIN, one of Portland’s early homeless services agencies. What’s your impression of how providers are doing in that field now?

Rob Justus: Everything that was learned in the last 20 or 30 years seems to have been forgotten. We’re not collecting the right data, and coordination isn’t happening.

What data are people not collecting?

The primary data is housing retention. Are people staying housed six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months after they are placed in new housing? And if not, why not?

What’s the issue with coordination?

When I ask what’s the coordination between the Joint Office of Homeless Services and the Portland Housing Bureau, there’s not much. You don’t place somebody in housing and then try to figure out what type of services they need. We found that at Home First. We said to the county, we’re open to taking on some folks who are coming off the streets, with the assumption that you’re going to be providing services. We placed a lot of people into housing, and then services never came.

What did you learn from 14 years of producing low-income housing?

Development is hard and not for the faint of heart. There is a well-established industry that develops affordable housing on a national level with a very complex funding structure, tax credits, multiple sources of financing, and so on. That complexity is part of the reason the cost of affordable housing is so high.

Are you surprised more developers aren’t copying the Home First model?

No. Part of the way affordable housing gets funded is also how a lot of nonprofits pay their staffs. We have entire organizations that depend on a certain percentage of a developer’s fee. And if they don’t get that, they’re going to have to lay people off.

OK, you’ve described an inefficient funding model and an inefficient development model. How could the system work better?

We need to go upstream and look at how projects are funded and how nonprofits fund themselves. We also need to engage the private sector in a meaningful way and figure out funding mechanisms that are not so convoluted. The governor is talking about producing 36,000 new units a year. To hit that target, we just need more people building. The private sector cannot be seen as the enemy.

This city and state are full of talented people with the best of intentions and a desire to tackle big problems. How did things get so far off track?

When you’re a state dominated by one party, people get really comfortable. One of the things that’s been true for a long time with Oregon and the Portland metropolitan area is, we don’t really give a lot of room for dissenting thoughts or ideas. We still have people in the Democratic Party that are like, everything’s great. It would be better just to be humble, believe in data, and also listen to people who you may not think you agree with.

Home First branched out into other parts of the state. What was it like working outside the metro area?

I loved it. Probably the easiest city that we ever built housing in was Ontario, Oregon.

Why was it so easy?

The director of development there said housing for us isn’t a political issue. It’s just basic economics. Our average household in Ontario makes maybe $35,000 a year. We need places where those families can live and we don’t have them. So, he said, what do you need? Zoning change? Boom. Done in a month. Building permits? If you meet all the state’s requirements, boom. Done in a month. They were just pragmatic. You have other jurisdictions where a zoning change could be a year and a half.