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One afternoon last month, a man in a black polo shirt and white sneakers set up a folding table outside an Old Town food kitchen and started handing out flyers.
To the denizens of Portland’s streets, the brightly colored leaflets offered salvation: food, clothing, and mental health treatment. Most importantly, the man was overheard offering soup kitchen regulars something they longed for: a roof over their heads. The flyers listed a Northeast Portland address.
The man and his three colleagues were offering something that Portland sorely needs: mental health and addiction treatment paired with temporary housing to ease people off the streets and into self-sufficiency. And they were doing so on behalf of a new for-profit company, aided by an out-of-state real estate investor, funded by federal dollars.
The result is that about a dozen men are now living in a five-bedroom house at the city’s eastern border, in a neighborhood called Wilkes.
No housing? No insurance? No problem, the sidewalk recruiters say. They’ll give you the former, and they’ll sign you up for the latter.
The company providing this is called Wiicare. Founded last summer, it’s run by a charismatic young woman named Faith Omar. Having lost her parents when she was young, Omar says, she understands the emotional scars driving homelessness and addiction.
“A person doesn’t choose drugs or homelessness,” she says. “They’re heartbroken. You must fix the root.”
The idea of housing people recovering from addiction in privately owned homes is nothing new. But in recent years, several entrepreneurs have stretched the concept, creating something that looks a lot like an Airbnb short-term rental for the city’s most distressed people—with the federal government paying the tab.
One business WW spoke to said it uses a program, funded locally by CareOregon, that pays up to three months’ rent. That program has grown rapidly in recent years, thanks to a nationwide push to channel federal Medicaid dollars toward housing. The state will soon allow businesses to file Medicaid claims for six months’ rent beginning in November.
It’s not clear whether that program is making payments on the $750,000 house in the far Northeast Portland neighborhood of Wilkes. (Omar says she’s applied, but CareOregon says it hasn’t paid anything out.) Regardless, state records show Wiicare is receiving substantial amounts of federal money, over $100,000 a month, but the records offer no additional details about the company’s finances.
Oregon has a shortfall of nearly 3,000 treatment beds for mental health and addiction. While these facilities typically include round-the-clock staffing and prepared meals, the house in Wilkes doesn’t quite offer that. (The treatment Wiicare offers is in another building across town.) But it’s a whole lot cheaper.
“It’s the next best thing,” says Eric Martin of the Mental Health & Addiction Certification Board of Oregon. “It’s quasi-residential treatment.”
This is all great news for Wiicare’s clients, some of whom tell WW that the three-month program has changed their lives. It could also be great news for Portlanders fed up with the visible misery on their streets.
But it hasn’t been great news for the Wilkes house’s neighbors, of whom a dozen spoke to WW about their concerns.
One, who lives across the street, said he now carries a gun while mowing his front lawn. “We don’t know if they’re thieves,” he said.
Neighbors objecting to low-income housing is nothing new. But the residents of Wilkes have some unique grounds for their gripes.
For reasons that officials can’t clearly explain, no government agency mandates registration of recovery homes. No public official could even tell the neighbors who runs the Wilkes house. And the last time Oregon passed a law to watchdog group housing for people with mental illness, it was never enforced.
“If we’re paying for it, then at least let us have some standards and open communication—the city had no problem doing that for Airbnbs,” says Nicole, who lives down the street and asked to be identified only by her first name, fearing retaliation by her new neighbors.
She added: “This shit would never happen in the West Hills.”
Wiicare’s house is on the corner of a winding street in the Northeast Portland neighborhood of Wilkes, so far east it spills into Gresham. The house was built in 1981 with five bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, three fireplaces, and two garages, and is surrounded by similar midcentury mini-mansions. There’s a sweeping view of Mount St. Helens from the deck. For decades, it was a suburban idyll.
In the pandemic, it became something else. The longtime owner moved into a nursing home, and a Seattle investment firm turned it into an Airbnb. During the pandemic, squatters moved in and, neighbors say, the house became a slum.
On April 26, it was purchased by another out-of-state firm: an Arizona holding company that lists a Phoenix vape shop as its mailing address in county records.
That night, a neighbor across the street watched a dozen people marching into the house, dragging their bedding behind. Those people were clients of Wiicare, moving from the streets into their new home.
Houses like the one in Wilkes are often referred to as “sober living homes,” but go by a myriad of other names: “halfway house,” “recovery residence,” “transitional housing.”
The variants all have this in common: They’re a cost-effective way to help the downtrodden get back on their feet. And they’re increasingly considered a crucial piece of a well-functioning behavioral health care system. Oregon has around 3,200 beds in recovery residences and needs to double that number, according to a recent estimate by Oregon Health & Science University. State lawmakers earmarked $18 million to build more of them just this year.
Often, residents pay their own rent. But that won’t work if you’re coming off the streets and jobless.
Enter Medicaid.
The federal health insurance program for the poor, Medicaid is administered by states, and Oregon has been an aggressive experimenter.
Currently, if you have a qualifying mental illness or substance use disorder, and if you’re living on the street you likely do, then the state’s primary Medicaid insurer, CareOregon, will pay for “health-related” services, including short-term rent. (There’s no cap on expenses, but it must be “cost-effective,” a spokesperson says.)
Beginning in November, CareOregon is formalizing the housing benefit. Clinics are allowed bill for six months’ rent just like they’d bill for a doctor’s visit.
It’s not clear if Wiicare receives funds from the program. Omar says another nonprofit, also run by her, is writing applications for the money. (CareOregon says it has no records of either organization participating in the program.)
One reason it’s difficult to obtain information about the Wilkes sober living home is that regulation is spotty. While Oregon’s Medicaid program requires certification of clinics it funds, the same is not true of houses.
Registration with the National Alliance for Recovery Residences is voluntary: 13 businesses in the state have done so, but not Wiicare or Omar’s nonprofit.
Oregon does have laws on the books requiring “congregate housing” that provides “services and support” for people with mental illness or substance use disorders to be registered with the state. They were passed in 2015 after a man walked out of an unlicensed Hillsboro treatment facility managed by a local nonprofit, raped a 21-year-old woman at knifepoint, and sexually abused an 11-year-old girl, both of whom lived nearby.
Linda Mokler led a group of neighborhood advocates who successfully fought for the law’s implementation. “We can’t help people off the streets if we are not providing quality care,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine quality housing and care happening without any regulation.”
But the agency responsible for enforcing that law still can’t decide, nearly a decade later, whether it applies to recovery homes like the Wilkes house. (An Oregon Health Authority spokesperson told WW it was “presently deliberating” the question.)
No matter: The law isn’t being enforced anyway. Despite new fines for noncompliance being introduced at Mokler’s urging in 2021, not a single one of these “congregate housing” facilities is currently registered with the state.
“It was gutted,” Mokler says of the law, after lawmakers introduced loopholes.
Since the arrival of a dozen new residents to the Wilkes house, neighbors have tallied an array of unfamiliar nuisances.
Loud hip-hop emanated from the balcony at all hours of the day. Trash piled up in the driveway. No one mowed the lawn. At one point, a man knocked on Nicole’s door late one morning, flashing a wallet full of cash and begging to buy a can opener for $60. He was desperate to bake a sweet potato pie, and the house minder who typically drove him to the store was asleep, he said.
“That sounds like pure chaos,” thought Nicole, who had no can opener.
Every morning, residents piled into a white van clutching binders. Neighbors felt the whole thing reeked of exploitation, or at least fraud.
They turned to their neighborhood association, whose chair, a bubbly woman named Shana Koalska, started asking around. “Just about every entity that I reached out to pushed me on to another,” Koalska says.
Eventually, after emailing the county to say there had been “reports of overcrowding (more than 12 adults living on site), public drug use and intoxication, lack of available food and bedding,” she got someone to run the address through state databases. Nothing came up.
State officials later confirmed to WW that the house was not in their records.
But Wiicare has registered a clinic, in a former DocuMart on Northeast Sandy Boulevard. It opened its doors earlier this year after being certified as an outpatient mental health clinic by the Oregon Health Authority in January.
Most mornings, residents of the Wilkes house are driven there by van. It looks more like a social club than a doctor’s office. On a recent visit by a reporter, several men were playing video games on a large flatscreen TV. A foosball table was set up in the corner.
That’s by design, Omar says. “I treat them as human beings,” she says. “I want them to not feel neglected—and I want them to not be a nuisance to the public.”
Obtaining further information about Wiicare has been a challenge. A man who answered the door of the Wilkes house on a recent afternoon, an outreach worker named Ricky who said he’d recently graduated from the program, referred questions to Wiicare and Omar.
But Omar has stopped returning WW’s calls. (Wiicare, until recently, had no website. It now has a splash page saying “Good Things Are Coming.”)
To some degree, that’s understandable. The operators of Wiicare feel they’ve been targeted for harassment by Wilkes residents who don’t want impoverished neighbors. On May 9, a manager called the police after a neighbor trailed the Wiicare van from the house to the Sandy Boulevard clinic and confronted Omar on the street.
“We don’t need people like you living here,” the neighbor said, according to a police report. No charges were filed.
Such conflicts have dogged Wiicare’s founders. The man who controls the limited liability company that owns Wiicare’s home has been sued twice by Arizona homeowner associations that say one of his halfway houses played music too loudly and another housed a sex offender. (The man who controls the LLC, Whaill Abdallah, has evaded efforts to serve him court papers.)
Some of Wiicare’s clients say they are happy with their treatment.
Jackie Hamilton first spoke with WW outside the Wiicare clinic in early May. She’d just started the program and was being temporarily put up by the clinic in a Tigard Airbnb with her 8-year-old terrier, Finigan.
Hamilton’s life had spiraled during the pandemic. She was laid off from her job as a medical claims analyst and was later evicted. She was living out of her car when an acquaintance told her about Wiicare. Hamilton, who’d been previously diagnosed with anxiety and depression, was an ideal client.
Omar was different from the other case workers she’d met during her stint on the streets. Omar bought her clients new clothes. She stocked the fridge with soda. She took everyone to get haircuts. “She doesn’t want them to feel they deserve less,” Hamilton says.
The program’s largesse shocked Hamilton. “They’re paying all the utilities, they’re buying food, they’re providing transportation,” she says. That’s on top of the counseling appointments and group therapy offered at the clinic.
When WW got back in touch with Hamilton, in July, she had gotten a job at Plaid Pantry and had pulled her life back together. She was now managing the company’ newest house, its third, located in Oregon City.
She doesn’t think the scrutiny of sober living homes is justified. “The neighbors don’t want to be around a group of 15 ex-cons and people in recovery,” she says. “But where are they supposed to go?”
Lessons learned, Hamilton took a proactive approach in Oregon City. Soon after moving in, she walked the neighborhood, passing out her phone number.