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What defines Mayor-elect Keith Wilson and his unlikely victory last week is his intense optimism.
“I don’t know what it looks like, but I’ll tell you, we need to hew towards collaboration to set the stage for this next 20 years,” Wilson said in an interview this week with WW. “We have to clean up the streets. We have to address public safety. That is my job. That’s why I was elected.”
The cornerstone of Wilson’s landslide win last week is a plan to establish 2,000 nighttime shelter beds within the year. He says doing so will effectively end unsheltered homelessness and place the city back on the right track.
Once those beds are available, and police can compel people to sleep in shelters, Wilson describes a domino effect: Developers and office workers would flock downtown, reinfusing the city’s core with economic activity. Police would no longer have to spend much of their time responding to calls about homeless people, freeing them to respond more swiftly to 911 calls. The city could save up to $300 million annually and use the savings to improve basic city services like filling potholes, Wilson says.
The details of Wilson’s plan, which he thinks will cost $25 million annually, are still opaque. He needs to find funding, shelter operators, and the shelter spaces themselves. If he wants to use the taxpayer dollars that flow through the Joint Office of Homeless Services, he’d likely have to get approval from both the Portland City Council and the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners.
Even Wilson admits that his plan needs a lot of work. But he’s determined to find a way, whether in tandem with other elected officials, or by working around them.
Wilson stopped by WW’s office this week—before walking in the Veteran’s Day Parade alongside Mayor Ted Wheeler on a drizzly morning—to discuss his ambitious vision, his plan to fix the city’s budget woes, and his north star: ending unsheltered homelessness.
The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
WW: Do you need majority approval from the City Council and the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners to fund your shelter plan?
Keith Wilson: I do believe so, and it would happen through budget amendments. But the mayor also has an executive requirement to address public safety. A person living and dying on the street is a public safety emergency.
Are you saying you believe you can use executive authority to push through the plan if the two elected bodies don’t approve it?
We’re hopeful [we can use executive authority]. But we’re not at that point. So there’s no reason to do the check-down yet. Right now, let’s talk to the county and partner together to make their [homelessness plan] work well. I’ve set out an ambitious goal to care for Portlanders within a year to ensure that nobody is denied a place to sleep safely tonight. What does that look like? We’ll see.
Where do you get the money to fund the $25 million plan of yours?
The city is currently spending $300 million because of unsheltered homelessness on things like boulders, gates and [sweeps]. Once you start bringing down that waste, you have excess funds to reallocate.
We know there’s unspent funds in the bureaus for consultancies, independent contractors, and advisers. We’ve found $40 million in unspent bureau funds.
Portland Solutions [a new city division that responds to unsheltered homelessness] is what you call the “COPQ” in an organization. It’s “cost of poor quality.” It shouldn’t be there. We added it because we haven’t been able to address homelessness. It’s $67 million that we didn’t once have. It’s a symptom of us not addressing the crisis. [Much of Portland Solutions’ budget is dedicated to operating the city’s safe rest villages and temporary alternative shelter sites.]
Has anyone offered to fund your shelter plan privately?
Two [private] people have offered $25 million to fund the project entirely. [Wilson declined to identify them.]
Do you need Metro and the Multnomah County collaboration on your shelter plan?
I’d like to have a triumvirate on this. [Metro President Lynn Peterson] and I have been friends, and we’ve been working on the homeless crisis for years now. She’s looking at a rewrite of the supportive housing services tax measure, so it’s critical Portland factor into that conversation.
On the county side, they’re behavioral health, human services and addiction. That’s part of the equation. When the city ceded adult shelters over to the county, they were really good at setting up programs like permanent supportive housing and long-term rental assistance, but they were never good at the infrastructure or the structures. That was always the city. And that’s where we got turned around.
Is there a difference of approach between you and County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson when it comes to homelessness?
I’m not going to point fingers, and you have not heard me say anything about Jessica in the last nine months. The Homeless Response Action Plan is good. It’s a good program. It’s 80%, right? So let’s fix the 20%, which is we don’t have enough shelters.
Saying that we’re gonna take care of 50% of the unsheltered people by the end of 2025—so what half do we leave on the street? That’s not a plan. You have to end the encampments. You have to end the RVs, which are migrating here, and then start getting back to baseline.
My goal is not to create anything new but to make things work better, faster, at lower cost.
There’s a perception that part of the problem is that there’s no accountability for nonprofits that receive homelessness dollars. Where do you stand on that?
It’s not the nonprofits. They’re beholden to the contract and the county. The homeless providers want to help. They’re not out there being nefarious. They’re just good people trying to do good work. They want guidelines because they need to bring these souls to the table to activate that self-actualization. And right now, they don’t.
Will you enforce anti-camping laws, like the city’s time, place and manner ordinance?
I have to open up the shelter beds so I can apply the laws appropriately to where we can enforce our no-camping laws. I think it’s pragmatic to have a few hundred empty beds every night.
How do we get investors back to downtown Portland?
No one’s going to get a return on investment until we get cleanliness and safety restored. So that’s why this one-year plan is so important.
Will you bring city employees back to the office?
Four days [a week in the office] would be the expectation, with five being the goal.
What will you do to reduce police response times?
You have to look at why they’re delayed. Where’s the bottleneck? Fifty-two percent of all arrests are of the unsheltered. So if we can reduce and remove unsheltered homelessness next year, you’re addressing the bottleneck and you’re releasing that resource to go back to faster response times.
When you walk into City Hall, you’re going to see some red-green graphs. And everybody in the city is going to know what our five or six key metrics are. Unsheltered homelessness. This is a critical one. Response times are going to be one of them. Because everybody from City Council to me to anybody walking in are going to know the key items that we have to hit.
How do you feel about the composition of the future City Council?
You’ve got a host of different people, from economists to policymakers to existing commissioners to union representatives to business representatives. I like what I see.
Do you think the City Council will approve of enforcing the city’s current time, place and manner ordinance in conjunction with your shelter plan?
Leaving people in tents and RVs on the sidewalks is something I’ve talked to all of them about, and they’re not really for that. So absolutely, yeah.