A framework for moving from managing homelessness to measurable results
Report #14 Why Portland Needs the Five Principles and Accountability Criteria
Introduction
Portland and Multnomah County do not lack compassion, effort, or money. What they lack is a disciplined system that connects those resources to measurable outcomes. For years, our region has added programs, contracts, committees, emergency responses, and public spending, yet the visible crisis has continued to grow. The result is frustration across the community: housed residents see public spaces deteriorating, businesses see disorder and loss of confidence, and people living outside too often remain trapped in addiction, mental illness, trauma, isolation, and instability.
The central problem is not that every existing program is bad. Many providers are doing difficult and necessary work. The deeper problem is that the system does not operate from one clear plan, one accountable leadership structure, or one consistent definition of success. It often measures activity rather than results: beds opened, contacts made, dollars spent, people referred, and services offered. Those numbers matter, but they do not answer the question the public has a right to ask: are people moving from the street to stability?
I. The Problem: A Fragmented System That Measures Activity Instead of Results
Portland and Multnomah County’s response to homelessness has been fragmented, expensive, and too often a failure. The Homeless Services Department (HSD) Data Dashboard illustrates the gap. Multnomah County’s homelessness rate is roughly 9 to 10 times higher than neighboring counties using PIT (Point in Time) data, and roughly 12 to 14 times higher using the By-Name List comparison.
Homelessness Rate Comparison - January 2025
County / measure | Homeless per 1,000 residents |
Clackamas County, PIT | 1.31 |
Washington County, PIT | 1.52 |
Multnomah County, PIT | 13.20 |
Multnomah County, By-Name List | 18.01 |
The By-Name List also reveals a steep two-year increase: from 11,430 people in January 2024 to 17,490 in December 2025. That is an increase of 6,060 people, or approximately 53 percent.
That gap between spending and results has damaged public trust. Residents see tents, open-air drug use, untreated mental illness, trash, crime, and human suffering. Service providers see a system that too often rewards compliance with funding rules rather than verified outcomes. People experiencing homelessness encounter a maze of agencies, intake processes, eligibility rules, and referrals rather than a coherent path out of homelessness.
The official response is often to do more of the same, even when budgets are tightening. But more spending through the same fragmented system is not a plan. A plan requires leadership, priorities, coordination, accountability, and consequences when programs do not produce results.
The contrast between drug deflection programs in Multnomah County and Washington County illustrates the difference. Deflection is intended to give people arrested for drug possession a pathway to treatment instead of jail. The question is whether the pathway is real, verified, and followed through to completion.
Multnomah County Deflection | Washington County Deflection |
Person can walk out, no consequences | If person walks out, they go to jail |
If they stay, given a list of providers | If they stay, choose from list of providers |
If they call a provider, listed as a “success” | Escorted to provider, enrolled by case manager |
No follow-up, no record of completion of services | Case manager follows up monthly, attends graduation |
The point is not that jail is the solution to addiction. It is not. The point is that a recovery pathway must have structure. A program that allows people to walk away, counts a phone call or referral as success, and does not verify completion is not a treatment pathway; it is a handoff without accountability.
II. The Solution: The Five Principles and Accountability Criteria
The Five Principles provide a practical framework for correcting these failures. They are not a partisan platform, nor a detailed operating manual. They are a set of standards by which policies, budgets, contracts, and service providers can be evaluated.
The Five Principles is a framework for changing how Portland responds to homelessness, combining common sense, good management, and respect for people experiencing homelessness as citizens with both rights and responsibilities.
- Unified Leadership with one overall budget and accountability
- Effective Outreach
- Treat the Whole Person
- Prevent Homelessness
- Protect the Commons
However, these principles must be paired with accountability in implementation. Hope for the Homeless Foundation evaluates programs addressing homelessness by whether they help people who are ready to rebuild their lives, address the underlying causes of their homelessness, and move toward long-term stability. The key metrics of the HHF method are:
- Total number of persons served
- Number of persons still in the program at year-end
- Number of persons who exited the program, including those who left early and those who succeeded in becoming stabilized and housed
- Success rate: total persons stabilized and housed divided by total persons exiting the program
- One-year success rate: persons remaining stabilized and housed one year later divided by the previous year’s total number of persons stabilized and housed
- Total annual residential program costs
- Cost per person successfully stabilized and housed
Utilizing these outcome metrics recognizes that not every person experiencing homelessness needs the same intervention and that programs should be matched to the population they serve. Emergency shelters should not be judged the same way as long-term recovery housing. A prevention program should not be judged the same way as a treatment-based transitional housing program. But every program should be able to state what it is trying to accomplish, who it is designed to serve, how success is measured, whether participants are better off after receiving help, and importantly whether they do so at a cost that is an effective expenditure of limited funds.
III. Further on The Five Principle
1. Unified Leadership
The County is responsible for shelters and housing, courts and jails, and much of the behavioral health system. The City provides police, cleanup services, public space management, and some shelter capacity. The Homeless Services Department is a joint program of the county and city. Metro provides major supportive housing funding. The State and Federal Medicaid fund large parts of behavioral health. Each level of government has its own budget, authority, politics, reporting requirements, and priorities.
That structure guarantees confusion unless there is unified leadership. Without a single plan, agencies duplicate work, shift blame, and leave service providers to navigate conflicting requirements. Most important, people experiencing homelessness fall through the cracks.
A successful system needs one accountable structure with a unified plan and budget, common data standards, shared performance measures, and public reporting. Funders should require coordination, data sharing, and comparable outcomes in contracts with service providers. Communities that have made measurable progress have generally done so by building coordinated systems, not by letting dozens of separate efforts operate independently.
2. Effective Outreach
Outreach and case management are often the first real contact between a person living outside and the homeless services system. Outreach should not be an end in itself. It should be the gateway to assessment, case management, treatment, shelter, recovery, housing, and follow-through.
A functioning system would identify people by name, enter basic information into a shared data system, assess needs, and connect each person to the right level of care. A case manager would then help develop an Individual Recovery Plan or service plan, track progress, and stay involved until the person is stable.
In Multnomah County, outreach and case management are spread across many organizations, each with different procedures, data practices, and program rules. That makes it hard to track people, hard to know which interventions work, and hard to hold the system accountable.
3. Treat the Whole Person
A one-size-fits-all response will fail because homelessness is not one problem. Some people are temporarily displaced and need short-term assistance. Some are working but cannot afford rent. Some are fleeing domestic violence. Some are trapped in addiction. Some suffer from serious mental illness. Some need long-term supportive housing. Some need institutional care. Some are ready for recovery and structure; others are not.
Treating the whole person means matching the intervention to the person. A person who lost housing because of a short-term financial crisis may need rent assistance and light case management. A person addicted to fentanyl or meth may need withdrawal management, treatment, transitional recovery housing, employment support, and long-term accountability. A person with severe untreated mental illness may need clinical intervention or institutional care before independent housing is realistic.
Housing matters. But housing alone is not a recovery plan. If the underlying causes of homelessness are not addressed, many people will cycle from street to shelter to housing and back again. A humane system must treat people as individuals, not as interchangeable applicants for apartments.
4. Prevent Homelessness
Preventing homelessness is almost always less costly and less traumatic than trying to solve homelessness after a person has been living outside. Rent assistance, eviction prevention, reentry planning, family reunification, foster youth transition support, and transportation back to supportive communities can all reduce inflow into homelessness.
But prevention dollars must be targeted. It is not enough to report how many people received assistance. The more important questions are whether those people were at imminent risk of homelessness, whether they had other options, whether assistance prevented homelessness, and for how long. A strong prevention system should identify people at highest risk and prioritize limited resources accordingly. Prevention should be measured by housing stability, not by checks written or applications processed.
5. Protect the Commons
The debate over homelessness often creates a false choice between compassion and public order. Portland needs both. It is not compassionate to leave people with severe addiction or mental illness living in tents, surrounded by violence, trafficking, theft, exposure, disease, and overdose risk. It is also not acceptable to allow parks, sidewalks, libraries, business districts, and neighborhoods to become unsafe or unusable.
Public spaces belong to everyone, housed and unhoused alike. When public spaces deteriorate, residents and businesses lose confidence, the tax base weakens, and the resources available for homelessness services decline. The people living outside also suffer, because they are often the most vulnerable victims of crime, exploitation, and violence.
Protecting the commons means setting clear rules for public spaces while also offering real pathways indoors. Enforcement without services is not enough. Services without standards are not enough. A functional city must do both.
Conclusion
Portland’s homelessness crisis will not be solved by slogans, larger budgets, or another layer of bureaucracy. It will be solved only when the region is willing to define success clearly, match people to the right interventions, insist on follow-through, and publicly measure results.
This is not a call to abandon compassion. It is a call to make compassion effective. People experiencing homelessness deserve more than temporary relief and endless referrals. Taxpayers deserve more than activity reports.
Neighborhoods deserve safe and usable public spaces. And service providers who are producing real outcomes deserve to be recognized, funded, and used as models for the rest of the system.
Portland can continue managing homelessness, or it can begin measuring and solving it. The Five Principles provide the framework, and HHF’s Accountability Criteria provide the discipline.
Source Notes
Recommended Original Sources:
Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative / Multnomah County Homeless Services Department, 2025 Portland Tri-County Point-in-Time Count Findings, November 2025.
https://hsd.multco.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Tri-County-PITC-Report-11.04.25.pdf
Multnomah County Homeless Services Department, Data Dashboard / By-Name List.
https://hsd.multco.us/data-dashboard/
Multnomah County Homeless Services Department, FY 2026 Proposed Budget One-Pager.
https://multco.us/file/one_pager_-_hsd_budget/download
Multnomah County, Domicile Unknown report for deaths among people experiencing homelessness in 2024.
Multnomah County, Deflection Program. https://multco.us/info/deflection-program
Willamette Week, The Solution to Multnomah County's Struggles With Compulsory Drug Rehab Turned Out to Be in the County Next Door, April 1, 2026.
National Alliance to End Homelessness, Housing-Focused Street Outreach Framework, February 2025.
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, Federal Homelessness Prevention Framework, September 2024.
United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, All In: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness - Prevent Homelessness section.
https://www.usich.gov/federal-strategic-plan/prevent-homelessness
Community Solutions, What Cities with Successful Homeless Programs Have in Common, May 6, 2026.
https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-homeless-programs-have-in-common/
National Alliance to End Homelessness.
k.pdfNational League of Cities, Enhancing Public Safety: Why Community Responder Models Are the Smart Solution to Addressing Homelessness, January 21, 2026.
Hope for the Homeless Foundation, Accountability Criteria for Vetting Holistic Recovery Organizations.
John Hopkins University
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/we-can-end-homelessness-in-america
Washington County, Deflection Program.
https://www.washingtoncountyor.gov/bcc/news/2024/05/23/washington-county-deflection-program
Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, 2025 Behavioral Health Deflection Best Practices Report.
https://www.oregon.gov/cjc/CJC%20Document%20Library/2025%20BHD%20Best%20Practices%20Report.pdf
Multnomah County, Deflection Program Year One: First Quarter Report.
https://multco.us/file/deflection_program_q1_report_%28september_1__december_31%2C_2024%29/download
Portland Voice Issues
Unified Leadership and Accountability:
Portland Voice Report #8: Unified Leadership: Prerequisite for a Successful Homeless Policy
Portland Voice Report #13: ACCOUNTABILITY: MEASURING ACTIVITIES OR RESULTS?
Portland Voice Report #9: How (not) to Measure Accountability
Effective Outreach:
Portland Voice Report #10 Outreach: the first crucial step
Treat the Whole Person:
Portland Voice Report #11 CityTeam’s Integrated Program for the Homeless
Portland Voice Report #6: Review of CCC’s Engaged Social Housing
Portland Voice Report #7: Can Housing First Beat Fentanyl, Meth, and Psychoses? The Crisis of Chronic
Homelessness and the Case for Heterodox Housing Policy
Portland Voice Report #5: Behavioral Health and Drug Addiction. The Ignored Stepchild of Homeless Services
Protect the Commons:
Portland Voice Report #2: https://oregonharborofhope.org/report-2-a-flood-of-money-a-dysfunctional-system/
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