Willamette Week recently reported on a spat between Portland and Multnomah County that is preventing the Joint Office of Homeless Services from tracking data.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Eight years ago, leaders from the city of Portland and Multnomah County envisioned the Joint Office of Homeless Services as a clearinghouse for the two organizations to coordinate efforts to address homelessness. But as Willamette Week recently reported, the office has essentially operated blindly since its founding, with no consistent data to guide its efforts.
JOHS processes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year and distributes that money to hundreds of nonprofit organizations contracted to handle various aspects of homelessness prevention. This includes outreach efforts, shelters, transitional housing programs, and financial assistance for people who cannot afford housing, to name a few.
One of the biggest criticisms of the Integration Office in recent years is that no one within the system seems to know who specifically is being supported and whether it is making a tangible difference. Thing. JOHS maintains an online dashboard with data to report the number of people it has helped, but does that count only include unique interactions, or does she, for example, have one person help multiple times? It is impossible to know if you were helped.
The Willamette Week report details how the office has been in the dark about this type of specific information since its inception. The Story's Pat Doris spoke to the story's author, Nigel Jaquis, to find out more about the report.
It's worth your time: After a long wait, Multnomah County has taken a big step to better understand who is homeless and what services they need.
“This is really amazing. Since this joint office was established in 2016, you would think that the system would have moved almost immediately from its former location at the Portland Housing Authority,” Jaquis said. said. “There was a lot of bickering and a lot of talks between the city and the county, but the reality is that until March 25, 2024, the county joint office could take control of the system. It took almost a year.”
Jaquis is talking about the Homeless Management Information System. It was originally a city-maintained database developed as a standardized way to track funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This is not a great system, especially these days. It has been criticized for being clunky and outdated. However, this is a central database that has historically been used to collect and store information about people experiencing homelessness. For many years, even this imperfect tool could not spread from the city to the county, and the latter took over the driver's seat of his JOHS.
“I think everyone recognizes that data is useful in all human activities,” Jaquis continued. “Then we need to understand who is there, what services they need, what services they have used in the past, and from that data what projects and services are effective in reducing homelessness. You can analyze it.
“In reality, there was no such data at all. The limited data that is currently in the system is largely inaccessible to nonprofit organizations that provide services, and largely inaccessible to government partners. The data itself is also very incomplete. So the consultant said that there are about 50 things that people who look at this want the system to tell them, but the information in eight of those fields doesn't really tell anyone. I can't access it either.
audit: Payment delays and poor communication are making it difficult for service providers to interact with Multnomah County homeless agencies.
After spending eight years trying to get this system, Multnomah County has it. And now Jaquis said he plans to spend another three years replacing it with something that actually provides useful data collection and sharing.
“I think this is one of those cases… when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge,” he added. “The joint office is a joint venture between cities and counties. City and county elected officials are often at odds, and they see this as a turf war rather than something that will help alleviate a humanitarian disaster.” 'And no one really said, 'This is unacceptable.' ”
From 2017 to 2023, the joint office received $444,682,583 in taxpayer funds, according to Multnomah County budget reports. This year's budget was $280 million.
The 2025 budget begins on July 1, and it is unclear how much money will be allocated to JOHS, but if it is the same as the previous budget, taxpayers will have spent more on homelessness than JOHS alone in the past nine years. That's a billion dollars spent. Individual counties, cities and the state of Oregon are spending even more money.