Homeless and Housing in Lincoln County: Can a $1 million effort to find solutions possibly work, or is it just another plan?

 

 

This is the second of a two-part series on homelessness in Lincoln County and a $1 million pilot program to help tackle the crisis. The first part ran June 2 and can be found here.

 

By KENNETH LIPP/YachatsNews

U.S. Navy veteran Tamera Speights was living in Stayton when the Beachie Creek fire bore down on her neighborhood as wildfires swept through Oregon that awful September 2020.

Speights and her husband evacuated together, landing in a hotel in Sublimity. That’s where he left her with no car or money.

Speights spent the next two years homeless.

The American Red Cross got her a hotel room for three months. From there she went to a treatment facility in northeast Oregon for alcohol use and then to ReConnections Counseling in Newport for outpatient treatment.

She spent some time renting space from a relative but was unable to afford that. With no stable place to live, ReConnections found her a place in its group home.

The counseling service had her meet Keith Barnes, Lincoln County’s veteran services officer, to see what kind of opportunities her time in the military could afford. Barnes then connected Speights with the Community Services Consortium, a three-county nonprofit, which found a small home for her in Seal Rock.

Now Barnes is working to get Speights service-connected disability approved so she can receive Veterans Administration health benefits and disability payments. She wants to go to college, although she’s not sure yet what she wants to study.

Barnes considers Speights a budding success story. And while by no means discounting her hard personal work or suffering, it’s an example of a lucky confluence of several supportive services.

“Luck favors the willing,” Barnes said.

Better coordination needed

Speights could have easily fallen between the cracks between services offered by half a dozen agencies or groups.

A plan being developed in Lincoln County wants to lessen the chance of that happening.

Last year, Lincoln County was among eight recipients of a $1 million state grant to create pilot programs for a locally led, regional group to coordinate responses to housing and homeless issues.

The programs are meant to establish a high-level strategic vision, improve use of current funding, identify more resources, and create a more effective and equitable homeless response system.

Every municipality in the county has signed an agreement to work with the Lincoln County Homeless Advisory Board, with a goal of developing a five-year plan and a sustainable navigation center. Such a center would be an access point for wraparound services that could end up taking many forms and might include the county’s first centralized shelter.

The county is using $100,000 of the grant to contract with the Lincoln County Housing Authority to act as its administrator, managing the monthly board meetings and four work groups with more than 100 total participants.

The county also awarded a $200,000 contract to the Beaverton consulting firm Morant McLeod to lead that process.

“What we want to find out is, how can we help to make sure everybody has the right access at the right time that they need it,” said Ernest Stephens, Morant McLeod’s chief executive officer.

From now until summer, the consultants and the four workgroups will conduct “heavy, community-participatory research” to define the scope of the problem and what services are currently in place.

The information, Stephens said, is already pouring in.

“We’re talking to everybody. We’re talking to police departments, ambulances. We’ve already talked to hospitals,” he said. “We’ve identified 160 service organizations from nonprofits, governments, churches, everybody. And we’re doing a lot of interviewing to bring everybody to the table.”

Housing first

During meetings in April and May, Stephens hammers home the telling research exposing a misconception about rural housing affordability.

In every category of rental units — one, two and three bedroom — the area with the highest rents in a sample of a dozen other cities was someplace in Lincoln County.

Rent for a one-bedroom home in Newport averages $2,100 month, according to the research, compared with $1,616 in Eugene, $1,507 in Salem and $1,095 on the low end of the scale in Cottage Grove.

The average monthly average rent for a two-bedroom home in Depoe Bay is $3,500. Newport and Yachats led the pack in three-bedroom rental prices at $4,700 and $4,500 a month.

For families looking to buy, Lincoln County is particularly unaffordable compared to its neighbors.

One-bedroom homes in Lincoln County are the “cheapest” among five counties in the region — at an average cost of $506,000 — compared with Benton, Lane, Polk and Tillamook.

Two-bedroom homes in the county have the second-highest average cost at $820,000, behind only Tillamook County.

And the average cost for a three-bedroom home in Lincoln County is $1.07 million, the most expensive among the five counties, according to Morant McLeod’s data.

Even people with greater means are also not guaranteed housing. According to Lincoln County’s 2022 workforce housing action plan, 31 percent of all housing in the county is vacant with 81 percent of those seasonal or second homes. The U.S. Census puts the vacancy rate at nearly 42 percent.

Those houses are in a county with an estimated 15.2 percent poverty rate, Stephens reported. The per capita income in Lincoln County is $32,776, and 36 percent of earners make $50,000 or less annually.

To afford the average one-bedroom apartment in Newport, using the one-third gross income standard, a renter would have to make $84,000 a year.

“Thank you,” Toledo mayor Rod Cross said after Stephens’ presentation in April. “This demonstrates something that a lot of us already knew, and now we can show it.”

Part of the endgame, after all, is to be able to demonstrate a need for the money it will take to implement the five-year plan.

The $1 million from the state is intended to keep the county’s pilot program operating for two years. Another requirement is that the participants commit to continued, sustained funding of their programs after that.

Lincoln County will compete with two dozen others for $27 million in state homeless funds headed to mostly rural counties.

Workgroups and panels

The advisory board is relying on four work groups to help the process. These are finance and economics, community engagement, mental and physical health, and service provision and policy.

Stephens participates in all meetings of every workgroup with one or more other McLeod staff.

Stephens says they’ll take the product of all the research, workgroups and panels to the advisory board on Wednesday, June 14 and present the big picture of homeless and housing issues in the county.

“And then we’re going to say what are the possibilities, what are the possible strategic directions that we can go,” Stephens said. “And then we’re going to sit down and wrestle with those, then take them back to the panels and ask them what they think. And then we’re going to start to narrow those down in terms of viability.”

That discussion should include “all the players,” he said, a table seating at least 100 organizations. Once they’ve established viable alternatives, they’ll “take the show on the road” throughout the county during the fall with town hall meetings and presentations. They’ll use that to come up with the “preferred alternative.”

Then they’ll come up with projected work plans, budgets and funding possibilities.

Navigation center

The early hypothesis among participants is that a navigation center would be best for Lincoln County.

Navigation centers take many forms.

Grace Wins Haven in Newport, Coastal Support Services in Lincoln City and the Hub in Waldport all fall into that category in that they provide a single point of contact to access several different services and organizations.

But they are small and do not provide complete services. Lincoln County will likely create one on a much larger scale.

“It’s a hub for employment services, a hub for housing services, a hub for winter sheltering services,” Stephens said. “What’s important, what’s best practices as far as research is concerned, is to have a ‘no wrong door approach.’ It doesn’t matter how you get in touch with us, we want to have a service available for you, and we’re not going to judge you.”

That approach can be controversial, Stephens said, if someone “comes through a door tied to something illegal or to drugs.”

And it might not be the best solution for Lincoln County, he said. They’re still testing the hypothesis through the research and workgroup process.

A possible model is the “low-barrier” navigation center is due to open soon in Salem. The renovated office building with a 75-bed shelter does not require sobriety to enter or segregate by gender, and it allows people to bring pets. There will be a curfew.

“The purpose of a navigation center is to provide stabilization: sleep, meals, access to getting documents in order, and housing assistance,” the city of Salem said on its website. “It is not providing a permanent place to live.”

A commercial kitchen will serve three meals a day, a day room provides space for programming and leisure, there are showers, bathrooms, laundry facilities and a dog run. Sleeping areas have locking storage and there are private rooms for people with sleep apnea, light sleepers and people traumatized by congregate shelter.

The cost? About $13 million.

Already, there are divergent attempts at such a place. The city of Newport is seeking $2.5 million from the 2023 Legislature to create a public-private partnership with a building owner in the city to create a small navigation center and shelter.

But there’s great uncertainty about getting those funds, said mayor Dean Sawyer, and even if it did get the money there’s no chance of having it open by winter.

In the meantime, the county and advisory board is working on plans to recruit and coordinate churches to oofer a rotating schedule of emergency shelters this winter.

Just another plan?

Some stakeholders have privately displayed cynicism or expressed anxiety that this will be “another plan.” In 2007, Lincoln County’s 10-year housing plan had a focus of tackling chronic homelessness, and though it logged some successes, it ultimately failed to produce a shelter as envisioned.

And the talk-it-out approach has its detractors — a frustrated service provider said during a homeless advisory board meeting: “Why are we talking about finding the holes? We know where the holes are. I don’t know if we can pay our rent.”

Others, like county commissioner Claire Hall, who worked on the 2007 plan and is the chair of the new advisory board, see this moment as uniquely energized by the wholesale buy-in from all of the cities.

Neither the cynics nor the faithful will have to wait long for the first evidence. Lincoln County’s navigation center is supposed to be planned by the time Morant McLeod’s contract is up at the end of the year.

During May’s advisory board meeting, Stephens said initial research indicates that Lincoln County has lots of organizations providing specific services but they have a difficult time dealing with someone who has multiple issues or needs the help of another organization.

And while there may be close relationships between those providers, Stephens said, there is no overall, broad coordination.

“If we get nothing else out of what we do here,” Cross told the group, “it will be do break down these walls between services.”

• Editor’s note: Former YachatsNews staffer Kenneth Lipp spent a month reporting and writing this two-part series before taking a position as Lincoln County’s public information officer in late April.