Homeless and Housing in Lincoln County: What are the numbers? What are the issues? What are solutions? What is anyone doing?

 

This is the first of a two-part series on homelessness in Lincoln County and a $1 million pilot program to help tackle the crisis. This first article seeks to paint a picture of the current scope of the issue in Lincoln County.

 

By KENNETH LIPP/YachatsNews

An extension cord runs from the building on First Street in Newport to a white minivan parked out front. It’s helping to keep Michael, a 76-year-old who worked decades as a fisherman in the area, alive.

The van is his home.

The First Street building is operated by Grace Wins Haven, a homeless services nonprofit that allows Michael to park and plug into its electricity to charge his oxygen machines. He spends a lot of time in the driver’s seat reading – partially hidden behind the cluttered dashboard, a towel over the window and an oxygen tube running to his nose.

Grace Wins Haven is among dozens of organizations in Lincoln County that provide some sort of service to the homeless.

Its small building does not house a shelter. Volunteers prepare sack lunches and other meals in its kitchen and help people get connected to resources from other organizations. A storage area holds clothing, tents, sleeping bags and other outdoor survival supplies. There’s a laundry room that anyone can use to wash clothes, and a cargo trailer containing a shower parked in the alley.

That’s where Michael cleans up.

The nonprofit’s board voted last month to close the service’s doors June 15, citing the poor health of its founder, financial issues and the dwindling number of volunteers. A group met this week in Newport to find a new director and keep operations going — and may be able to do that.

Michael relies on Social Security to survive, but without a government subsidy it’s not near enough to afford an apartment or house. Michael said he’s applied to waiting lists with no success.

Still, he considers himself fortunate compared with people who face the Oregon coast’s weather without a vehicle for refuge. When it’s too cold, he pays for a hotel room or gets a voucher for one from Grace Wins.

While people like Michael are the most visible, most homeless in Lincoln County are less so – living deep in the forest in tents or trailers, doubling up with friends or relatives, or even spending months in poorly-equipped motel rooms. The estimated 1,500 homeless here includes a whopping 630 children in the Lincoln County School District considered homeless under a different federally-required counting system.

Lincoln County faces significant, unique challenges in responding to a homeless crisis, starting with the difficulty of adequately defining the problem, and then finding and allocating enough money to help tackle the issue.

There is also the over-reliance on a dedicated but underfunded and inadequately connected network of agencies and organizations to respond to such a complicated problem.

And finally, there’s the complex nexus of factors that contribute to homelessness — the housing market, wages, a 2½-year pandemic, catastrophes, addictions and mental illness — all swirled together in a debate about which factor is more critical to finding a solution.

Using a $1 million state grant, Lincoln County is spending the rest of this year developing a pilot program with the aim of untangling and addressing that complexity, bringing together more than 150 stakeholders from governments, nonprofits and the community.

The numbers

Oregon experienced one of the largest increases in homelessness of any U.S. state from 2020-22, a period when national statistics remained relatively stable. In one of her first official acts in January, Gov. Tina Kotek declared a homelessness state of emergency, asking the 2023 Legislature for hundreds of millions of dollars to address the issue.

A report from 2020 estimated Lincoln County’s homeless population to be 750 to 1,100 — three times that in Benton County and twice the homeless population of Linn County.

Another barometer for the local crisis is the staggering number of Lincoln County School District students considered homeless. Some of that is due to a federal law that requires those students to be counted in a different way.

In 2017-18, the school district hit a peak of 1,016 students considered homeless – about one-fourth the number counted in Multnomah County, which has 16 times Lincoln County’s population. That represented an increase of more than 600 homeless students since 2009.

That number decreased to 630 as of 2022, which still constitutes more than 12 percent of the district’s 5,200 students.

The student homelessness rate highlights another confounding element of the problem and weakness of conventional counting methods — homelessness comes in many forms. It could be a family or child that crashes with relatives and friends, to a person who lives in a house with no running water or electricity, to a person with mental illness in a shelter.

Among Lincoln County’s 630 known homeless students as of June 2022, 466 were “doubled up” in another household, 70 were in hotels, 66 were in shelters and 152 were unsheltered. There were 123 known homeless children from infant to age five, and 78 kids living without a parent or guardian.

Homeless kids

Woody Crobar is the coordinator of the Lincoln County School District program that identifies homeless students, ensures they are afforded their rights and connects them with services.

Crobar said it’s been harder to keep track since the Covid pandemic.

“Families got way more mobile, that’s a trend we’ve seen nationwide,” Crobar said. “We’re identifying fewer children in general just because it got way harder.”

There are two main ways the district identifies students who qualify for assistance — through a residency questionnaire when they register for school and through referrals from staff or other agencies who work with families and children.

The number is always changing as new kids are identified or drop from the rolls.

“It’s constantly being updated,” Crobar said. And making the job more difficult, federal law requires students to re-qualify every year.

“Every August, we start out with zero kids,” he said. “We contact all of the families from last year to find out what they’re doing, if their situation’s changed, then we get them registered.”

Crobar said he thinks the district will have a higher number this year.

Students who qualify for assistance must be immediately enrolled, even if they don’t have transcripts and vital records.

Federal law also requires transport to “school of origin” for students who have to move because of unstable housing.

“So if you have a family who let’s say their children are going to Toledo High School, and they have to move to Waldport because grandma and grandpa are the only people who have space for them. That student has a right to keep going to school in Toledo, and we will provide busing to them.”

Add to the tally the hundreds of people who became instantly homeless in September 2020 when their homes burned in the Echo Mountain wildfires, some of whom are still not in a permanent residence.

Based on all of those factors, YachatsNews estimates there are as many as 1,500 homeless people in Lincoln County, population 50,000.

It is more visible

It is the common impression among county officials, service providers and local unhoused people that the number of homeless has risen dramatically. Some of that impression might be driven by a radical change in the legal landscape.

Four years ago, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case out of Idaho that anti-camping and “vagrancy” laws in most Western cities could not be enforced. The court found that criminalizing camping on public property if no alternative was provided violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

That ruling was followed by an Oregon law requiring cities to adopt ordinances with “objectively reasonable” limitations on time, place and manner of permitted camping.

With authorities unable to clear campers from public property unless another crime was committed or the camp presented a safety hazard, Lincoln County residents began to see just how many people were homeless.

An ordinance passed by Newport City Council last October seems to have been successful at making the problem less obvious – but not necessarily go away. The ordinance prohibits camping within 150 feet of organizations providing services to the homeless. Camps were soon gone – including one at Grace Wins Haven.

Newport’s ordinance also created new forms of permitted camping so property owners could offer free space to campers, if they provide basic supervision. And, Newport Police Department expanded its outreach to inform homeless people where they are allowed to camp and where to access services.

Waldport has passed a similar ordinance.

While the camps might have been pushed largely from view, the homeless are still around.

Who offers what?

A 2007 county housing plan envisioned creating a general access homeless shelter. That has not happened.

There are shelters for special populations such as domestic violence victims and children, and there are shelter alternatives managed by small, local non-profits for when winter weather gets bad enough to make sleeping outside deadly.

During a historic snowstorm in February, visitors to the Newport Seafood and Wine Festival had every hotel room in the area booked. Grace Wins volunteers had to scramble to find an alternative to its hotel voucher program to bring people inside from the freezing weather. After an entreaty to Newport churches, St. Stephen’s Episcopal opened its doors.

In south county, Yachats Community Presbyterian Church had to act fast to replace using the pavilion at the Yachats Commons as an emergency refuge. It pulled together $90,000 to buy and erect five pallet shelters, keeping about 20 people out of the elements throughout the winter.

In Lincoln City, the homeless get help from Coastal Support Services, which like Grace Wins received a $30,000 grant from the county for a winter shelter program. It used those funds this winter for hotel vouchers.

Housing services are rounded out by organizations and agencies including:

• The Community Services Consortium, which offers a wide variety of services including utility and housing assistance in Lincoln, Benton and Linn counties;
• The Housing Authority of Lincoln County which is helping 782 families through federal housing subsidies and 11 apartment complexes totaling 242 units spread throughout the county;
• Samaritan House, which provides supportive and transitional shelter to families with children;
• The county-run TIDES shelter for homeless youth ages 12-18 in Newport;
• My Safe Place, formerly My Sister’s Place, which provides shelter to domestic violence victims;
• The school district’s HELP program;
• The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, a significant provider of affordable housing in the Siletz area;
• Family Promise of Lincoln County, which provides shelter, meals and wraparound services to homeless, low-income families with children.

Local governments have largely supported the efforts of those organizations by providing yearly social service grants.

The county’s $1 million pilot program is not the first try at creating a united effort by government and community organizations to combat homelessness. And, it’s not that previous efforts have failed to build some kind of collaborative safety net — those efforts just never moved fast enough or far enough.

And research by a new homeless advisory group is showing that the dozens of organizations currently trying to help have trouble handling people with multiple issues or don’t connect well enough with other groups.

At Home in Lincoln County

Lincoln County launched a 10-year housing plan in 2007 called “At Home in Lincoln County” with a focus on addressing chronic homelessness.

While the plan addressed a broad range of factors and demographics such as poverty and drug addiction, it aimed for a “housing-first” approach to the problem. That approach is an alternative to the focus on emergency sheltering that assumes other services will be more effective when people are in permanent homes.

In 2007, the local median single-family home price had doubled to $298,000 during the previous 15 years. Monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment climbed from $386 to $573 in seven years.

At the same time, 11.6 percent of the county’s population was in poverty, higher than the statewide average. The average single wage earner made about $150 too little a month for rent to be considered affordable by federal standards.

The year after the plan was adopted, the United States saw its worst financial crisis since 1929. A 2012 update to the housing plan noted “We are still struggling to recover, and during the past few years, many individuals and families in this county slipped over the line into homelessness.”

“The combination of high demand, a limited base of buildable land, and low wages have worked in concert to create a workforce housing crisis in Lincoln County,” the 2012 report said. “Even the burst of the housing bubble that helped precipitate the recession did not reverse the fact that in a span of two decades, housing prices grew twice as fast as wages.”

On the street

Carla, 51, has lived in Newport for 13 years and has been homeless twice, the current time since last June. She worked as a live-in home health care aide until a progressive nerve condition in her legs left her unable to work. She’s now surviving by soliciting assistance at the intersection of U.S. Highways 101 and 20 in Newport, until her disability claim is processed.

She said she could get housing vouchers, but she doesn’t have the income to make up the difference in rent. Anywhere from 30 percent to 45 percent of people in Lincoln County receiving housing vouchers are still unable to locate housing they can afford. Voucher recipients are typically responsible for 30 percent of their housing costs if renting from  a private landlord.

“Once I have disability, I can use HUD, and then I’ll have a steady place to live, which is what I’m looking forward to,” she said. “That happens to a lot of homeless people. I would say maybe half the homeless in this area are disabled in some way. And then when they do get their disability check, it’s only $600 a month, so they would prefer to live in a tent area and have some money to spend, rather than give up every dime for rent and have only food stamps.”

She said there were also people who’ve lived in remote camps for years who would never willingly seek conventional housing.

“I know several people who swear they’ll live and die out there,” she said.

She’d like to see more small, temporary shelters like the pallet shelters constructed in Yachats. She took advantage of Grace Wins’ voucher program for a hotel room this past winter.

And if a large central shelter is opened, it should accept families, she said.

$1 million effort

The county’s latest effort is occurring during a similar environment as in 2007.

The effort follows a 2½-year pandemic, 8 percent inflation, rising interest rates and higher housing prices that are outstripping growth in wages.

County commissioner Claire Hall, a principal driver of the 2007 plan, is chair of the homeless advisory board. The board, with representatives from every municipality, is the central governing body in devising and executing the pilot program.

The county dedicated $200,000 of its $1 million grant to a consultant, who is spending the year working with the board, four workgroups and community panels to devise the plan. By the end of the year, it expects to have a network of at least 100 entities, a road map for the next five years, and significant progress toward a key piece of infrastructure — a navigation center, perhaps including a central shelter.

Hall said she’s optimistic about the effort.

“What’s different now than when we did our original homeless plan back in ‘07 and really other discussions about this is having the wholehearted buy-in of the cities,” she said. “Not only are they at the table, but their engagement has been very positive and high level.”

• Next week: What the Lincoln County Homeless Advisory Board has learned so far, what remains, and what the result could look like.
• Editor’s note: 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.