Portland Re-examines Ways To Serve Homeless

Portland officials are reconsidering how and where the city provides emergency shelter for thousands of homeless people who crowd into aging, converted apartment buildings each year and sometimes disrupt life in the downtown neighborhood. The city’s shelters are in Bayside, a neighborhood that is beginning to see some development activity and where the city is planning to sell the buildings used by its public works department to make way for private redevelopment. In addition to having a shelter overcrowded with people who in many cases struggle with mental illness and substance abuse issues, city staff are worried about a rise in predominately young people who hang out and do drugs around the shelter but don’t go inside or seek city services, officials say. The physical layout of the primary adult shelter – a three-story building with numerous small rooms and nooks – has long been seen as a problem and potential danger to staff who monitor about 150 clients sleeping on floor mats each night.