by Julia Shumway, Oregon Capital Chronicle
January 9, 2025
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek on Thursday continued the homelessness state of emergency she declared on her first day in office for a third year as the state continues to grapple with the crisis of thousands of people living outside.
Kotek’s executive order follows confirmation in a federal report released in the last week of 2024 that Oregon has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual point in time count, conducted in January 2024, found 22,875 of Oregon’s roughly 4.2 million residents experienced homelessness. About 62% of those individuals lacked shelter.
The federal report confirms that Oregon, like 42 other states, experienced an increase in homelessness between 2023 and 2024 — despite record sums and attention being paid by state officials to shelter more people, help homeless people find housing and keep people living in precarious situations from losing their homes.
Lawmakers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in housing and homelessness in recent years, and Kotek’s 2025-27 budget proposal includes $700 million intended to shelter homeless Oregonians and keep them from falling into homelessness, as well as about $1.4 billion in bonds and infrastructure funding to help the state build its way out of a decades-long housing shortage.
Kotek said in a statement Thursday that the state is seeing progress. While the total number of homeless Oregonians increased between January 2023 and January 2024, her office and Oregon Housing and Community Services estimate that by the end of June the state will have funded 5,500 shelter beds, helped 3,300 families experiencing homelessness back into housing and prevented 24,000 households from becoming homeless.
“We must stay the course on what we see working. If we keep at this pace, one in every three people who were experiencing homelessness in 2023 will be rehoused,” Kotek said in the statement. “Since declaring the homelessness emergency response two years ago, we exceeded the targets we set through a statewide homelessness infrastructure we never had before. But the urgency remains as homelessness continues to increase and we need to see this strategy through.”
Extending the emergency order gives Kotek’s office and the Oregon Department of Emergency Management more flexibility to coordinate state agencies, employees and equipment to address the homelessness crisis. Her executive order also directs Oregon Housing and Community Services to set up a statewide homelessness response system to continue coordinating with local governments and community service providers after the emergency ends.
Housing Executive Director Andrea Bell said Kotek entered office recognizing that the state needed to act quickly and boldly.
“This work is and has always been about people and making their life better. This starts with supporting and empowering local leaders to do what they do best — deliver for community,” Bell said. “So much depends on what we, the generations now in positions of responsibility, choose to do in this moment. Building a future that includes and works for everyone is possible when we recognize the scale of our challenges and bring an even greater scale of ambition in confronting them.”
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