PORTLAND, Ore. — Multnomah County is launching a new program aimed at connecting homeless residents with housing, and this latest attempt looks to landlords to try to help bridge the housing gap.
"One of the biggest obstacles to moving someone off the streets and into housing is finding an available unit to put them in," said Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal.
It's an all-too-familiar obstacle for Annette Johnson, who struggled with homelessness for a long time before finally finding housing.
"There really is no way to find out, you just have to guess, word of mouth," she said.
The county announced a partnership this week with Housing Connector, a nonprofit that works with the online real estate marketplace Zillow to incentivize property owners to list vacant units on the website, making them easier for homeless service providers to find.
"Some barriers to them can be things like bad credit, a criminal history, they've got a gap in employment or rental history," explained Courtney Dodds, communications director at the Union Gospel Mission, one of the homeless service providers that the county program hopes to help out.
Through the program, landlords will agree to waive those types of barriers. Housing Connector will provide each person housed with two years of guaranteed housing stability support. In exchange, property owners receive access to financial and mitigation support including up to three months of emergency rent guarantee.
"I think assistance up front could be helpful too," said Dodds. "A lot of times, people who are coming out of homelessness don't have savings."
If the program concept sounds familiar, that's because it's not completely new. Multnomah County launched a different landlord incentive program just last year called Move-In Multnomah, which paid landlords to house homeless people, covering rent for the first year.
That program had mixed results. When it ended, some of the homeless people ended up back on the streets, unable to make further payments themselves. So the big question facing the county's Housing Connector partnership is whether the new program will fare any better.
"We have been successful at taking thousands of people off the streets and putting them into housing," Jayapal said. "There are always places we can do better, and I've worked on identifying those, and this is one of them."
Jayapal said she's been trying to bring the new program to Multnomah County for almost a year — longer than she would have liked, she added. But she said she believes connecting landlords to service providers is an important piece that's been missing from previous county-led housing programs "to really create a more effective system of placing people into housing."