Social Justice Coalition Letter in Support of Shelter to Housing Continuum

As organizations that fight for equity, inclusion, and social justice for every Portlander, we call on Portland City Council to enact the Shelter to Housing Continuum (S2HC) and embrace greater flexibility to provide stable housing and shelter to our city’s most vulnerable neighbors. 

Our city is in the throes of a housing and homelessness crisis, brought on by generations of exclusionary policy decisions, predatory capitalism, a fraying safety net, and a failure to plan for the future. As Portlanders who love our city and our neighbors, we have a collective responsibility to help solve this crisis and ensure a safe, stable place to live for every human being here.

Recommended by a unanimous vote of the Planning and Sustainability Commission, S2HC is an important step toward making safe, stable housing and shelter a reality for all Portlanders, including the poorest among us. City Council should enact S2HC without delay, reject proposals to weaken it, and embrace changes that give the city greater flexibility to find good sites for new housing and shelters.

S2HC provides thoughtful, humane tools to address houselessness:

• Lowers barriers to siting homeless shelters and associated services across the city.

• Gives permanent legal status to Outdoor Shelters like the Kenton Women’s Village, when they are opened by public agencies and community-based nonprofits. 

• Expands the legal Group Living options, making it easier to build alternative types of housing like dormitories, senior care facilities, co-housing, and single-room occupancy apartments. 

• Allows a residential property to permanently host a recreational vehicle or a tiny house on wheels. 

Each of these elements builds on proven, successful approaches to supporting our houseless neighbors through safe, stable living arrangements. None of them pose the least risk to livability, health, or public safety. They are what a welcoming city does. 

Yet the City Council is hearing from voices asking for S2HC to be watered down or rejected entirely. These calls can generally be reduced down to “Some human beings do not deserve to live near me or my favorite places.”

That is not who we are, as Portlanders, and it is certainly not who we tell ourselves we want to be.

If we want to truly be a welcoming city, we need to adopt S2HC and push it further:

• Remove the blanket ban on Outdoor Shelters in Open Space zones and replace it with a process for City Council to approve sites on a case-by-case basis after a public hearing.

• Allow churches, faith-based organizations, and community nonprofits in low-density residential zones to site Outdoor Shelters on their property by right.

• Allow RVs and tiny houses on wheels on residential property if it uses approved sanitation solutions (rather than banning anything without a sewer line).

Adopting S2HC with these changes will help Portland reach our aspiration to be a compassionate, welcoming city. We urge you to do so without delay. 

Signed by:

• Sightline Institute

• Portland DSA 

• Stop the Sweeps PDX

• Sunrise PDX

• Business for a Better Portland

• Unite Oregon