Portland: Neighbors Welcome Supports the Morillo Amendment

Portland: Neighbors Welcome is an organization committed to making Portland a place where housing is a human right, and where every present and future Portlander has a safe and stable home they can afford. 

We are here today to encourage City Councilors to vote in support of the Morillo-1 amendment to the Fall Supplemental Budget, because sweeps are harmful, violent, and a waste of taxpayer dollars. At Portland: Neighbors Welcome, we champion a housing-first approach, the gold standard for transitioning people out of homelessness. Evidence shows that sweeps do not improve the conditions or prospects of the people they affect or the City of Portland as a whole. They are a harmful and inadequate strategy for addressing the challenges our homeless neighbors face every day.

The primary cause of Portland’s housing crisis is the decades-long underproduction of housing that has created a shortage of 140,000 homes in our state, and the second lowest number of rental homes affordable to neighbors at or below poverty levels.  Rather than addressing these systemic harms, sweeps exacerbate them by forcing homeless residents to move farther away from services. We also know from local reporting by outlets like Street Roots that City officials and contractors charged with conducting the sweeps have a history of destroying medications and documentation that our unhoused neighbors need to survive. Mayor Wilson’s strategies are making it harder for people to access housing and services, despite his insistence that he is acting out of compassion.

The data tell us that sweeps destabilize, traumatize, and kill the people our failed policies have pushed onto the street. Every dollar spent on forcibly moving our unhoused neighbors from one wet sidewalk to another is a dollar not spent on programs like rental assistance, which keeps Portlanders from becoming unhoused in the first place. According to the recently released Finding Home report, 91% of survey respondents said rent assistance would help them remain housed, with half of respondents saying that not being able to afford rent is their primary barrier to accessing housing. As vulnerable households grapple with the impacts of federal funding cuts to benefit programs, we should be doing all we can to ensure they can stay stably housed. 

We urge the City to make a better choice, one that accepts responsibility for the policy failures that have created this situation: we can spend our money and our energy creating housing options that serve everyone, not just the most fortunate among us. Support the Morillo-1 amendment and stop the sweeps.