If you are due for a dose of hope, I recommend you dig into the newly released Portland Street Response six-month evaluation.
Yes, Portland Street Response is too small – the city thus far has only invested in a small pilot with a small staff of people in one neighborhood that responds to too limited a range of calls.
But the evaluation by Portland State Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative – led by Greg Townley and Emily Leickly – unequivocally recommends that Portland Street Response go city-wide with expanded hours and expanded call types.
It’s on the right track, the report indicates, and Portland Fire and Rescue is a good structure for it.
Street Roots ambassadors surveyed the unhoused people included in the report. Townley and Leickly also interviewed and surveyed other Lents neighbors, Portland Street Response workers, as well as Lents firefighters and police. They evaluated reams of data.
Portland Street Response is doing what it set out to do: reduce police interactions as well as emergency room visits for unhoused people and people in mental health distress. Nearly 90 percent of the calls routed to PSR would have been routed to police. And the number of resultant arrests? Zero.
Portland Street Response was frequently able to treat people on the spot, providing wound care and
administering medicine. When people aren’t transported to emergency rooms, there is a cost savings, but this also
reduces police encounters. As Disability Rights Oregon showed in its report, “The Unwanteds: Looking for Help, Landing in
Jail,” too often distressed unhoused people in hospitals are arrested and sent to jail.
Townley and Leickly pointed out something else that started to sink in for me in a new way: “The community health worker component of Portland Street Response is a true innovation that sets it apart from CAHOOTS and other alternative first responder programs.”
I have been concerned that Portland Street Response would be saddled with too many expectations that are inappropriate for crisis workers who simply need to meet people where they are at. By adding community health workers, though, Portland Street Response is able to follow-up with people. They are able to stitch a bit more of the system together.
In this case, community health workers Haika Mushi and Heather Middleton were able to get six people into housing by following up with them. That’s beautiful, and worth investing in.
There’s clearly a need to develop a Portland Street Response-specific phone line. Over half of unhoused people reported feeling too unsafe to call 911. Significantly, this hesitancy stretches to surrounding neighbors, nearly half of whom also report not feeling safe to call 911, in part because they are “concerned about how calling 911 might negatively impact other community members, especially people of color and people experiencing homelessness.”
People need good options, and that includes a way to specifically call Portland Street Response, in addition to 911 re-routing calls.
Aside from expanding the hours and the neighborhoods, Portland Street Response needs to be able to go to more call types. The majority of calls are for people who need welfare checks – outside. But people also need welfare checks inside, something done by CAHOOTS in Eugene, the inspiration for Portland Street Response. This is a growing need, too, in weather disasters. Most of the people who died during the heat dome in June, for example, lived indoors.
The city needs an agreement with the police union – Portland Police Association – in order for Portland Street Response to both respond inside residences – not just on the streets – and to call in which someone is in suicidal distress. Townley and Leickly recommend both, as well as responding to people standing in traffic (and this takes using fire and lights, something possible to develop in that limited capacity as long as Portland Street Response is housed in Portland Fire and Rescue).
There need to be places for people to go. This is not something Portland Street Response itself can solve, but as our city builds it, we must commit to these places. Housing, of course. But also the short-term places where people can safely sober up or even detox— there’s no such place in Portland, and this is a dramatic gap.
Far fewer Black, Indigenous and other communities of color had heard of Portland Street Response than white neighbors. So as Portland Street Response expands its pilot across the city, it needs to strive to be culturally specific in each neighborhood.
So it’s time to expand pilot city-wide, continuing to evaluated it and adjust the program.
City council adjusts its budget in the fall, so the timing is good. It’s time to commit the funds to city-wide expansion.
Best to end in the words of one unhoused person who was served by Portland Street Response: “The team has helped me. I want it to continue helping people, and not end with me. It should be expanded to help more people."
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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Kaia Sand | Portland Street Response is on the right track, 6-month evaluation shows - Street Roots News
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