By YachatsNews and KATU-TV
A small army of 100 volunteers from 27 organizations has completed Lincoln County’s most comprehensive count to date of the number of homeless in the area.
But it could be 6-8 weeks before all the numbers and data are crunched to determine just how many people are sleeping outside, staying in motel rooms or shelters, in transitional housing or “double-bunking” with friends or relatives.
The numbers are important if the county is to fight for increasingly competitive requests for state and federal money to run homeless programs, provide temporary shelter and work on long-term housing.
“Funding follows the numbers,” said Karen Rockwell, executive director of the Housing Authority of Lincoln County which coordinated the counts that started Jan. 22 and finished Wednesday. “If we continue to show fewer numbers then we’ll continue to get fewer resources to deal with what we know is a considerable issue.”
In metropolitan areas, the so-called homeless “point in time” count occurs on one day. Because Lincoln County is considered rural, it had 10 days to scour camps, shelters, food banks, transitional housing and other places to count the homeless. Willing participants were also asked a long series of questions that asked where they stayed, how long they had been homeless, mental and physical health conditions, disabilities and whether they had experienced domestic violence.
“We just try to blanket the area,” Rockwell said.
That included visits to homeless camps tucked into the forests around most cities. Jesse Noble, who runs the county’s harm reduction program, took a reporter for KATU-TV along as she conducted the survey in a homeless camp near Lincoln City.
Some taking the survey, like Linnea Zeller, grew up in Lincoln City.
“I’ve been here since third grade of elementary school,” said Zeller, 30. “I went to high school here and everything.”
Zeller said she became homeless three years ago because of domestic abuse and after she lost her job during the Covid pandemic.
“It is scary because the things that happen on the streets and in the woods … it’s scary,” she told KATU.
In rural coastal Oregon, places for her to get help are few and far between. Lincoln City has some stepping-stone type programs that require regular drug testing and proof of progress. The program works to gradually transition residents into more stable housing.
Zeller told KATU she is willing to abide by the program’s requirements to get off the street. She has used drugs and says she occasionally she still uses to “stay awake,” but she does not believe she has a substance-use disorder and says she would get clean “cold turkey” if housed.
Although the county opened a night-time winter shelter in October that will stay open through March, there are no low-barrier year-round shelter options in the area.
“It really sucks that we don’t have resources in Lincoln County for homeless; it’s a tourist town,” she says. “I want to be back living life again where I don’t have to be stepping on glass, where I don’t have to be worrying about my next hot meal or if I have a shower and clean clothes and look human.”
Service providers say part of the problem is that previous point-in-time counts have underrepresented the extent of hidden homelessness.
“We have these coastal communities that are largely retirement and tourism, and then you have these vast spaces where so many people can live and go unnoticed,” Noble told KATU.
Noble said the camp she visited last week had likely been around for five or six years and until now had not been included in the annual homeless count.
“Previously, we had an event where folks in the underhoused community were asked to come to us,” Noble told KATU. “We found there were far too many barriers in terms of getting people to the location.”
This year, Lincoln County had 100 volunteers from 27 organizations making sure the county gets the most accurate homeless count possible. In years past service providers estimate the county has had less than half that number of volunteers.
Big push to count
Lincoln County and some service agencies have launched an aggressive plan to help tackle the burgeoning homeless and housing issues. The county is using a $1 million state grant to develop a five-year plan to hopefully address some of those issues. The county – with help from some cities – opened the first low-barrier night time winter shelter in Newport in a building purchased by the Housing Authority, and is using motel vouchers to shelter more homeless in Lincoln City. A private nonprofit called Helping Hands has also opened a transitional housing program in a remodeled building in Lincoln City.
It’s a concerted effort that stems largely from the structure of funding in Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek’s emergency order last year addressing homelessness.
The order allocated roughly $130 million to mostly metro areas of Oregon while 26 rural counties were left to split less than a quarter of that sum. Lincoln County got one of the smallest slivers of funding statewide.
It was a historic level of investment in Oregon’s homeless service network, with allocations based on previous point in time data.
Rockwell and Noble believe this year, Lincoln County’s count may get closer to representing the real extent of homelessness in this coastal community.
A consultant’s 2023 analysis for Lincoln County’s new housing and homeless advisory committee estimated there are more than 2,000 unhoused individuals in the county. But that number includes an estimated 630 students in the Lincoln County School District, which is required by the federal government to use a different counting method to include children staying with friends or relatives.
Rockwell told YachatsNews that she doesn’t believe the county’s point-in-time counts will reach 2,000 people, but it also will not be the estimated 150 homeless from previous years.
“It will be closer, but it won’t be as high as 2,000,” she said.
But whether the state will make further investment to house people like Zeller in rural Oregon remains to be seen.
Tanay Janiak, who lives in a trailer up the hill from Zeller’s tent, says as it stands, she has no hope of getting services because she “doesn’t have an addiction.”
“All of the services here require you to have a substance-use disorder,” she says. “I work sometimes two full-time jobs. My problem is there is no housing.”
Janiak says she was working a full-time job at a local motel where she was also living. When she lost that job, she lost her housing and moved into her van until it was towed. She was in a tent until it got too cold and another person in the camp offered to let her double up in his trailer.
“He wasn’t going to let me freeze to death,” she says.
- Portions of this story appeared Jan. 24, 2024 on KATU-TV Portland.
