We all long for some good news amid our worsening homelessness crisis in Multnomah County. Unfortunately, this story isn’t it.

Indeed, Multnomah County does get proportionally less SHS measure funding relative to Washington and Clackamas counties given their respective homeless populations. This is worth pointing out, and it needs to be fixed.

Yet, contrary to the story’s conclusion that the County is getting “more bang for its homeless bucks,” it has only demonstrated how effective the County is at doing “less with more.”

Let’s remember that the purpose of the SHS measure was to raise sufficient funds to get people living chronically unsheltered into stable, long-term housing. County leaders assured us that they knew how to end chronic homelessness, if only they had the money.

$800 million later, the number of people living unsheltered has increased from 1,500 to over 7,500. This is failure on a massive scale by any measure.

Consider the key “metrics” described in the article: Placement into housing; “prevention” of homelessness; and construction of shelter beds. These are process distractions, not meaningful endpoints.

Under this rubric, someone “placed” into housing could leave the next day; a tenant could be “saved” by rent assistance one month and be evicted the next after the assistance evaporated; and shelter beds could be built but sit unoccupied. These are all indicators of system failure that Multnomah County wants to market as success.

In fact, that’s what’s happening on our streets every day, even as leaders desperately try to get reporters to write their “Mission Accomplished!” headlines.

Metro’s process point numbers, regurgitated in the article, simply mask the County’s failure to actually solve homelessness on our streets.

The real news here is the injustice that Multnomah County has received less than its proportional share of SHS dollars to waste. Meanwhile, while they’ve spent over a billion dollars, the number of people living on our streets has quintupled.

Willamette Week does a lot of strong reporting. Unfortunately this story bought the County’s KoolAid and then poured it out to the public.