Oregon child welfare officials have spent more than $57 million housing hundreds of children in foster care in hotels since 2018, the year they agreed to end the practice in a legal settlement.

For years, the state has struggled to find a place for its most vulnerable children. Children placed in foster care have been sent out-of-state. They’ve been put in unlicensed short-term rentals.

Last legislative session, lawmakers decided they couldn’t solve the issue at home so they needed the ability to send kids to facilities out-of-state once again. That fizzled. And there have been many, many lawsuits.

The state’s latest approach to avoid hoteling is to pay providers to buy or build homes that can house one or two children throughout the state. It’s a potentially costly plan, but its advocates say it may help provide more stability for Oregon’s foster kids.

“This is a new model that will support one child or young adult at a time within licensed settings by trained staff,” Jake Sunderland, a spokesman for the state’s child welfare system wrote in an email.

The first two contracts the state has signed have what one state lawmaker, Sen. Lisa Reynolds, D-Portland, called “eyebrow raising” startup costs. The first would pay up to $843,200 for Youth Unlimited, Inc., to purchase a home, lease a vehicle, hire personnel and for supplies.

The other contract, to Vineyard Family, Inc., is a one-time payment of $81,500 to build an additional dwelling unit to house a child. The company’s total contract allows up to $535,313 in spending, which would cover personnel and supplies.

The two providers must serve kids in the child-welfare system for a minimum of 10 years or repay the startup costs. Although the costs are high and the number of children they serve are low, Oregon noted in its proposal, the costs are equivalent to about five months of housing two children or young adults in a hotel.

Oregon is placing foster children in unlicensed short-term rental homes and paying millions to do so

April Johnson, who is the CEO of Youth Unlimited, said the program will help some of the kids who simply have no place else to go.

“This is what we need for some kids,” Johnson said. “When kids end up not making it in a placement and they are in a hotel, they aren’t eating good food, going to school, they aren’t regulated.”

In the homes they can stay up to 90 days, she said. Once there, they will have licensed, specialized care.

“It’s hard to keep a complicated kid in a permanent space … we have kids blowing out of care," Johnson said. “The kids need holistic support and qualified people to support them, not just any random person. We just don’t have enough homes and everybody is working on it and everybody is trying at every move. We are all doing whatever we can.”

Chad Vineyard, who lives in Ontario, Oregon, received the other contract and is building a 900-square-foot additional dwelling unit on a property he owns. He runs a 24-hour care facility already on the property for individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

Vineyard said he believes this venture will best serve the kids by allowing them to live in a more “family-like setting” with mental health support, compared to eating junk food and playing video games in a hotel all day.

“We’re excited to partner with (child welfare) and do our part to try and stabilize these kids in crisis without homes,” Vineyard said.

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Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, who has long been a watchdog over the state’s foster care program, said the latest idea seems likely to benefit some children.

“But if you need 20 of those or seven of those, it can’t be $1 million a pop,” she said. “Does this move the needle on stability for kids in the long run? It’s an expensive solution that will benefit a couple of kids, but I don’t know how it solves the whole problem.”

Gelser Blouin is in the process of creating a formal work group that would look holistically at why Oregon continually fails to find appropriate placements for kids with complicated needs.

“I think it’s a point of unity that nobody wants to do temporary lodging and yet this has been a challenge for a decade for us,” Gelser Blouin said.

Last month, the state’s Department of Human Services, which oversees the child welfare system and program, got a new leader. Fariborz Pakseresht, the long-time director, retired in October. The state Senate recently confirmed Liesl Wendt to lead the agency.

DHS is one of the state’s largest agencies and has been scrutinized in recent years for failing to care for some of Oregon’s most at-risk residents.

The agency’s current budget includes $7.5 billion in general fund dollars and more than 11,300 positions.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/08/a-pricy-new-plan-aims-to-keep-oregons-foster-kids-out-of-hotels/