Portland Mayor Keith Wilson entered office last year promising to end unsheltered homelessness in the city.

He swiftly opened a series of overnight shelters, where the majority of beds are filled each night. Wilson is certain this means homelessness is decreasing.

But the numbers say otherwise.

According to Multnomah County, nearly 3,000 more people are living unsheltered in the county than there were when Wilson took office.

Wilson doesn’t buy it.

“The data, as a whole, isn’t matching up with what we’re seeing anecdotally,” Wilson told OPB in a recent interview, pointing to the decrease in visible homelessness on Portland streets.

It also doesn’t appear to match national trends: Recent data suggests that homelessness is declining in cities across the U.S.

That disconnect reflects a familiar tension between the city and county, which jointly oversee the region’s homeless response, but often disagree on how to measure – and address – the crisis.

Now, as both governments face multimillion-dollar budget gaps that could force shelter closures, those old disagreements are resurfacing.

Wilson’s distrust of county data has confused policymakers, angered staff and sparked calls for serious change.

OPB spoke with more than a dozen people working for city and county homeless services, homeless providers, those in elected office, and others for this story. Many declined to comment on the record out of fear of jeopardizing their jobs or political careers.

The protracted data spat overshadows the fact that, regardless of whose numbers are correct, there are still thousands of people experiencing homelessness in Portland. And how elected officials perceive the data will impact their chances of getting help.

“Having better data is always helpful,” said Marisa Zapata, the director of PSU’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. “But at what cost? At this point, how much more time should we spend on improving data if we aren’t addressing homelessness and housing? We are delaying that critical work over a number game.”

A rocky history

In 2016, the city and county teamed up to share resources to address the region’s mounting homelessness crisis.

That intergovernmental agreement dictated how the two governments would share funding and oversight of all programs that address homelessness.

It also established the Joint Office of Homeless Services, a county department to run this work that’s since been renamed the Homeless Services Department.

It’s been a rocky decade, as city and county elected officials have often disagreed on the best way to spend money to address homelessness. These disagreements led both governments to establish their own similar programs. For example, both the city and county operate their own shelter programs.

The tension came to a head in late 2024, when Portland city councilors proposed leaving the agreement, accusing the county of flawed data collection, among other things.

That momentum ground to a halt after the November mayoral election.

Mayor-elect Wilson swiftly convinced the councilors to drop the effort, appearing to renew the city’s commitment to this partnership.

But now, three months into his second year in office, Wilson is raising similar concerns.

“I fear that we may not be looking at the data in a critical fashion,” Wilson told staff with the county’s Homeless Services Department at a Feb. 27 meeting.

Crunching the numbers

Data on the region’s homeless population has always come with an asterisk.

For years, the region relied on the biennial “point-in-time count,” where volunteers collect data on where people experiencing homelessness slept on one single January evening.

This data, which the federal government requires the county to collect to receive funding, has long been considered incomplete.

Last year, the county unveiled a new data collection model, one based on information about anyone who touches the region’s homeless services – whether that’s staying in a shelter, interacting with an outreach worker, or moving into permanent housing.

This is data that the county is already required to collect, but was never used to tabulate people experiencing homelessness.

The county’s new system uses this data to do just that, reporting on the number of people who are reported to be living unsheltered, living in a shelter, or moving into housing each month.

The data remain imperfect, but far more reliable than the previous yearly count.

“The county has come a long way on its data,” said Councilor Eric Zimmerman, who previously worked for Multnomah County. “For me, it’s a continuous evolution.”

Because the data reflect far more sources than just a one-night snapshot, they also give the impression that the county’s homeless population has exploded.

For example, the number of people experiencing homelessness in 2025 appears to be 67% higher than the point-in-time data collected in 2023.

Currently, the county estimates nearly 18,000 people are experiencing homelessness, with about 8,800 people considered unsheltered, meaning living outside or in a car – not in a shelter.

When Wilson entered office, that number was roughly 6,000.

The debate

Wilson doesn’t believe this data matches his reality.

He raised this at a February meeting with the committee that oversees the city-county homelessness system, of which Wilson is a member.

“We’re messaging that unsheltered homelessness and homelessness is increasing, but we’re not seeing it on the street,” he said. “We’re not seeing it with our eyes.”

Wilson said that the number should be falling as more people use his overnight shelters.

The mayor said shelter providers and hospital emergency staff have told him that they feel like the homeless population appears to be declining.

“I understand the anecdotal descriptions that you’re providing, but these data and these numbers come from people accessing homeless services, day shelters, outreach, homeless shelters, etc.,” said Ryan Deibert, deputy director of the county’s Homeless Response System.

At this meeting, Wilson also referenced talking points that had been circulated internally by his staff, which raise questions about how the county collects data.

OPB obtained a copy of a staff-made presentation featuring those concerns through a records request.

It suggested, without evidence, that the county may be inflating homeless numbers by double, counting people who may give fake names to shelter staff.

The document also suggests people may be using homeless services, despite not being homeless.

“We have some anomalies that we believe are in the data,” Wilson told the committee.

This rankled Homeless Services Department Director Anna Plumb.

According to records obtained by OPB, Plumb sent a text message during that meeting to Skyler Brocker-Knapp, head of Portland’s shelter programs.

“Nothing he is saying is true,” Plumb wrote, asking for a meeting with Wilson.

She said in the text string that the staff presentation, which was created by city spokesperson Rob Layne, was incorrect and “extremely damaging.”

In response, Brocker-Knapp apologized and offered the possibility Layne had made a mistake.

“But the mayor wants to dig in every day to these things and we work for him,” she said. “So we are doing our very best.”

The county later released a memo to city staff debunking Layne’s presentation, slide by slide.

Others familiar with data analysis say Wilson’s claims appear baseless.

Zapata, the director of PSU’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, oversees the region’s biennial point-in-time count.

She said that, even if some people were giving fake names to service providers and being represented multiple times in the data, it wouldn’t be enough to seriously impact the numbers.

“It’s completely unfounded,” said Zapata. “He’s grasping at small things to prove a point.”

Former County Commissioner Sharon Meieran agrees.

Meieran, a longtime critic of the county’s data collection system, said she “absolutely” believes the county is still undercounting the unsheltered population.

Meieran, who is rumored to be considering a run for Multnomah County chair, pointed to her own anecdotal evidence that people are being swept from downtown streets and pushed into harder-to-find areas.

“Is the central city looking better? Yes it is. Does that mean numbers have lessened? No. Just because you don’t see them on the street, they don’t magically disappear,” said Meieran. “At the end of the day, he’s just playing politics.”

Playing politics

Wilson has much to gain from data showing homelessness declining. It’s his chief campaign promise.

“Concerns about homelessness are lower than when the mayor was running for office,” said John Horvick, vice president of DHM Research, which regularly polls Portland residents on top issues. “So, if I’m the mayor, I want to take credit for that. I would imagine if someone is saying, ‘No you’re wrong, homelessness is worse,’ that would be frustrating.”

In December 2024, 35% of 700 Portland voters polled by DHM said homelessness was the city’s top problem, he said.

A year later, that number dropped to 20%. Both polls were commissioned by the region’s chamber of commerce.

Like many political debates, the concern is as much about policy as it is money.

Both city and county governments are facing significant budget gaps, each threatening to shutter shelters and other programs that address homelessness. Multnomah County’s Homeless Services Department needs to make $68 million in cuts to balance its upcoming budget, while Portland says it needs to find $54 million to keep the city’s shelter program running next year. Together, the gaps could eliminate more than 2,000 shelter beds across the region.

At the same time the city and county are locked in a financial dispute.

The homeless services contract requires the city to give the county roughly $31 million each year. The city argues that the contract also directs the county to pay around $38 million to the city to oversee village-style shelters, but the county says that interpretation is incorrect.

As both governments are crafting budgets, neither has committed to giving the other the amount of money they believe they’re owed.

Time for a change?

Both governments are eager to retool the city-county homeless services agreement when it expires in July 2027.

In the meantime, Wilson has introduced an amendment that would remove language requiring each side to exchange funds.

“Let’s just stop swapping those dollars back and forth,” he said. “It’s just muddying in the water. We each need to figure out how to operate the best systems possible and then coordinate.”

It’s not clear if Wilson’s plan has support from all county commissioners, but at least one is open to a more thorough overhaul.

“The plan was written without a budget,” said Shannon Singleton, a commissioner who sits on the city-county homeless oversight board. “And without clarity around roles and responsibilities. There’s too much duplication.”

Singleton, who is running for county chair in November, wants to see an end to both governments running shelters and other programs. Portland City Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney agrees.

“I feel like we’ve now spent a year talking about the fact that we have these two systems that sit side by side that are not well coordinated,” Pirtle-Guiney said at a joint city-county meeting last month. “We can’t keep spinning our wheels. We are at the crisis point.”

It will require a level of trust neither government has had with each other.

“There are shared values across electeds in both bodies,” said Singleton. “I think if we could just come back to what roles and responsibilities are in this partnership, we can build back some trust. There’s no other option.”

The city and council are forming a new “data work group” that Wilson hopes will put everyone on the same page.

“Good data is required to make good decisions,” the mayor said.

Meanwhile, the two governments and their separate numbers machines lurch forward.

The county’s most recent data on homelessness is from January.

Based on that data, an estimated 400 people who had previously been unsheltered moved into permanent housing.

More than 1,300 new people experiencing homelessness interacted with the county’s services for the first time.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/01/behind-portlands-homelessness-data-familial-political-fight-emerges/