Ed Blackburn retires this year from Central City Concern, one of the city's largest homeless services organizations. He became executive director in 2008, after more than 10 years running parts of the nonprofit's health and addiction services.

In that time, he helped the organization grow from about 80 employees to 800. He has overseen $200 million in real estate development for housing and centers to provide a wide range of mental health, addiction recovery and other health services, as well as career training and employment programs.

Blackburn switched from city planning to working with the city's homeless population as he was searching for spiritual clarity. In a few months, he found a place where the staff literally washed the feet of the poor and sick – in this case, because of bad cases of athlete's foot – and he found his calling.

But now he's stepping down after 25 years with Central City Concern. He's still involved in the development of 380 housing units, built with $21.5 million donated from six Portland health systems. He'll move to emeritus status at the end of September.

Blackburn said he plans to take some time off and relax, but won't be gone for long.

"I'll probably get in trouble somehow in not too long," he told The Oregonian/OregonLive earlier this summer.

In the interview, he reflected on how he has seen Portland's homeless population grow and change, and how Central City Concern and the city have adapted to the fluctuations.

Here's the interview, edited for length and clarity:

Is this level of homelessness a new phenomenon?

When we thought of homelessness when I started in 1992, it was mostly what we refer to as "Skid Row," and Old Town and parts of downtown and parts of the Central Eastside. There probably were people sleeping on couches back then, but they weren't even what we considered to be homeless at that point.

By early afternoon on most days, you'd have a hundred people just in this area of Old Town, passed out in doorways from drinking. Mostly from alcohol use, some other drugs sometimes.

But most port cities, like Portland, had issues with Skid Row going back a century or more. Modern homelessness as we think about it today really started increasing in the 1980s when the federal government began de-investing in the building of low-income housing and switched mostly to a voucher system, tapping into the private landlord market, which had some efficacy and worked to some degree.

But now we find ourselves decades later with a huge shortage of housing for those who are 30 percent below the median income. And the marketplace doesn't build a lot of housing for those low-income levels.

Also during that time, in the wake of Vietnam, we saw a big upsurge in homeless veterans. We saw the de-institutionalization of large mental health hospitals, which was supposed to be followed by a lot of community investment in housing and community services, but that investment was never made proportionally to the de-investment in hospitals.

The War on Drugs led to a huge increase in incarceration rates for poor people generally, but for people of color way disproportionately for the size of the population. And that led to homelessness in the 1990s for African Americans to that degree we had never seen before.

We've also seen employers and landlords being much more sophisticated about background checks, so the people with long-term incarceration records end up homeless as a result of that.

In the Northwest, we've seen a huge in-migration of people here in the last 20 years -- but even in the last 10 years, tens of thousands of people have moved here. With that migration is all kinds of people -- rich people, people with degrees and people who are very employable. And people who are looking for a new life, a new start, and sometimes that doesn't work out so well and they end up on the streets.

The Great Recession was really a great depression for a lot of low-income people. I think we had a lot of young people here who didn't get attached to the mainstream economy and a lot of other people who lost their jobs and detached. We see a lot of the migratory homeless population on the West Coast and I think people have adapted to survive in that way.

The opiate addiction has added a new twist, especially with the migratory population. The presence of heroin addiction is something I haven't seen before in the homeless population.

So we have a swarm of things happening. We don't see much of the old Skid Row alcoholics anymore. We kind of solved that one. But it was replaced by other factors that are contributing to homelessness.

When you look back at how this has evolved over time in Portland or Multnomah County, was there ever a moment or a decision point that was a turning point?

I think there are kind of waves of it. It's not necessarily a steady upward stream of homelessness.

A part of what's happening is a result of a good economy. You've got all these people moving here because it's a desirable place to live. The more people move here, it seems like we can't get ahead. So there are paradoxes.

I think gentrification in Northeast Portland has resulted in homelessness as families have been broken up. Some of those were efforts to actually improve the neighborhoods, provide mass transportation, make the neighborhoods more desirable. But what happened is higher-income people moved in and bought the property. So a lot of lower-income people were gentrified out to East County and, for some people, they lost family connections, they lost a sense of community.

I don't think anyone anticipated the incredible rise in home prices and the housing market here 10 years ago. When we were building a new clinic in Old Town in 2009, it was the only crane in the city. We were wondering if we would ever come out of those days.

There were vacancies all over the place. People weren't even bothering to put their homes up for sale because they'd take such a loss. I think not investing in land banking for the future and the building of affordable housing at the lower income levels was a mistake.

We also lost a lot of single-room occupancy hotels. That happened around the country. We lost several hundred units or more in Portland.

Starting around 2003, the city focused on chronic homelessness. Central City Concern helped bring about $9 million in federal money and we did see that population go down.

There were nights I'd go out with CHIERS, our outreach program that picks up inebriated people on the streets, and count people. Over time, there were nights when they weren't counting anybody sleeping on the streets.

We were able to get several hundred people off the streets in probably about a year. The idea was the cities were going to demonstrate success and then there'd be a big investment. The investment didn't follow the success.

It was right before the invasion of Iraq and so when those wars really got underway, all that funding stopped.

Did you see this influx of homelessness coming?

I think that some of us were not surprised. Central City Concern and Northwest Pilot Projects put out a yearly report at that time of the number of low-income units that were being lost and warning what the outcomes would be.

When I think of all the tens of thousands of people moving here, it seems unrealistic to expect you're not going to have homeless people among that migration. It's just unrealistic. And I don't think our planning over the past 15 years we've accounted for that.

I think we need to do a better job of looking at the future. It's hard to see sometimes but it makes no sense you can do a steady investment over time and the population is increasing so dramatically and not expect that you're going to have homelessness with that kind of migration.

How has Central City Concern changed over the time you've been here?

When I got here in 1992, it was like a $4 million organization with maybe 80 employees -- a lot of those were part time. Many of them making minimum wage, which was pretty minimum back then. We had a few buildings and outpatient drug treatment programs using acupuncture, which was very innovative at the time.

But now we're multi-dimensional organization that does really robust health care services. We did addictions treatment back then, but now we also do really comprehensive health care services at our Old Town clinic. It's recognized as one of the best health care of the homeless clinics in the country.

We do specialty mental health services there as well. We have many more units of housing. We had no housing on the Eastside when I came here in 1992. Now, on any given night, we're housing about 2,700 people at our kids and family housing on the Eastside.

And we have different types of housing -- for people in recovery, people with special needs, physical health care problems.

We're pretty unique in the country.

One of the things we did back then that we continue to do now is hire a lot of people with lived experience. They're a major part of our workforce. We have psychiatrists and internal medicine doctors and people who have administration skills. Probably about half of our people now are people who we identify as being in recovery. Many of them have lived experience with homelessness, involvement in the criminal justice system. They have made awe-inspiring transformations in their life.

We added employment services and, in the last 12 months, we've placed well over 600 people in jobs, working with about 350 employers.

So you know we didn't serve 8,000 with health services when I got here. We do now. We're probably housing 2,000 more a year.

Currently we have $87 million worth of real estate investments. We didn't do real estate development back then.

How did you shape your vision for the organization as the city changed?

It's a really a vision that's evolved with leaders and staff over time. I think we already had a vision of a comprehensive approach to the little person. It seemed pretty naive back in 1992 -- this is what it's going to look like in 2016 or 2017. I think people would have thought you were a little out of touch.

When I came here, I didn't come for a vision of ending homelessness. It was more of a spiritual move. I was working on neighborhood crime issues at City Hall. So when I was hired here as the director of the Hooper Detoxification Center, I knew very little about it and I had a lot to learn. I didn't have the time to think about the grand vision at that point. It was a pretty rough place.

But as it developed, it was really built on really listening to people we were serving and the people who worked for us.

We got into health care services because Old Town Clinic, which was run by Ecumencial Ministries of Oregon -- they were losing so much money, they were going to shut it down. But they came to us and asked us to keep it open. Our board chair said we can't let it shut down so we're getting into the health care business. And so that's what we did. It wasn't part of a strategic plan.

It almost put us out of business, but we finally figured it out.

Are there any exciting ideas out there the city is working on now or you like as an effective way to deal with the city's level of homelessness?

Multnomah County and the city significantly upgraded their collaboration in addressing the problem with the creation of the Joint Office of Homeless Services. I think their collaboration on this issue has produced results in the short term.

They've upgraded the ability for workers to get out and clean out campsites and stuff.

I think the housing bond is going to produce some results. Shelters ultimately don't help homelessness. It's housing that is going to solve the problem.

I am also appreciative of the people of Portland. I know it's not easy when you're finding needles in your neighborhood or your parks. But I think as a nonprofit provider, I feel very fortunate that we have a population here that wants things to get better for homeless people, wants solutions.

As you near the end of your tenure at Central City Concern, are there any people or moments you are reflecting on?

When I first came, I was asked by the executive director then how long I would be staying and I said 18 months. I was going to do a turnaround thing.

But a few incidents really got me. I think the final capping incident was a guy there who was a heroin addict and he had both of his legs amputated below his knees from abscesses that went out of control from shooting up in his lower legs. He was in there almost every day at the sobering station.

I came to work one day and the paramedics were there. He had hypothermia, and they were trying to get an IV needle into his jugular vein. But, the paramedic said these guys become so sensitive to pain and needles that their bodies can sense it.

I went over and, literally, I felt pulled to the ground and I just whispered in his ear and I said, "God loves you, but if we can't get you off the streets and we can't get you clean you're going to die in a few weeks."

He kind of looked at me and a tear rolled out of his eye.

Then I left. But the staff got him into a hospital into the suburbs, because quite frankly, no one would take him here. I think they made up an identity for him. He then got out of the hospital and the staff got him into a Transition Projects homeless shelter.

A few weeks later, I get a call. It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. A staff member says, "Ed, you really need to come down." And I say, "Oh geez, what happened?"

So I walk in and I see this guy sitting in a wheelchair in the back. He looked like he was 15 years younger. He stayed sober and just wanted to thank me.

It was not just what happened with him, but the kind of angel trickery the staff were able to pull. I was very impressed. I can see them now excited to tell me they got him into the hospital.

Then I was locked in. It turned into 25 years.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com

503-294-5923

@MollyHarbarger