Elected leaders for Eugene and Lane County on Tuesday night threw their support behind an ambitious, expensive roadmap aimed at lowering to zero the number of homeless people camping along local streets and in parks.

The series of 10 recommendations by Technical Assistance Collaborative, a Boston-based consultant, includes construction of a 75-bed low-barrier homeless shelter and hundreds of additional units of supportive housing.

It also calls for the expansion or improvement of existing programs spread across numerous public agencies and nonprofit providers to better help homeless people secure housing and keep them in it.

The consultant calculated there would be no or very few unsheltered homeless living on the streets within three years if all the recommendations — which it characterized as a "package deal" — were fully implemented. There would still be homeless individuals who would stay in emergency indoor shelters.

"We think if these recommendations are adopted and implemented, that you can make a meaningful long-term impact on the homeless population here in Lane County," Doug Tetrault, an associate with the consulting firm, told a joint meeting of the Eugene City Council and Lane County Board of Commissioners.

To get there, however, would require a massive infusion of public money, likely running into the tens of millions of dollars, that elected leaders would have to identify to pay for both construction and annual operating costs.

Councilor Claire Syrett acknowledged the initiative will be expensive but said taxpayers already are bearing the cost of the homelessness crisis through intervention by law enforcement and other city services as well as the negative impacts the problem has had on neighborhoods.

"There’s a cost on either side and I think we need to recognize that," she said. "We have an opportunity to make an investment that will reduce tangible human suffering in our community and improve the quality of life for, I think, thousands of people in Lane County."

With a unanimous vote, the Eugene City Council directed City Manager Jon Ruiz to work with Lane County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky to develop a plan by May 1 to implement the consultant's recommendations. It also called for the formation of a steering committee to provide feedback during the plan's development.

County commissioners will take formal action on next steps at a future meeting but appeared supportive of the council's directives.

"What you’ve outlined is an outstanding program," Commissioner Pat Farr told the consultant's representatives at the meeting. "You've brought us a lot of threads to bind together."

The recommendations are:

• Expand outreach efforts to physically locate and connect homeless people to services, particularly those who have been on the streets the longest.

• Create a diversion program that provides immediate help to people who have just became homeless or are on the verge of becoming homeless by helping them reconnect with family or friends or by offering a small amount of financial assistance.

• Improve the rapid re-housing program, which gets homeless families and individuals into permanent housing with temporary financial assistance and supportive services.

• Almost double the number of units of permanent supportive housing that gets homeless people off the streets and into low-cost apartments, where they receive counseling, job training and drug and alcohol treatment. The consultant recommends adding 350 new units; there are 400 existing units for single adults, mostly reserved for chronically homeless military veterans. Dozens of new units are under development.

• Enact ways to free up costly supportive housing by moving along individuals who still need low-cost housing but no longer require the associated services.

• Offer more support to rental tenants as about one in four people who moved into permanent housing returned to homelessness within two years, the consultant said.

• Improve the gateway, formally called a coordinated entry system, used to evaluate and find assistance for homeless people to get them back into housing.

• Better coordinate management of landlords who provide low-cost housing.

• Provide more training to ensure employees are following best practices.

• Construct and operate a 75-bed low-barrier shelter for single adults that operates year-round. The consultant recommended the shelter be centrally located and built on either a publicly owned vacant lot or parcel that can be redeveloped to save money.

The consultant noted that the organizations that provide existing services or programs aimed at reducing homelessness either lack coordination with other groups, are understaffed or are underfunded.

The estimated construction cost of the shelter is between $712,000 and $2.4 million, not including any cost for land. The consultant recommended hiring 21 full-time-equivalent employees to operate the shelter at an annual estimated cost of $720,000 a year. No other operating costs, including maintenance and utilities, were included.

The estimated costs, which includes hiring 20 full-time-equivalent employees, for the other recommendations is more than $1.5 million a year in 2021.

Not included is the construction and operating costs of hundreds more units of supportive housing, the most expensive piece of the package. As context, Homes for Good, the county's public housing authority, is developing a 50-unit complex near Autzen Stadium. That project's total estimated development cost, including construction, is about $12 million. The estimated cost to operate and maintain the building and provide services to tenants is estimated at roughly $1 million a year.

Representatives of two social service providers and a homeless advocate praised the report, although they noted there's still much work to do.

Terry McDonald, executive director of St. Vincent de Paul, said he thought the consultant's estimated cost of operating a low-barrier shelter was too low. Low barrier means homeless people who are drunk or high or have criminal records wouldn't be turned away as long as they don't pose a safety risk. No such shelter exists in Lane County.

"By and large, the conclusions are correct," he said. "If you don't have program-enriched (supportive) housing, which we don't have (enough of), you can't get people out of the system."

He said elected leaders would need to discuss how to fund the recommendations as "the money is not going t pop up out of the air."

McDonald also said almost all the recommendations will take a long time to implement and "what are we going to do with an issue that's staring us in the face six months from now?"

St. Vincent de Paul is operating a new "dawn to dawn" site, essentially a tent city for more than 200 homeless people, on Highway 99 that is jointly funded by the city and county. The funding to operate the site will expire in early spring.

Dan Bryant, senior minister at First Christian Church and vice chairman of the county Poverty and Homelessness Board, said the report would help provide the "impetus and the political cover for our elected officials to begin putting those public resources into the system."

The needed next steps are for the elected officials to identify the money to pay for the recommendations — and figure out the order in which to implement them, he said.

Bryant said he thought the consultant would urge construction of a 150-bed shelter.

"That was really surprising," he said of its recommendation for a building with half that capacity. "Now it's a matter of figuring out how to do all those other things and improving the rest of the system."

Susan Ban, executive director of ShelterCare, another social service provider, characterized the recommendations, as well as the commitment to solutions by city and county leaders, as encouraging.

"The challenge will be the integration of all of those innovations," she said. "You can't do one without the other to really have an impact that's sustainable."

The consultant’s work will cost up to $84,000, with the expense shared by the city and county.

In an earlier report, the consultant found the unsheltered population in Lane County is "very visible" and its numbers are significantly higher than in similarly sized communities.



There are slightly more than 1,000 single adults living without any shelter, according to the latest homeless count. About 130 people are becoming newly homeless in Lane County each month, it found.

Homelessness is exacerbated in Lane County because it has a comparatively poorer, older and more disabled populace in an area with an inadequate stock of rental housing, either market-rate or publicly subsidized, the consultant said.