After more than seven years of working at the city’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development, and being the lead staffer for Portland and Multnomah County’s 10-year plan to end homelessness, Heather Lyons is moving on.
Lyons is taking a position with the Corporation of Supportive Housing. She will be based in Portland but working throughout the country, in communities such as Detroit and Los Angeles, to build strategies for supportive housing and re-entry for individuals coming out of prison.
During her tenure with the bureau, she has gone from being a one-woman show to managing six staffers who have helped implement the 10-year plan with community partners. She was responsible for overseeing the administering and application of more than $18 million in funding to help end homelessness in Portland.
Although former City Commissioner Erik Sten has been the face of Portland’s 10-year plan, Lyons was the linchpin who helped garner national and international recognition for implementing and carrying out the first stages of the city’s initiatives.
Street Roots recently sat down with Lyons to ask her about the city’s successes and to get the lowdown on where things are headed.
S.R.: You have been the lead staffer in charge of Portland’s 10-year plan to end homelessness since its inception. The city’s plan has been hailed locally and nationally for its results in the region. What are some of the highlights that have made the plan successful to this point?
Heather Lyons: In my mind, Portland had a convergence of four areas. One, we had the political will on the front end; two, we have some really strong nonprofit agencies in the community that were already doing the work; three, there’s just a great interest in Portland on the issue of homelessness and we were able to take that to a new level. And then there are couple of very creative bureaucrats that helped us move things forward.
Also, one of the things that has helped us here that a lot of other communities don’t have, is a positive relationships with advocates. We may not always agree, but we’ve always been able to communicate and give each other space to do the work. It has allowed us to move faster and quicker than some communities on the issue. That, and we had some money.
S.R.: Portland was seen early on as a racehorse for the 10-year plan. Did the federal government recognize this and help?
H.L.: The federal government gave us $9 million in the very beginning because they recognized that we had the political will and the agencies to pull it off. Some of that funding is continuing, but some of that funding is going away in typical federal fashion. The money that is continuing is the housing money, but service money is not so strong.
S.R.: What do you mean by service money?
H.L.: Nationally, the hardest resources to find are service resources like clinical resources for mental health, drug and alcohol. Not having an adequate health care system makes it very difficult. We’ve had to fill the gap for these services locally with one-time-only money from the budget, and it’s a constant struggle.
S.R.: In the context of the 10-year plan, what are we doing right and what could be changed to make the housing-first model work more smoothly?
H.L.: In terms of the 10-year plan and housing first, we’ve tried to incorporate different styles of housing first. As your readers know, there’s no one type of person that’s experiencing homelessness, there’s no one style of housing first. It makes much more sense to offer individuals housing instead of shelter, but that doesn’t mean we abandoned other philosophies that have worked. We look at how we can add attributes to the existing system and how we can reduce barriers in other services.
What we can do better is to continue to work on our relationships across the different jurisdictions. It’s crucial to keep this issue alive.
S.R.: Do we still have the political will moving forward?
H.L.: I think both of the candidates running for Commissioner Sten’s seat have talked about the importance of prioritizing the 10-year plan and keeping things moving forward. What remains to be seen is how much of a priority either one of those candidates will place among numerous priorities. So we’ll see.
We’ve put a big dent in homelessness in Portland, but we haven’t solved anything. Honestly, what I think should happen now that we’ve seen some success (with the 10-year plan) is to step back and regroup and move forward from there.
S.R.: You worked with the former City Commissioner Erik Sten for your entire time at the BHCD. What was that like, and how will the city be different without him on the council?
H.L.:. Erik was a great champion and very supportive of the work we do. He had the rare combination of having his head and his heart in the right place. He knew how to get the resources we needed to do the right thing. Erik was very supportive. He trusted the bureau to get things done on homelessness. It was great.
S.R.: As you know, Street Roots has been a vocal opponent of criminalization efforts such as the sit-lie and camping ordinances along with special programs geared toward forcing people into treatment and housing. Are we missing the boat? Are these efforts showing a success in helping people end their homelessness?
H.L.: Sit-lie and the camping ordinance, I don’t know if they’re helping end people’s homelessness. There’s a link to homelessness, but it’s more linked to livability issues. A lot of people impacted by these laws, specifically sit-lie, are sometimes housed. They may just not look like people that the business or other downtown community interests would like to see on the streets.
I do think that one of the things that is an ongoing struggle is that there are folks that without a push might not have made it into housing. But I think in any instance there has to be safeguards. Civil rights have to be at the forefront of these policies and checks have to be put in place. Part of the check that needs to be put in place is that if services are tied to whatever stick, that you are engaging folks who have been there. If you get that icky feeling on the inside when you are working on something like this, we probably shouldn’t be doing it.
