Residents in Oregon’s coastal towns are willing to help people in their communities who have fallen on hard times. But they expect those seeking services to meet them halfway – and many are weary of enabling an increasingly visible homeless population that’s perceived as transient and criminal, according to social service providers Street Roots interviewed in Astoria, Seaside, Tillamook, Lincoln City and Coos Bay.
“A lot of people want to help homeless people who just had unfortunate circumstances that landed them at our door,” said Raven Brown, development director at Helping Hands, which operates shelter programs in three coastal counties. “They don’t want to help the traveling, transient people that are destructive to property and leave debris behind and cause problems in our community.”
Teaching potential donors that not all unsheltered people fall into that latter category can be a challenge, but on the coast, it’s necessary for nonprofits trying to secure funding.
Given local attitudes and limited area resources, it should be no surprise that most well-funded charities that assist homeless people on the coast require that they remain clean and sober and work toward self-sufficiency.
While this reality can leave some with mental health and substance abuse issues outdoors, the success these programs have with those who are eligible begs notice.
Remarkably, despite shoestring budgets and skeleton crews, these programs see the vast majority of graduates maintain their own housing for years after they graduate.
Helping Hands Reentry Outreach Centers (“reentry” is used to describe a person’s reentry to society from homelessness rather than from prison) is known as the primary provider of shelter in the coast’s northern counties.
It operates four emergency shelters anyone can access for up to four days, as long as they aren’t a sex offender and are not intoxicated. This is to protect children who may be onsite.
After four days, however, if an individual cannot commit to the Helping Hands’ strict sobriety and programming requirements, and pass a drug and alcohol test, they must leave.
Sixty percent of the people who access the emergency shelters agree to stay and work the program. Fifteen percent secure another roof over their head before the four-day time limit is up.
Of those who stay, 90 percent successfully graduate, explained Brown, “and three years later, 80 percent of women and 75 percent of men are still independently sustaining housing.”
Helping Hands has been able to achieve this high rate of success at a cost of just $13 to $15 per person per day.
Its founder, Alan Evans, said this is possible because Helping Hands survives on foundational grants and donations so it can be somewhat unconventional in how it administers assistance.
“Federal dollars have too many strings attached,” said Evans. “We’ve been looking at it from the bottom up rather than the top down from the very beginning, and we will not change that. We are very good at what we do, and we will not limit that service for a dollar.”
Before he founded Helping Hands, which began as Thugz off Drugz in 2004, Evans was homeless and addicted to methamphetamine.
“I lived on the streets from 13 until 38,” he said from the swivel chair behind his desk at Helping Hands’ Seaside office. “I am a survivor. I’m a sexual abuse survivor. I’m a physical abuse survivor as a child. I’ve been in and out of the system, in and out of the penitentiary. I’m the panhandler – I’m the aggressive guy on the corner.”
He said social workers he crossed paths with during those years never saw that he was broken on the inside. He finally got off the streets when a police officer who arrested him decided to take a chance on him and found a home were he could stay while he got on his feet. He got a job, saved his money and opened an eight-bed shelter in Seaside. Now his program has 11 facilities and 190 beds across Clatsop, Lincoln, Yamhill and Tillamook counties.
He’s based his programming on pinpointing and fixing each individual’s unique challenges, rather than trying to squeeze everyone into a one-size-fits-all box. The core of the program is addressing a person’s underlying trauma.
The average stay in one of Helping Hands’ re-entry programs is 90 days, but those with tougher cases stay up to a year.
Participants must pass random drug tests, attend classes they’ve been assigned, and they must complete 10 volunteer hours per week within the shelter where they live or, as many choose to do, at other various nonprofits in the area. Brown said the volunteer-hour requirement is meant to help individuals reconnect with their community.
In Tillamook, an old naval command center has served as Helping Hands emergency shelter and reentry program for the county since 2015.
In April, Street Roots visited the large, two-story shelter that sits between the base of the Cascade Range and Tillamook’s Air Museum. It was the site manager’s 57th birthday the day we visited.
“They’re probably making me a cake that I can’t eat because I’m diabetic,” said Gary Carlson.
He said Helping Hands came to him when his drinking habit landed him in Astoria’s hospital six years ago. He said he was drinking himself to death, but the program gave him a reason to live.
“I haven’t touched a drop of liquor in six years. Basically it gives me purpose, helping others so they don’t fall in the same trap I did,” he said.
Across its programming and facilities, Helping Hands has only three full-time and six part-time staff. It gets by with the help of 200 active volunteers who teach classes, cook meals and counsel, and house managers such as Carlson, who are all graduates of the program themselves and work for free room and board plus a $500 monthly stipend.
Outside the Tillamook shelter, vegetables for resident meals grow in newly constructed garden beds, and children run around a playground, complete with jungle gyms, slides and swings. Several reentry program residents congregated on the back porch.
“In Newport, they need a Helping Hands for girls,” said a woman, extinguishing her cigarette before she rushed inside to keep the cake from burning.
Those in reentry learn how to find and apply for jobs, which in Seaside and many other coastal towns is fairly easy because the demand for employees outweighs the supply. It helps that Evans’ Seaside office building is shared with an employment agency.
After demonstrating the nonprofit’s database that updates daily bed counts and tracks client demographics, Brown scrolled down a list of the hundreds of classes that participants were offered last year – everything from resume writing and healthy cooking to parenting and coping skills, as well as specialized job training programs tailored to area industries.
“I have heard from our farmers that they’ve had really good experiences hiring people from Helping Hands,” said Sarah Beaubien, an executive at Tillamook County Creamery Association. “We have a ton of respect for that organization.” She hopes to develop a training program at Helping Hands that will allow participants to easily segway from Helping Hands to jobs at the creamery.
Once participants are employed, they pay $200 a month in rent, which helps cover overhead costs. With 190 beds and some flexibility for adding more when it has to, Evans said Helping Hands never turns people away from its emergency shelters.
“Each of our facilities has overflow that we hope we never touch, but at times we have to,” he said.
In recent years, however, Brown said, “We have been concerned at the capacity we’ve been operating.”
Last year, Helping Hands saw an 18 percent increase in seniors and a 30 percent increase in families accessing its services.
“We can see an increase,” said Evans. “I think more people are in need of the service because more people are falling out of the system. … 19 percent of the people that walk in our door have a full-time job. Think about that.”
Brown said she worries a new cannery opening up in Clatsop County, along with the new Walmart in Warrenton, will worsen the situation. “We’re just looking at all these people that they’re going to try to employ, and we’re wondering where they’re going to house them. We feel like we’re staring down the end of a barrel at the moment.”
To ease the burden, Helping Hands has purchased the five story Uniontown Boarding House building in Astoria that will serve as its 12th facility and the only year-round shelter appropriate for families in town.
“Astoria has lost almost all of its manufacturing. That’s one contributor to why there’s a lot of homelessness,” said Elaine Bruce, executive director of Clatsop Community Action in Astoria. Her agency is working with Helping Hands to fund the building’s remodel. When it opens this fall, it will provide 65 to 70 beds.
While about half of the families Bruce works with in Clatsop County are locals, the other half are not. “It’s amazing, we have people that just show up here and they’ll say, ‘we don’t have any job but we wanted to live by the ocean,’” Bruce said. “And they’ll pull up with a car full of kids.”
While Helping Hands operates an eight-bed men’s program in Lincoln County, it’s primarily for inmates exiting out of state prisons.
Along that stretch of coastline, there are no year-round shelters for single adults or unaccompanied youths experiencing homeless, but a family-centered program is achieving an equally-high rate of success with its formerly homeless graduates.
In Newport, Samaritan House offers families a 10-month program. It too operates efficiently, with a yearly budget of $150,000. This is in part because the Presbyterian Church deeded the nonprofit the apartment building where it houses the 11 families in its program.
Its director, Lola Jones, said old promotional material from the shelter indicated it typically had about 50 families on its waitlist before she took the helm in 2012 at the age of 26.
Today, there are 250 families waiting to get in.
“Most are coming from their cars, tents, abandoned buildings – it’s a reality that’s difficult to sit with every night because I see the drawer full of applications and I know what’s happening,” said Jones. “There’s a huge temptation to go quicker than the process will allow, but everyone who lives here deserves every second of this program.”
While Helping Hands will make decisions about failed drug tests on an individual basis, because Samaritan House works with Oregon Department of Human Services, Jones adheres to a strict zero-tolerance policy.
“In this post-financial crisis reality, the reason you are homeless has a lot to do with how you were brought up,” said Jones. “We see a lot of the multi-generational poverty element, but also see a lot of people who are ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with life in poverty because they weren’t brought up in poverty.”
Residents are required to come up with a $100 refundable deposit for their apartments, put 60 percent of their take-home pay into a savings account that Jones oversees, and for the last six months they enter into a legal lease agreement, which builds rental history.
“We’re trying to mimic what the real world feels like, but on an accessible level,” said Jones. But for the first 30 days, all her families have to do is come up with a case plan. “This de-escalates their crisis brain and gets them thinking in a long-term sense,” she said.
More than 85 percent of her clients are single parent households – mostly moms.
“I had a mom here, she was working in middle management at Taco Bell, barely making enough to pay for child care. One of her paychecks she actually owed more to her childcare provider than was on her check,” Jones said. But that woman was able to get her certified nursing certificate while she was staying at Samaritan House, and now she supports her family with a better paying job in Corvallis.
“There has always been a fundamental inequity of income to housing cost in Lincoln County – there always has been,” said Jones.
But when you combine that with Lincoln County’s economic decline in fishing and timber, along with its above average rate of drug and alcohol abuse, Jones said, “you get this powder keg.”
Of Samaritan House families that graduate, 80 percent are still in housing one year later.
About a half hour north of Newport, Family Promise of Lincoln City is able to shelter about 14 people at a time. It doesn’t have an overnight shelter, so it partners with 12 local churches where families in its program sleep at night. Each morning, a van picks them up and brings them to the nonprofit’s facility, which has a kitchen, showers, living room, play room and offices.
Family Promise is a national model based on networking, building relationships and trauma-informed care.
Like Helping Hands and Samaritan House, sobriety and active participation is required, although it serves as more of an emergency shelter than long-term program. When there’s availability, director Elizabeth Reyes said she sends families south to Samaritan House. About 80 percent of the families she shelters are able to maintain housing after they exit, she said.
Reyes said the majority of people who live in Lincoln City year-round are one to two paychecks away from needing her services.
“All it takes is a car repair,” she said.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.