by Jacob Espinoza

The What's Happening Salem podcast is back, and for the first episode I sat down with Gretchen Bennett, the city's community services director and homeless liaison. I went in planning to ask about the new agreement with the state that lets city crews work on Oregon Department of Transportation land. We got to that. But we also talked about something else that caught my attention.

Salem has spent six years building an emergency shelter network, and it's working. But now the system is jammed at the next step.

Bennett has worked for the city for more than 13 years. She took on homelessness specifically in March 2020, right as COVID hit. 

"When I started in 2020, we did not have the three hotels that we have now. We did not have the micro shelter villages that we have now. We did not have a Navigation Center. United Way was at 50% of the capacity they are now,” she said.

Micro shelter villages are the small lockable cabins. Church at the Park’s Villages of Hope are a great example. The Navigation Center is a low-barrier shelter, meaning you don't have to be sober to get in and you can bring your belongings and your pets. 

The three hotels are former motels the state bought and converted through a program called Project Turnkey, which put $74.7 million into turning distressed motels into shelter space across Oregon. 

She also credits the two city teams doing the day-to-day work: the Clean Salem crew that handles trash and stores people's property, and the Salem Police Department's homeless services team that builds relationships and handles enforcing camping bans. These teams matter because they help build rapport and trust.

Bennett told me that when these teams know people on a first name basis, they can better understand their struggles. That makes it easier for people to trust them, removing barriers needed to provide assistance. 

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Emergency shelter is supposed to be a stop, not a destination. You come in, you sleep, you stabilize, you move to treatment or to housing. Bennett says the moving on part is where Salem is stuck.

"Our emergency shelters are getting people stabilized, which is so important as a step to a treatment or a housing, but then we can't find the next," she said.

So the beds stay full with people who are ready for the next step and have nowhere to take it. Which means the next person outside can't get in.

I asked her if our shelters are at capacity, and she told me it’s a mixed bag.

There's usually room at the men's mission at Union Gospel Mission. Often not at Simonka Place, their women's shelter in Keizer. Safe Sleep United through United Way typically has a couple of spots, especially if someone can take an upper bunk. The Navigation Center, she said, generally runs at capacity with "wiggle room like onesie, twosies, threesies in any given week."

For scale on the wait, Salem Reporter obtained the draft ODOT agreement through a public records request in July and reported that Church at the Park's micro shelter pods for adults had a waitlist of more than 3,000 people for 112 beds. 

Bennett told me about a woman who called her about a week and a half before we talked. She was in her early 70s. Her cost of living had climbed past a fixed income, and she'd been outside three days when she picked up the phone.

The base Social Security payment is $994 a month.

"It's so hard to pay rent on that and all the other expenses," Bennett said.

This one ended well. The homeless services team figured out she had family in the Midwest ready to take her. She just couldn't get there before her next check arrived. So the city put her up at the Navigation Center until the money came in, then got her to the train.

But Bennett used it to make a broader point about who the system can't currently serve. If someone's income is $994 a month, the housing that works for them has to rent for about $300.

And it isn't only people on fixed incomes. DJ Vincent, who runs Church at the Park, told me for a documentary we made on homelessness in Salem that more than 40% of the people in their shelters are employed.

"They're underemployed and their pay is too low to do first and last and to make their rent payments," he said.

The people waiting aren't a category apart from the people working. They are often the same people.

Vincent has done outreach in Salem for a decade. His point is that a shelter queue isn't neutral. The longer someone is outside, the more work it takes to bring them back.

Catch a family right after an eviction, he said, and the skills are intact. "The skills they have are the normal skills you would expect of someone going to work and getting kids to school," he said.

Stay outside longer and the brain reprioritizes around getting through the night.

"The longer that you're in survival mode just looking for the next meal, how am I going to keep myself warm tonight, those skills become the most important," he said. "It's a few weeks and then it's a few months and then it's a few years."

That's the cost of a full system that nobody sees on a spreadsheet. Every week someone waits for a next step that doesn't exist, the next step gets harder and more expensive.

"Just finding that really, really affordable option for someone to go into" is the hard part, Bennett said.

Bennett said certain types of Oregon Health Plan coverage aren’t accepted by inpatient alcohol and drug providers here, which can push someone to outpatient care instead. Outpatient raises an obvious question: where does that person sleep at night? 

She also noted there's no legal way to compel an adult into treatment. It has to be a day they're ready.

Scale is the word Gretchen kept coming back to. Here's what scale actually means.

U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas told me Oregon is roughly 140,000 housing units short right now, and about 440,000 units short over the next 20 years.

That's the statewide hole Salem is trying to fill its corner of.

Bennett pointed to Salem Housing Authority's three permanent supportive housing buildings, Redwood, Yaquina and Sequoia, as exactly the right kind of thing. Permanent supportive housing means a subsidized apartment that comes with services attached, for people who need ongoing support to stay housed.

"All of those have been really helpful," she said, "but to scale, right? We could use quite a few more of those."

Same with Cottages United, the affordable housing project United Way built on land the city donated.

"We have a lot of the right things in place, but it's not to the scale of need," Bennett said.

The city's stated goal is something called Built for Zero, a commitment Salem made a while back. In plain terms, the aim isn't that no one ever loses housing. It's that when someone does, it's brief. Bennett's reasoning for why brief matters: "When people are chronically unsheltered, the trauma compounds, the barriers compound."

It's easier to argue about camps than about the thing underneath them, and I understand why. 

Camps are visible. People in crisis on a street corner or in a park are visible. 

What isn’t visible: 

None of that photographs well. 

We are also past the point where a mass supply of $300-a-month apartments would finish the job. A lot of the people struggling on the street now need more than a unit. They need support that actually sticks, and someone walking them through it. 

There is another group that is not often part of this conversation. The people who are one bad month away. Some are close to getting back inside. Some have never been homeless and are getting close. MIT’s Living Wage Calculator says you need about $26 an hour to make it on your own in Marion County. A single parent with two kids needs about $57.

Listening to Bennett, the pattern was hard to miss. Salem got good at the emergency. We built the front door and never built the hallway. Every conversation about clearing a camp runs into the same wall: the people being moved need somewhere to be moved to.

That is not a reason to stop clearing camps. It is a reason to be honest that clearing them is maintenance, not progress.