Mention homelessness and a certain picture comes to mind. Tents lining sidewalks. Makeshift encampments in vacant lots. Rows of parked RVs slowly succumbing to the elements. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, downtown Portland and pockets throughout the city resembled this stereotypical snapshot. But homelessness, like many crises, isn’t as straightforward as this portrait may suggest.
From the ongoing shortage of affordable housing to the complexities of mental health and addiction, Portland’s homelessness crisis is a multifaceted dilemma that defies simple solutions.
But at Portland State University (PSU), researchers, faculty and students have been making inroads by studying solutions and providing community resources that put the issues driving homelessness into context and uncover ways to reduce harm and improve outcomes for people experiencing it.
Rooted in research
In large part, PSU’s contributions have been made in collaboration with the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC), which was founded in 2018 as one of two research centers dedicated to addressing the largest issues facing our communities. HRAC was founded by eight cross-disciplinary faculty members at PSU: Marisa Zapata from the College of Urban and Public Affairs, Jacen Greene from the School of Business, Todd Ferry and Sergio Palleroni from the School of Architecture, Greg Townley and Maude Hines from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Lisa Hawash from the School of Social Work and Paula Carder from the School of Public Health.
“We wanted to provide a place where research could inform best practices for responding to homelessness, to understand the causes and solutions to homelessness with a specific focus on the local context,” says Townley, professor of community psychology. “Also with particularly close attention to communities of color and other communities that have been traditionally often left out of the conversation about best practices for solving homelessness.”
Since its inception, HRAC has studied the impact of shelter policies and proposals aimed to address homelessness, produced a DIY guide to building tiny home villages and published a comic book focused on changing the narrative about homelessness, to name just a few of their projects. The center also helped design Portland Street Response — which assists people experiencing mental health and behavioral health crises — and evaluate the effectiveness of the program.
Homelessness is not a monolith.
“We've been able to influence and improve statewide policy and evaluate state programs to ensure they are more successful, more effective, and ultimately more cost effective as well for taxpayers, because we can prove what has a real impact on addressing or preventing homelessness,” says Greene, assistant director of HRAC.
Although their work has explored homelessness at the state level, HRAC’s research first started close to home with a study examining food and housing insecurity within the PSU population.
“That was a really instrumental way to show we're both concerned about homelessness on our own campus and concerned in the broader community,” Townley says. “We have to make sure that we are taking care of those who work here and who study here first.”
That report found that about 16% of students experienced homelessness in 2019 and 44.6% experienced housing insecurity (those numbers increased to 19.1% and 54.7% respectively in 2023), which led to a PSU Foundation-led fundraising campaign to support basic needs and provide hardship funds to those in need at PSU.
“The Foundation raised a record amount of money to support emergency and hardship funds for students in that moment,” Townley adds. “It’s a great example of research impacting some pretty direct actions.”
Changing the narrative
One of the ongoing challenges to solving homelessness is the narrative surrounding those impacted. Although not as tangible as providing housing, changing perceptions of homelessness are key to ensuring community buy-in and support for solutions.
The stereotype about homelessness is that everyone experiencing homelessness lives on the street and is navigating serious mental illness or are drug affected. Although public perception may indicate 75% of folks who are houseless fit the stereotype, Townley says the number is much closer to 25%.
“Homelessness is not a monolith. The more visible individuals experiencing homelessness may be those who are drug affected or are experiencing psychosis in the context of having schizophrenia, but those are the minority of people experiencing homelessness,” he says. “Most are living doubled up. They're living in cars or places that are not visible. They don't need the same high-level services that other people need.”
HRAC has worked to shift public perception around houselessness, most notably by publishing Changing the Narrative, a comic book designed to reframe discussions around homelessness and housing instability through illustrated stories about PSU students that provide insight into the diverse experiences of those experiencing homelessness and poverty.
“It was so popular when it came out. It sold out the first print run,” Greene says. “When you use a narrative like comics to help people understand homelessness and housing insecurity, it humanizes it, and then also brings in what's really happening. It’s much more effective in changing people's minds, changing how they vote and what policies or nonprofits they support than any number of reports. I think there's a lot of potential there for a really profound impact in public knowledge around homelessness.”
Photo Credit: Zach Putnum, "Kenton Womens Village"
Innovating housing
Support for affordable emergency housing is one outcome HRAC is working toward — starting with the ongoing Center for Public Interest Design (CPID; based in the School of Architecture) partnership that's led to multiple new housing options in the Portland Metro area.
CPID Director Palleroni is no stranger to designing innovative approaches to emergency housing. He’s built housing for Yaqui women in Mexico, helped reconstruct New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and designed housing for the Hispanic community that empowered rather than displaced families in Austin.
Palleroni joined PSU in 2008 — just after the housing crash — and began exploring ADU programming as a solution to a lack of affordable housing. He founded the Center for Public Interest Design, which would later become integral to housing research conducted as part of HRAC. Ultimately, Palleroni and his colleagues found that ADU’s weren’t affordable for most families but the concept served as inspiration for one of CPID’s most successful endeavors.
Informed by villages in Portland like Right 2 Dream Too and Dignity Village built by people experiencing homelessness, CPID began studying the feasibility of a tiny home village operated by a nonprofit that provided agency and empowered residents. In 2016, Ferry and CPID collaborated with the Village Coalition — a local advocacy group for people experiencing homelessness — as well as the city of Portland, Mercy Corps, Catholic Charities and local architecture firms to design what became the Kenton Women’s Village. The project served as the groundwork for what would become a first response to homelessness in the Portland Metro area.
I was really interested in how people could more directly impact the spaces that they inhabit or use every day, so that they feel like their own, and they feel like they reflect them.
Molly Esteve, M.Arch ’20, helped design the Kenton Women’s Village as a PSU student.
“I had been working with women for years, mostly survivors of domestic violence who were in some sort of transitional housing,” Esteve says. “What we were able to access for a lot of folks felt like it didn’t reflect them or their community. I was really interested in how people could more directly impact the spaces that they inhabit or use every day, so that they feel like their own, and they feel like they reflect them, which is directly related to what I do now in my work.”
Designing the Kenton Women’s Village represented a departure from traditional architecture work. Not only were people with lived experience interviewed and asked to provide input on the design, but the community surrounding the village’s location was involved in the conceptual process in the hopes of broader buy-in that could bolster the village’s success and sustainability.
Esteve now works as a Placemaking Project Manager in the Office of Violence Prevention at the city of Portland and integrates this way of thinking into her role creating safer spaces in the community.
“I understand now that you can set the intention for how the community participates and interacts with that space — not just the folks who live there,” she says. “For me, that's become a much bigger idea and impact.”
Since the Kenton Women’s Village opened in 2017, CPID has provided advising, design or coordination for more than a dozen planned or built villages.
This fall, a new village broke ground in Forest Grove, and continues to provide opportunities for PSU students to gain hands-on experience and address the issue of homelessness in their community.
Isabella Thomas is a current PSU student in the Master of Architecture program. In 2024, her CPID cohort was able to collaborate on the design process for the Forest Grove village from the beginning.
“Keeping humanity central in all parts of the design within this village was really present and really important,” Thomas says.
Students interviewed residents of the Veterans Village in Clackamas County — also designed by PSU architecture students and students in CPID — which opened in 2018, to get feedback and learn from the residents’ experiences.
“It gave us a little bit more insight that what we’re doing is actually really important and impactful, and can actually make a difference in improving someone's step into a more stable living condition,” she says. “Learning from them what things are working, what things don't work, and then actually using those to make really intentional, informed design choices to better serve different populations was really inspiring.”
Ferry, who left PSU last year, built relationships throughout the region to advance the development of tiny home villages for alternative shelters and became a national expert on best practices.
A way forward
Going into 2025, there's a sense of cautious optimism that PSU can continue to work to address homelessness, and make an impact on the issue locally, and nationwide.
“I hope people see that homelessness research of this type, this action-oriented research, is not just something that's nice to have,” Greene says. “I think it's really essential in terms of how we address homelessness, [and] how we ensure that governments are responsible and effective in the way they address homelessness.”
Measuring the success of PSU’s efforts comes with its own challenges, particularly as the number of people experiencing homelessness in Oregon continues to increase.
“I tell people, I feel like a climate scientist, because we know what causes homelessness. We know how to solve it. The only thing we need is the political will and funding to do so,” he adds.
On a local level, Townley is hopeful the city’s new form of government will provide the support necessary to implement solutions to homelessness — and lean on PSU for information and advice.
“There are some folks that have demonstrated themselves to be really focused on addressing homelessness in a compassionate way that's informed by research,” he says.
For Palleroni, a focus on the next steps forward is key — starting with funding affordable housing.
“The challenge now with the state's budget is how do we get the housing that will become the next step. Because you can't just have these tiny villages. We need to provide the next step in the process to have the biggest impact,” Palleroni says.
What those next steps look like is yet to be determined. But it’s clear Portland State is on track to envision a transformative path forward — backed by research and informed by lived experience — that can continue to improve the lives and futures for some of our most vulnerable communities.
“There is a lot of power in PSU’s capacity to be the catalyst point for new ideas in the city and for students to really lead that effort in envisioning what's next for Portland,” Esteve says. “I really have a lot of faith that our PSU students are the ones to show us the way forward, or to show us a way forward that we don’t yet understand.”