In 2007, the City of Corvallis and Benton County set out to write a “10-year plan to end homelessness.” The plan launched in 2009 with a hopeful title borrowed from Dorothy herself: There’s No Place Like Home. Somewhere between the drawing board and the ribbon-cutting, one word quietly changed. The goal was no longer to end homelessness. It was to address it.
Ending homelessness is one of the hardest things a community can take on, and the people who wrote that plan were reaching for something genuinely good. Softening “end” to “address” is honesty about how steep the climb really is.
And we have addressed it, for going on twenty years now. A ten-year plan, old enough to vote, and we’re still hard at it.
Here’s what all that work has produced. I share these numbers not to point fingers, but because we can’t improve what we don’t measure.
When the plan launched, the count on page 9 listed the number of homeless people in Benton County at 154. When the Coordinated Homeless Response Office reported to the Board of Commissioners this past May, the number was 569 — 347 of them with no shelter at all. A fair-minded reader will note those two counts weren’t taken the same way, and that’s true: our methods have grown more thorough over the years, adding street counts and survey incentives that the 2009 tally didn’t include. But that cuts against the hopeful reading — it means 2009 was likely an undercount. And you don’t need to settle the methodology to see the direction. The County’s own consistent year-by-year count runs from 127 in 2015 to 569 in 2026 — more than a fourfold jump. However you count it, the need has grown faster than our response to it.
And what has it cost?
I went looking for the answer. In late 2024, I asked the County a straightforward question: how much have we spent trying to address homelessness since the plan began? The Health Department gave me an honest answer — no one has a comprehensive figure.
What the County could assemble covered only six years, from the beginning of 2019 through the end of 2024, a sliver of the plan’s life, and it had already totaled nearly $11 million in public dollars. The County’s homeless-response office reports bringing in roughly $7.9 million more in recent grants on top of that. None of it counts the City of Corvallis’ full spending from the decade before 2019, or the federal, state, and nonprofit dollars that flow through here every year. Nearly two decades in, we’ve invested a sum no one can total — with real generosity and real intent — and the number we hoped to shrink has grown instead.
Here’s the question I keep coming back to, and I ask it of myself as much as anyone: maybe it’s time we stopped asking whether we’re spending enough and started asking whether we’re spending it on the right things.
So, I did what any of us can do. I searched the internet.
It turns out that’s exactly how Rockford, Illinois, got started. Back in 2015, a city staffer there searched online for a better way and found one: a method called Built for Zero. Two years later, Rockford became the first community in America to reach “functional zero” for both veteran and chronic homelessness.
Let me be careful here, because I’d never want to tell you something false. “Functional zero” does not mean no one in town will ever be homeless again. It means homelessness becomes rare and brief — in any given month, fewer people are homeless than the community routinely houses, and those who do fall into it are housed quickly. It’s earned one population at a time, not all at once. It’s no magic wand. But it is real, it is measurable, and more than 100 communities are now pursuing it.
How did the ones who succeeded pull it off? Not by outspending everyone. They did four unglamorous things. They built a by-name list — a live, current roster of every homeless person, instead of a once-a-year snapshot that’s stale before it’s printed. They put every agency at one table every week, with someone accountable for each name. They housed people first, then added services — rather than making housing the prize at the end of a waiting list. And they started with veterans, the most winnable group, because the tools and federal dollars already exist for them.
The proof it works: veteran homelessness nationwide has fallen more than 55% since 2009, even as overall homelessness hit record highs.
Here’s the part that gives me real hope. We already own most of the machinery. We have the joint City-County HOPE Advisory Board. We have the Coordinated Homeless Response Office. We have a coordinated-entry system and a flexible housing fund. We don’t need to build a system from scratch. We need to give the one we have a target, a live list, and a scoreboard.
Which brings me to the ask.
I’d ask our Board of Commissioners and our City Council to please do three things. Adopt the by-name-list method — enroll in Built for Zero or copy it outright. Start with veterans, and set a real, dated goal. And every single month, publish one number: how many of our neighbors are actively homeless right now. Not to second-guess the good people already doing this work — they work hard, and I’m grateful for it — but to add the one measure that tells us whether it’s working. Dollars spent and programs launched tell us how much we’re doing. That one monthly number tells us whether we’re really helping.
We wrote a ten-year plan, and it’s now old enough to vote. Before it’s old enough to rent a car, let’s give it the three things it has never had: a finish line, a live count, and the courage to publish the score whether we’re ahead or behind.
I searched the internet and found communities — real places, not so different from ours — that actually did this. The information is right there, free, waiting for us. The only question left is whether we’ll use it, together, before another ten years go by.
Curtis Wright is a public policy observer and writer living in Corvallis. Locally, he has served on or led numerous City of Corvallis and Benton County commissions and committees and task forces. He has also served on or led many area nonprofit boards of directors. Wright’s commentary may or may not reflect the views of The Corvallis Advocate, or its management, staff, supporters and advertisers.
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