A response to Curtis Wright’s “Our ’10-Year Plan to End Homelessness’ Is Old Enough to Vote”
I read Curtis Wright’s recent commentary with both recognition and frustration. He is right about the most important thing he says, which is that we should know people by name. My frustration is with how he got there, and where he stopped.
Mr. Wright tells us plainly how he found his answer. He searched the internet. He says so himself, twice, and he means it as an invitation, so I don’t raise it to be unkind. But researching homelessness and being in relationship with people living it are different activities, and the difference shows up in what he proposes.
He lists our machinery: the joint City-County HOPE Advisory Board, the Coordinated Homeless Response Office, a coordinated-entry system, a flexible housing fund. He is right that we have all of it. What he seems not to know is that coordinated entry is already a by-name process, by design. It is how people get prioritized for housing, one name at a time. And it isn’t even our only one. Outreach workers and provider staff carry current, working knowledge of who is outside, updated by the day rather than once a year.
He also asks us to look at Built for Zero. We looked at Built for Zero during the HOAC years. He has described, accurately, machinery we already own, and recommended a method we have already considered. An afternoon with any of the providers would have told him so, and would have raised the harder question underneath it: why hasn’t having the list been enough?
That answer is no mystery to anyone doing this work. We know who is outside. There is nowhere to put them.
We are not short on coordination. We are short on permanent supportive housing, which means a door that locks, a lease with someone’s name on it, and services that follow the person instead of waiting at the end of an ever-growing queue. It is the intervention with the strongest evidence behind it and the one we have never built at anything close to the scale of what we need. You can run the most elegant by-name list in America and it will tell you only, faster and in higher resolution, that there are 569 people and not enough units.
Meanwhile, our appetite for building the next system has not diminished. Another board, another office, another plan with a better acronym. Each is announced as a breakthrough. Each adds a
layer. And each one buys us another year of not doing the expensive, unglamorous, politically difficult thing, which is putting up buildings and staffing them. The HOPE Advisory Board has now spent years re-litigating and re-articulating work the Homeless Opportunities Action Council (HOAC) had already completed.
Something else in the commentary stopped me, and it isn’t a small thing. Our unhoused neighbors appear there as a number to publish monthly, a population to work through, a group to begin with because they are “the most winnable.” Veterans, described as winnable. I understand the strategic logic behind that word and I still can’t get past it. A community that has trained itself to talk about its neighbors as a metric to be moved has already lost something no amount of operational efficiency will give back.
Mr. Wright asks for a monthly number. I want to ask for something harder.
In 2019 I ended up working alongside people living in extreme poverty, and I ended up there by accident, when a group of people swept out of a camp clearing came to the congregational church and asked for shelter. Over the three years that followed, my congregation pressed the county to make managed camping a legal and safe reality here.
That work has taken a lot of forms since. Only one thing has ever made a durable difference, and it is relationship. Not a name on a list but a person.
I met Andrew through Safe Camp. I know how generational poverty and a lifetime of trauma made the perfect storm that landed him outside. I know the names of his children and how proud he is that every one of them is thriving. I know he loves woodworking and wants his own construction business someday. I know his coffee order, too. Today, Drew is sober, sheltered, and has gone back to work.
None of that came from a program, though programs helped. It came from years of showing up. I have watched people get clean that way, find work that means something to them, repair estrangements they thought were permanent, and heal in ways no line-item will ever capture. It is slow. It is not abstract.
It also costs something, which is the part we would rather not say out loud. Eighteen months ago I told a friend living outside that I would do what I could to support her. I did not imagine that promise would end in an adoption, and in commitments that will last the rest of my life. But that is what doing enough, for long enough, turned out to mean here. I am not offering it as a model. Most people are not called to that, and no one should be shamed for not doing it. I raise it only because it is the actual scale of what this work asks, and no dashboard is ever going to generate that.
Mr. Wright closes with three asks of the Board of Commissioners and the City Council. I am not going to make any.
After seven years I no longer believe the people currently in charge have the capacity or the intention to do better. I don’t mean the outreach workers, the caseworkers, or the shelter staff, who are doing extraordinary work on scraps. I mean the decision-makers, who have had nineteen years, a sum of public money so poorly tracked that Mr. Wright couldn’t get a full accounting of it when he asked, and a count that has climbed almost every year they have been at it.
Nineteen years of genuine intention would have produced units. Instead it has produced “affordable” housing that isn’t affordable to anyone we are talking about, and an endless, expensive cycle of displacing people who have nowhere legal to exist. What we have to show for it is a shelf of plans and a fresh study whenever public pressure rises. A pattern that consistent stops being a series of accidents and becomes a preference. Process costs less than housing, announces faster, and photographs better.
So this is not a new ask. It is a narrowing of the old one and, honestly, a lowering of my expectations.
Get out of the way. Move the money to the providers, directly and predictably, and let them do the work they already know how to do. Stop standing up new bodies to coordinate or supervise or replicate what already exists, because every layer built on top of the work pulls hours and dollars out of it. Put public capacity where only public capacity can go, which is land, zoning, capital, and the long-term operating subsidy that permanent supportive housing requires and that no nonprofit can conjure on its own.
Fund the people already doing this. Build the housing. If that is beyond the current configuration of desks, then the question in front of Corvallis and Benton County isn’t which plan to adopt next. It’s who we keep putting in charge of the last one.
The rest of us don’t get to sit this out either.
We have become badly unlinked from one another. Somewhere along the way we decided, quietly and without ever voting on it, that we are not our brother’s keeper, that this is what we pay taxes and hire caseworkers for. We are willing to fund people we are not willing to know.
We are not all called to the same thing. We are all called to each other. Until we are willing to risk that, to see every human as worthy of our affection and our inconvenience, no system, however efficient, is going to save us.
Rev. Jennifer Butler has worked alongside people living in extreme poverty in Benton County since 2019. She is the senior minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Corvallis, the founder of SafePlace, and a Unity Shelter board member.
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