At the request of the Homeless Strategies and Solutions Initiative (HSSI), ECOnorthwest’s John Tapogna and Melissa Rowe recently published “Postcard from the Future: What Can Portland Learn from the Implementation of Los Angeles’s Measure H?” The report reviews the implementation of Los Angeles County’s homeless service initiative, which passed in 2017 and became a model for a similar measure in Portland. After four years and nearly $1.8 billion of service delivery, polls show LA residents perceive little improvement in the homeless crisis. It is far too soon to declare Measure H a policy success or failure. A full assessment will require the perspectives of public health experts, social scientists, people with lived experience, service providers, and others. But Portland, now navigating the tradeoffs between different uses of its own service resources, would be well-served to understand Los Angeles’s emerging lessons in hopes of charting a better path forward.
Click to view the press coverage from KOIN, Portland Tribune, and OPB.