Welcome to the Mid-Columbia Houseless Collaborative

Across Oregon and Washington, communities are facing rising rates of housing insecurity and houselessness. For too many families, staying in housing has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Housing supply has lagged while demand has grown. Investors have begun buying up more and more single-family homes. Rents have sky-rocketed. As a result, the idea of being just one illness or car repair away from eviction has become all too familiar to our friends, families, and neighbors.

The issue of houselessness has also become more complex than it used to be. Increasing numbers of unhoused individuals are chronically houseless, meaning they have experienced houselessness for at least a year, or multiple times throughout their lives. Additionally, a growing portion of the houseless population has untreated mental illnesses or substance use disorders that make rehousing more difficult without intensive case management and other supports.

Like with any crisis, houselessness hits some communities harder than others. People of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other historically underserved communities are overrepresented in the houseless population. Families experiencing houselessness are typically headed by women, many of whom are young parents with children, and some of whom are fleeing domestic or sexual violence. People who have been incarcerated are more likely to experience houselessness and struggle to access housing stabilization resources than the general public due to their criminal records.

The Mid-Columbia region is unfortunately not immune from these trends. Preventing and ending houselessness in our area requires urgent, thoughtful work—and most importantly, partnership. Although this is a daunting task, our communities are up to the challenge. To date, there have been multiple, localized efforts to collaborate on work to prevent and end houselessness. However, this work has yet to be thoroughly coordinated across the five-county Mid-Columbia region, resulting in fragmentation across communities. That’s why the Mid-Columbia Houseless Collaborative was founded.

In early 2022, Mid-Columbia Community Action Council (MCCAC) hired a consulting team, Sarah Kellems and Heidi Venture, to develop and convene a Collaborative of organizations and local governments from Hood River, Wasco, Sherman, Skamania, and Klickitat Counties working to address houselessness. With supportive leadership from Washington Gorge Action Programs (WAGAP) and generous funding from Providence, the consultants and MCCAC guided members of the Collaborative through a strategic planning process over the next nine months.

The strategic plan included here represents the work members of the Mid-Columbia Houseless Collaborative will do between 20227-2027 to develop a more strongly connected regional houselessness response system that provides the highest level of service to our most vulnerable community members. It explains how we will leverage and coordinate existing efforts throughout the region, and how we’ll partner to enhance sorely needed services that will help our communities prevent and respond to houselessness more effectively.

This plan also serves as the official work plan for MCCAC’s Office of Housing Stabilization. This office was established in July, 2022 with funding from the Oregon Legislature following the passage of House Bill 4123, which allocated resources to a handful of communities across Oregon, including in Hood River, Wasco, and Sherman Counties, to strengthen their regional houselessness response systems.

As we begin the work of implementing this plan, we need support from the entire, five-county Mid-Columbia community. Growing houselessness is not simply an individual problem with individual solutions. This issue affects the families and children who are unhoused. It impacts our neighborhoods and divides our communities. And it costs our local and statewide economies significant resources that could be saved if we implemented more proactive interventions. At the end of the day, preventing and ending houselessness is our collective responsibility. It requires a unified, systems-level commitment from key community leaders, local governments, housing developers, tribal leaders, social service agencies, landlords, organizations that provide culturally responsive services to underserved populations, private sector partners, and people who have been or are houseless.

Members of the Mid-Columbia Houseless Collaborative have already demonstrated they are ready to make that commitment by writing this plan, and we look forward to the next phase of our efforts together to implement it. As we work to address one of the most complex challenges of our time, we invite you to join us so we can make the Mid-Columbia region the most vibrant community possible for everyone who calls this place home.

Onward,

Kelli Horvath

Director of the Office of Housing Stabilization
Mid-Columbia Community Action Council