Meet the New Boss / Don't Get Fooled Again

Dear Friends,

I didn’t intend to send another mass email this quickly. But this week's Oregonian interview with the County's new Homeless Services director Nathaniel Vergow made it clear why we aren’t getting anywhere on homelessness, and this is too important to wait.

As I read the interview, I was looking for any of these three things: A diagnosis, a vision, or a plan. I found none of them.

The missing diagnosis

Mr. Vergow repeated the County's usual explanation for homelessness: high rents, not enough money.

Addiction? Substance use disorder? Serious mental illness? Not one of those words appeared in his answers.

That omission is glaring and defining.

If the person running the County’s Homeless Services Department doesn't name addiction and mental illness as central to the County’s unsheltered homelessness crisis, then there's no reason to listen to anything else.

And if he doesn't acknowledge that Multnomah County has spent among the highest amounts per capita on homeless services in the country, even as unsheltered homelessness has tripled in less than five years, we will continue to waste billions of dollars while the problem worsens.

The missing vision

Throughout the interview, Mr. Vergow reached for buzzwords like collaboration, efficiency, prevention, relationships, funding, and better data for elected officials. While those words matter, they do not add up to a vision.

A vision tells people where we're going. Mine is a county government that restores public trust by measuring whether people's lives have been changed for the better.

Goals are the waypoints on the way to that vision: ending unsheltered homelessness not by sweeping people out of sight, but by getting them into real stability; treatment and recovery housing that works, instead of streets that serve as waiting rooms for tragedy.

And measurables should tell us whether we're getting there: Are fewer people actually living outside? Are fewer people returning to the streets, emergency departments and jails? Are more people not just being placed into housing, but staying there for the long term?

Asked what success would look like over the next two years, I would have wanted to hear about these things.

Instead, the new director just regurgitated the generic talking points we’ve been hearing from the County for the last decade.

The missing plan

Meanwhile, the crisis isn't waiting. More than a thousand shelter beds are set to close in the coming months, and each bed represents a person that will have nowhere to go to stay safe, stay warm, and get the services they need to transition to housing. Where does Mr. Vergow expect these people to go?

My Homeless Services Turnaround Plan starts from a different premise entirely: homelessness isn't one problem. It operates at the intersection of housing, addiction, mental illness, physical illness, disability, public safety, trauma, and economic instability.

Multnomah County already has responsibility for virtually all of these systems. There is no excuse for them not working together.

My plan calls for reorganizing County government around the people it serves, rather than continuing to fund hundreds of disconnected departments, programs and nonprofits.

It measures what matters: not whether someone got "placed" in housing, but whether they're still stably housed - six months, twelve months, two years - later.

It ties spending to results, building the budget around what it actually costs to get someone from the streets to shelter to housing, and paying organizations that deliver.

And it accounts for every dollar, with the numbers that matter posted publicly and brought to commissioners every quarter.

Those aren't management techniques. They're what it takes for an organization to solve a problem this complex.

The missing leadership

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about why the Chair's hiring decisions are among the most important responsibilities of the office. This hire unfortunately highlights that failure.

Multnomah County's new Homeless Services director spent the past decade in senior leadership within Los Angeles's homeless services system, a system now being dismantled after a federal lawsuit and independent review exposed profound failures in oversight, accountability, and financial management.

If a similar review were conducted here, it would undoubtedly find many of the same failures: fragmented governance, weak accountability, inadequate contract oversight, and no clear way of tracking hundreds of millions of dollars, or showing whether any of the County’s investments are actually improving people's lives.

Multnomah County needs to chart a different course, starting with a new brand of leadership, with a clear plan designed around people, and defined by results, accountability, and transparency.

No one person can turn around an organization as complex as Multnomah County. But the right team can. I've already assembled a transition team of experienced leaders with proven records in homelessness, behavioral health, addiction treatment, public safety, technology, and organizational management.

Leadership isn't about having all the answers. It's about bringing together the people who do, and having the judgment to know who those people are.

As the new Homeless Services Director validated in his interview, Multnomah doesn’t have any of these things right now. It can and will when I am Chair.

Together, we can build a County government worthy of the people it exists to serve.

To learn more, please visit sharonforchair.com.