Today marks a major milestone of a significant data improvement project led by Multnomah County's Homeless Services Department (formerly Joint Office of Homeless Services).
Because of this effort — compiling the most comprehensive homelessness data in the County’s history and creating a new dashboard — the public and every partner in the work to address homelessness will now have a fuller understanding of our homelessness crisis, and our elected leaders will have better data to inform policy and budget decisions.
The dashboard shares, for the first time, monthly counts of the total number of people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County. It also provides monthly information on the work the County is doing to end homelessness, including showing the number of people receiving rent assistance that helps them leave homelessness for permanent housing. Previously, these progress reports were available only every three months.
Notably, the dashboard also provides the first-ever data on how many people enter and exit homelessness each month, and tracks whether they left homelessness for housing. Since housing is the only way to end homelessness, that data point is crucial in tracking progress. Using outflow data from January 2024 as a baseline, the number of people who left the County’s by-name list for housing each month has been higher than that baseline every month since except for one.
This comes from a data set the County has built over years called the “by-name list” of people experiencing homelessness, which is the result of years of work to align with national best practices and improve how homelessness data is collected, tracked, reported and analyzed. Working with national experts, including Community Solutions and their Built for Zero initiative, the County can now track people experiencing homelessness through our support systems more completely and accurately.
“Better data leads to more informed decisions, and we have many difficult decisions ahead in our continuing work to tackle our homelessness crisis,” said Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson. “This accurate and timely data is a major milestone that provides increased transparency and accountability while helping frontline workers, decision-makers, and the whole community make progress that we can more easily track and therefore achieve. The data also makes clear that our work is more important and necessary than ever.”
Count increased over past year because of housing shortage, evictions, expanded services, better data collection
Multnomah County has successfully intervened in the lives of increasingly more people experiencing homelessness in our community year over year. Every year, the County houses thousands of people experiencing homelessness and prevents homelessness in the first place for thousands more.
According to new data from January 2025, more than 7,500 people were either newly placed or were being sustained in housing via housing programs — people who are no longer homeless due to our efforts. That same month, County rent assistance for those on the edge of homelessness helped over 5,700 people avoid eviction and homelessness. And more than 3,600 people stayed in our expanded 24/7 shelter system to help them stay safe and begin the process of stabilizing.
At the same time, the first release of this new, more accurate data shows the County’s by-name list included 14,361 people experiencing homelessness as of January 2025, which is an increase over the numbers reported in our most accurate previous data, from January 2024.
Although the total number of people is higher, only 48% of people included in the January 2024 list remained in the most recent list. Importantly, 52% of the people whom the County understood to be homeless in January 2024 — just under 6,000 people — are no longer on the most current list.
Both of those data points — which were not possible to share previously, without this work — make clear that conditions including high housing costs and low incomes continue to push people to the margins and into homelessness.
Increase is a sign that data quality has improved
The reported increase is a sign that our data is more accurate — meaning the data reflects people who’ve been experiencing homelessness all along, but had not previously been counted.
Through consistent outreach and better data practices, including working to collect more data from additional outreach and shelter programs, the Homeless Services Department is identifying more people in real-time who are experiencing homelessness.
“It might seem counterintuitive, but increased services can actually lead to a higher count of people experiencing homelessness,” said Anna Plumb, deputy director of the Homeless Services Department. “That’s because we are actually reaching more people than ever before — and making sure they are captured in our data.”
“This is an important milestone and provides a path for actionable, data-informed decisions aimed at making homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring,” said Meghan Arsenault, Senior Strategy Lead for Community Solutions. “As the by-name data becomes more comprehensive, it will likely result in higher actively homeless numbers. This increase doesn’t mean that more people suddenly became homeless, but rather the system is better able to account for everyone who is experiencing homelessness. Having this clearer picture facilitates coordination and stronger matching of housing and service resources to meet people’s needs.”
Source: Multnomah County