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#2,358 - Spending on homelessness wildly spikes to over half a BILLION in Portland metro area
News For Reasonable People
English - June 26, 2024 10:00 - 21 minutes - 19.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 7 ratingsInvesting Business Entrepreneurship san francisco trending news protests defund the police antifa blm seattle conservative republican journalism Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Local governments and nonprofits in the Portland area spent more than half a billion dollars fighting homelessness last year, a 70% increase from the year before, according to a new report.
"The number itself was shocking," John Tapogna, a senior policy advisor at ECOnorthwest, which crunched the numbers, told KOIN 6 News.
Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties, which make up Oregon's Portland metro area, spent $531 million on homelessness interventions in fiscal year 2023, according to ECOnorthwest's analysis.
The huge increase was driven in part by nearly $90 million in federal pandemic relief funds, as well as a regional homeless tax approved by voters in 2020, the report shows.