Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports on the discrimination embedded in a dark blue county’s homeless policies.
The homelessness crisis in Multnomah County, Oregon, is among the worst in the country. Home to deep-blue Portland, where the deaths of homeless people quadrupled between 2019 and 2023, according to data from the county health department, Multnomah has a per-capita homeless rate of 1.3 percent, and some shelters are closing due to budget problems.
That means that there is more demand than ever for the county’s public housing resources. Multnomah allocates those resources using a points-based system, which refers those with the requisite number of points to public housing. The county considers factors such as how long a person has been homeless, whether he or she is survivor of domestic violence, and, if applicable, the age of his or her children.
It then weighs those factors against some less conventional criteria: whether the person is a minority, a non-native English speaker, or “LGBTQIA2S+.”
Rolled out in October 2024, the Multnomah Services and Screening Tool awards up to 5 points to non-white, non-straight applicants who speak English as a second language—more than the 4 points it would award a domestic violence survivor with a six-year-old child who has been homeless for over a year.
The rubric, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a public records request, is “designed to prioritize … BIPOC households, LGBTQIA2S+, [and] people with disabilities,” according to a Frequently Asked Questions pamphlet. …
… Policies like Multnomah’s are subject to strict scrutiny, a legal standard that bars the government from considering race unless doing so is the only way to achieve a compelling state interest. The county’s programs clearly fail that test, said Dan Morenoff, the director of the American Civil Rights Project, adding that most of them sound “very unconstitutional.”
“There is no ‘compelling’ reason to choose who sleeps on the streets by race,” Morenoff said. “No governmental housing program ‘prioritizing’—and necessarily de-prioritizing—homeless families by color, as Multnomah County’s screening system openly does, should be expected to survive judicial scrutiny.”
