PORTLAND, Ore. — It’s a bold goal in a place with a major housing crisis: Get as many as 2,000 unsheltered Oregonians into homes this winter by spending $65 million in state money to buy up to 20 underused hotels.
Oregon’s Project Turnkey, modeled after a similar program in California, was born out of the need to provide shelter and practice social distancing during the pandemic. The economic effects of the pandemic and wildfires have compounded a preexisting homelessness and affordable housing crisis on the West Coast.
Temporarily housing homeless people in hotels is nothing new. Housing and social service agencies often use hotel vouchers during extremely cold weather or natural disasters. Many communities have used federal CARES Act money to provide temporary housing in hotels.
But by systematically purchasing hotels outright, Oregon and California have taken it a step further. When the pandemic ends, the two states will continue using hotels as emergency homeless shelters, transitional housing or permanent affordable housing. In Oregon, nonprofit housing and social services providers will own and run the hotels-turned-housing.
“We knew there was a need for immediate shelter,” said Megan Loeb, who leads Project Turnkey for the Oregon Community Foundation, the nonprofit administering the program for the state. “We knew that it was a cost-effective way to stand up shelter, but we also knew that it could be a secondary benefit as long-term housing, once the pandemic was over.”
Project Turnkey? More like Project Turkey.
The next step towards communism
I thought global warming was going to eradicate the need for emergency homeless shelters in the north in the winter…
If the states have that much money, where did they get the money?
I’M
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