A Home for Everyone served as a coordinating body for the local government agencies engaged in homeless services in Multnomah County from 2014 - April 2022.


Check out a new initiative from Multnomah County and the Joint Office of Homeless Services:

Logo of house, heart and key - Move in Multnomah

Move in Multnomah is a new program, developed by the Joint Office, that offers additional incentives to landlords willing to make housing units available to people coming out of homelessness.


This site (“A Home for Everyone”) is preserved in archival form, but is no longer updated. For the most recent updates, go to the Joint Office of Homeless Services site. All of the content that was previously on the “A Home for Everyone” website is still here - check the top menus for dropdowns to data, news and other information. All links are preserved.

We are working on migrating content to the JOHS website, but all of the pages, menus and links are still here on the AHFE site (the site just looks different, but the content is all still there).

Presentation on the history and successes of A Home for Everyone.

The story of A Home for Everyone

For years, we’ve been deep in a homelessness crisis fueled by stagnant wages for low-income neighbors, increasing housing costs, decades of federal disinvestment, ongoing racial disparities, and the pain and trauma left by cycles of poverty. A Home for Everyone came together as a community effort to try to address this crisis.

“We all want to take care of our neighbors, including those who have temporarily fallen on hard times, but also those with long-term illnesses or disabilities who might struggle to care for themselves. And everyone benefits when fewer of our neighbors are living their private lives in public spaces.”

Working through A Home for Everyone, Portland and Multnomah County created the Joint Office of Homeless Services in July 2016 to combine their spending on services for people experiencing homelessness.

View the Joint Office of Homeless Services website


Archived content from A Home for Everyone:

A Home for Everyone header

In 2014, our community took a stand against a housing crisis that is still pushing thousands of neighbors onto our streets.

The City of Portland, Multnomah County, Home Forward and the City of Gresham joined with others to invest in A Home for Everyone, our region’s first truly comprehensive strategy for addressing homelessness.

A Home for Everyone unites elected officials and people who’ve experienced homelessness with leaders from the faith, philanthropy, business and nonprofit communities around a shared vision and carefully chosen strategies in housing, employment, health, and emergency services.

Our vision is ambitious. Alongside our successful pledge to double shelter capacity, our partners promised to put more people back into housing while keeping more neighbors from losing their homes in the first place. We’ve also made it clear that our work must confront and reduce racial disparities.

Together, we’re making progress -- and helping more people than ever.

Since we started A Home for Everyone in 2014, housing placements out of homelessness have nearly doubled, climbing nearly 3,000 people a year (more than 5,900).

Our community has set new records for shelter access, with more than 8,700 people accessing shelter last year. And for the first time, more people are sleeping in shelter each night than outside -- including twice as many people in families -- in our most recent Point in Time Count.

Hundreds more people a year are kept from losing their homes (more than 6,300). And we’ve made a difference by prioritizing services for communities of color, women, veterans and more.

But we have more work to do. The gap between rents and incomes in our community remains staggering, particularly for people on the edge. The economy is still pushing people into homelessness faster than we can help them.

Racial disparities persist. And more people report being chronically homeless or struggling with a disability, particularly among those who sleep outside.

Homelessness can be solved. Before the 1980s, it didn’t exist in the way we see today. And it can be prevented.

If we keep pushing -- at all levels of government, and across every sector of the community -- someday we’ll fulfill our vision of a place where homelessness, if it happens at all, is rare, brief and one-time.


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