HUD's reply in support of its emergency motion to stay the order vacating the FY2026 Continuum of Care NOFO is due at 5:00 p.m. today in the First Circuit, which said it intends to rule promptly; the ten appellees filed their response August 21. The Oregonian reported that Portland and Multnomah County will decommission more than 1,000 adult shelter beds between them by the end of the year, about a third of the beds that existed in January. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Mother Jones each published profiles of Joe Lonsdale's Cicero Institute on August 22; the Times reported 21 states have considered Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years and 16 have passed them. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie's office disagreed fully or partially with all but one finding of the June civil grand jury report on oversight of the nearly $500 million the city spends annually on nonprofit homelessness contracts.
The Oregonian reported that Portland and Multnomah County will decommission more than 1,000 adult shelter beds between them by the end of the year — about a third of the beds that existed in January — after a five-year expansion that created more than 2,300 new beds. The article attributes the closures to county budget cuts and to Mayor Keith Wilson's shift toward the 1,500 overnight-only beds he campaigned on in 2024.
The Oregonian reported in June that more than 1,100 beds at 12 Portland-area shelters were slated to close by the end of 2026.
The city is converting the Multnomah Safe Rest Village on Southwest Multnomah Boulevard into a treatment-focused shelter: it will still house people leaving homelessness, but residents will be expected to engage in treatment and counseling during their stay. KGW reported that nearby residents gave mixed reactions and questioned whether the change will resolve the livability problems they have reported around the site.
The village opened in June 2022 as the city's first Safe Rest Village and has been operated by Urban Alchemy since July 2025.
City Councilor Steve Novick said Portland's affordable housing sector risks falling apart unless government agencies change strategy, arguing that residents with untreated behavioral health issues and little support are a growing liability for the city's affordable housing supply.
KGW reported the same week that the city is converting the Multnomah Safe Rest Village into a shelter whose residents are expected to engage in treatment and counseling.
Shelterforce reported that the Portland City Council's April 2026 approval of an initial $17.5 million investment in social housing — part of a $56 million package drawn from previously unbudgeted housing funds — is letting the city pilot a revolving loan fund to acquire property for permanently affordable housing. The piece reports that the discovery of the unbudgeted funds raised questions about administration of the Portland Housing Bureau's roughly $244 million 2025–2026 budget.
The study ordered by an April 2025 council resolution is expected to release its final report by the end of August 2026.
AFSCME Local 88, Multnomah County's largest employee union with about 4,000 represented county employees, endorsed Julia Brim-Edwards for county chair; Willamette Week called it the latest and perhaps most significant union endorsement in the race. The article notes opponent Shannon Singleton has so far raised significantly less than both of her opponents.
The Oregon Nurses Association endorsed Brim-Edwards on August 18, and all six of the county's city mayors endorsed her in April.
KGW · 2026-08-21 · on a Straight Talk interview on Metro's housing and homelessness role
In a Straight Talk interview, Metro Council President Juan Carlos Gonzalez said the regional government must move beyond its original growth-management mandate, with housing and workforce development rising to the fore. KGW's promotion of the interview said the Portland area is headed for a housing and homelessness funding cliff that could cause thousands of people to lose their housing.
Metro's supportive housing services tax, which funds homeless services in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties, expires in 2030 unless renewed.
Mayor Daniel Lurie's office issued its formal response Monday to the June civil grand jury report on oversight of the nearly $500 million San Francisco spends annually on nonprofit homelessness contracts, disagreeing fully or partially with all but one of the jury's findings. The mayor rejected recommendations to publish critical-incident data on a public dashboard and to route contract renewals through the Homelessness Oversight Commission, with his office writing that renewals are administrative matters under the city charter; it said it will implement some recommendations, including evaluating nonprofit housing operators on resident safety outcomes.
The grand jury report cited 2024 data showing 26% of San Francisco overdose deaths occurred at permanent supportive housing sites, an increase from prior years.
LAist reported that Mayor Karen Bass, the first Los Angeles mayor to appoint herself to the LAHSA Commission, missed 13 of 21 commission meetings between mid-August 2025 and now, and has been absent for 25 of 47 meetings since joining in late 2023. LAHSA's bylaws state that commissioners absent four times within a year may be subject to removal; Bass's office said she remained informed of agency business through her other appointees.
The LAHSA Commission oversees roughly $500 million in annual homelessness funding for the joint city-county authority.
The Los Angeles Times examined the time-limited rental subsidy program Councilmember Nithya Raman has championed in the mayor's race: a city consultant set a goal of 600 households moved into leases by July 1, but housing officials reported only three households had moved in by that date, rising to 54 by August 13. Raman has called for the vouchers, at a city-estimated cost of $30,000, as an alternative to Mayor Karen Bass's Inside Safe program, which costs about $82,000 per person per year according to city reports. LAHSA reported last month that the city's unsheltered population rose 7.9% after two consecutive years of decreases.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson split the Housing and Homelessness Committee in two this month and removed Raman as chair effective September 1.
San Francisco police chief Derrick Lew announced Friday that two employees of the Bayshore Navigation Center, run by Five Keys, were arrested Thursday evening for allegedly helping Norris Reed III hide from police after he shot and wounded an officer on May 31. Police said one employee gave Reed clothing to conceal his identity and the other gave false statements to officers; Five Keys CEO Steve Good gave a differing account, saying staff stopped Reed at the door, began evacuating the facility — which held more than 200 people — and alerted police, leading to Reed's arrest.
Reed allegedly shot Officer Brittney Taylor around 10:45 p.m. on May 31 after fleeing a robbery; a shelter employee alerted police at about 12:17 a.m. and he was arrested.
San Francisco Chronicle · 2026-08-23 · on Berkeley's Eighth-and-Harrison encampment
The Chronicle reported that the Harrison Street encampment in West Berkeley became the subject of a widely shared online debate this week after a local television reporter posted a video of the camp near UC Berkeley student housing, and recounted the litigation that has kept the camp in place. The paper cited a 2026 point-in-time count finding roughly 880 homeless people in Berkeley, about 11% of Alameda County's total.
Under U.S. District Judge Edward Chen's August 13 order, advocates must propose relocation sites for 23 camp residents by August 27, which the city then approves or rejects.
The New Times followed a man through arraignment at Phoenix Municipal Court on a class 1 misdemeanor charge of obstructing a public thoroughfare, cited during a July 30 police sweep near 11th Avenue and Jackson Street in the former "Zone" encampment area — his second citation in under a month. The paper reported there are about 900 shelter beds in the neighborhood, leaving a couple hundred people on the street when they fill each night; the man declined a plea deal, was appointed a public defender, and has a follow-up hearing in early September.
A Maricopa County judge declared the downtown Phoenix "Zone" encampment an illegal public nuisance in 2023 and ordered the city to clear it.
Maricopa County and the City of Phoenix launched an Eviction Prevention Pilot Program that will use $800,000 to pay qualified residents up to $3,200 covering up to two months of rental arrears, with all program funding going toward rent. Eligibility is limited to four ZIP codes with elevated eviction rates — 85008, 85040, 85041 and 85042 — and requires documented financial hardship and the property owner's agreement that payment fully satisfies the arrears.
Maricopa County's program page says the pilot's application window closed August 21 at 4 p.m.
A west Houston pilot placing homeless people in hotel rooms while West Houston Assistance Ministries provides employment coaching and other services received an additional $180,000 from council offices, Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones, and the Energy Corridor Management District as it entered its second year, after serving nearly 100 people on $30,000 in its first year. The city's 222-bed residential services center in East Downtown has operated at capacity since opening this summer, against an estimated 1,200 unsheltered people in Harris County.
Houston's 2026 point-in-time count tallied 3,321 homeless people in the area, per Houston Public Media's June reporting.
U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit via CourtListener · 2026-08-21 · on the appellees' response to HUD's emergency stay motion in the CoC NOFO appeal · Update — first covered 2026-08-20
The ten appellees — including the National Alliance to End Homelessness, NLIHC, Boston, Santa Clara County, and Tucson — filed their response to HUD's emergency motion for a stay pending appeal on August 21 at 4:28 p.m., meeting the court's 5:00 p.m. deadline. HUD's reply is due by 5:00 p.m. today, August 24, and the court's August 17 order said it "intends to rule promptly on the matter"; no ruling appears on the docket as of its August 22 update.
The district court denied the same stay request on August 13, holding HUD had not presented "a new, previously-unrejected basis on which they will likely succeed on the merits."
The Times reported that Joe Lonsdale's Cicero Institute has driven Republican homelessness policy, with 21 states considering camping bans or other Cicero-backed laws in recent years and 16 passing them. Former Domestic Policy Council official Scott Centorino said at a closed-door June Cicero conference that he consulted the group in drafting President Trump's homelessness executive order; Lonsdale told the Times "our work has been one of the main influences" and put his Cicero spending at "well less" than $15 million a year. The paper reported HUD's blocked NOFO sought to move two-thirds of roughly $4 billion in annual homelessness aid to time-limited programs with work rules or treatment mandates, a change opponents warned could cost as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people their housing.
The Washington Post and Mother Jones each published their own profiles of Lonsdale and the Cicero Institute the same day, August 22.
Based on leaked audio recordings, Invisible People reported that sitting HUD and White House Domestic Policy Council officials described plans to roll back Housing First at the Cicero Institute's June 5, 2026 summit in Washington, held four days after HUD released the FY2026 Continuum of Care NOFO. HUD Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development Ronald Kurtz told attendees "homelessness is much less a housing problem than it is a human problem," and HUD's Caitlyn McKenney said 41% of adults in HUD-funded permanent supportive housing self-report substance use disorder.
McKenney is the HUD official whose declaration accompanied the department's August 13 emergency stay motion in the district court.
NAR's Pending Home Sales Index, which tracks signed contracts on existing homes, fell 2.3% from June and 2.2% from a year earlier, reaching its lowest level since January 2026, with declines in all four regions led by a 4.7% monthly drop in the West. NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said the year's highest mortgage rates "hit right in the middle of summer," pulling back signings; pending contracts stand 30% below their 2019 level.
NAR's July existing-home sales report, released the prior day, showed sales at a 4.06 million annual rate with a median price of $434,100.
Stateline reported that cities including Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, and Honolulu are deploying AI tools to flag incomplete housing-permit applications, with two new federal funding streams supporting the shift: the new federal housing law's Innovation Fund at $200 million annually and up to $3 million in HUD grants for automated permitting systems. Honolulu officials said AI pre-screening cut permit reviews from an average of 3.4 review cycles per application to 1.4 for single- and two-family residential projects, and applicants' average time in the process fell from 73 days to 32.5 days.
Denver's council approved a five-year AI plan-review contract in March for about $4.6 million, with a stated goal of raising first-round application acceptance from 37% to 80%.
2026-08-24 — HUD's reply in support of its emergency stay motion due 5:00 p.m., First Circuit No. 26-1923 (NAEH v. HUD); the court says it intends to rule promptly (source)
2026-08-27 — Deadline under Judge Edward Chen's order for advocates to propose, and Berkeley to approve or reject, relocation sites for 23 Eighth-and-Harrison camp residents (source)
2026-08-31 — House members return; vote expected on the Senate-amended CR funding the government through December 11 (source)
2026-08-31 — Portland's council-ordered social housing study final report expected by the end of August (source)
2026-09-08 — Comments due on HUD's proposed rescission of the 2024 floodplain and Federal Flood Risk Management Standard rules (source)
2026-09-14 — Comments due on HUD's CDBG-DR allocation formula notice (Docket No. FR-6337-N-02) (source)
2026-10-09 — Comments due on HUD's proposed amendments to the Fair Housing Act disparate-impact standard (source)
2026-10-23 — Comments due on HUD's 60-day information-collection notice for the Section 811 Capital Advance grant application (Supportive Housing for Persons With Disabilities) (source)
2026-12-11 — Federal funding expires under the Senate-passed CR, if enacted by the House (source)