The city-funded Neil Good Day Center in East Village closed Wednesday after the city declined to renew its funding in this year’s budget; the city had paid nearly $950,000 of the center’s $1.7 million annual operating cost. Operator Father Joe’s Villages moved the services two blocks to its Joan Kroc Center, opening Thursday at its own expense, with capacity for 160 people against the day center’s 200-plus a day and no belongings storage. The city said it funds about 2,600 sheltering options across nearly two dozen programs and is working with Caltrans, which owns the land, to return the property.
The Joan Kroc Center absorbing the services is slated for demolition, with residents relocated in early 2028, to make way for the Jacobs Family Campus announced September 28.
PBS NewsHour / Associated Press · on the pocket rescission, including $56 million in HUD housing counseling grants
The White House announced Friday that it is canceling nearly $1 billion in congressionally approved spending through a "pocket rescission," with the package including HUD housing counseling grants alongside HHS refugee services, a Department of Education migrant-student program and a Commerce minority business program. The White House's itemization put the HUD housing counseling line at $56 million and named UnidosUS, the National Urban League and Housing Action Illinois as grantees. The Government Accountability Office has said the pocket-rescission maneuver is illegal; Sen. Susan Collins called it "a usurpation of Congress's appropriations powers."
Congress has 45 days to review a rescission request, but the fiscal year ends September 30 and the House is out of session through the November election.
Steve Cook, executive director of Blanchet House, said its 75-bed women's shelter Bethanie's Room has turned away five to 10 women each night since the 200-bed NW Northrup Shelter a quarter-mile away closed last week, and is fielding calls from emergency rooms and first responders with nowhere else to send people. City data cited by KATU showed Northrup accounted for 24% to 31% of all city shelter stays each month between October 2025 and February 2026. Portland Solutions spokesperson Laura Rude said six other city overnight shelters have beds available nightly, that the city holds flex beds, and that it is prepared to expand hours and capacity under emergency weather declarations.
OPB reported the Northrup Shelter closed September 18 after one year of operation.
The Metanoia Project, one of two seasonal shelters in Cuyahoga County, said it cannot afford to open this winter for the first time in nearly 20 years and may shut down entirely by December 31; it sheltered up to 45 people a night from November through April last season at a cost of about $300,000. Executive Director Kai Saga said the ADAMHS Board's loss of $8.5 million in county funding for 2026 and 2027 cost the shelter $90,000 a year, that a $75,000 county grant that covered part of the gap last year may not recur, and that the organization applied for more than 60 grants this year and was mostly denied. County homeless services director LeVine Ross said traditional shelters have about 400 men's beds and a little over 200 women's beds available, while NEOCH's Chris Knestrick said the coalition counted about 170 people living outside in August.
Cuyahoga County officials have called for 8% cuts to departments and programs funded by the health and human services levy.
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson proposed a roughly $9.1 billion 2027-2028 budget with no new tax increases, relying on more than $90 million in General Fund spending reductions. The proposal allocates more than $500 million annually for affordable housing, renters and homelessness services, including $37 million for new shelter capacity toward 960 shelter beds by the end of 2027, and for the first time funds homelessness services directly from the JumpStart payroll tax. The city estimates the new beds could serve about 1,750 people a year.
The City Council's budget process includes department presentations beginning September 24 and a public hearing October 6.
New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno's administration told the City Council on Tuesday that almost $80 million in cuts are needed to help fill a $100 million deficit in next year's budget if the city does not raise taxes, including cutting 152 full-time city jobs. Among the proposed cuts is recouping $2.5 million by closing the city's only low-barrier city-run homelessness shelter.
The council will hold more budget hearings later this month ahead of a final vote in November.
The 200-bed Northrup Shelter in the Pearl District, run by the Salvation Army and open 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., closed Friday, one year after opening as part of Mayor Keith Wilson's plan to open 1,500 new overnight shelter beds by December 2025. Wilson announced the closure in April as a budget-balancing measure, calling it "our highest cost facility"; a city spokesperson said the shelter averaged 98 guests nightly in September. The Salvation Army said the shelter served more than 2,700 people in its year of operation, and the city's shelter availability website now lists 530 overnight shelter beds.
Northrup is the second overnight-only shelter to close this year; a Centennial neighborhood shelter closed in April.
Prevention Point Philadelphia, a low-barrier services hub in Kensington serving many people who are homeless, dispensed and collected 1.7 million syringes in fiscal year 2025-26 after Mayor Cherelle Parker's administration pulled nearly $1 million in city funding from the syringe exchange, which now receives no public money. The program distributed roughly 8 million syringes in 2023. Parker has said she would "fight tooth and nail to ensure that not one city dollar is invested in the distribution of clean needles."
In 2019 the syringe exchange was fully funded by $1.2 million from the city.
The Oregonian/OregonLive · on the Letty Owings Center closure
Central City Concern said it will close the Letty Owings Center, a Portland residential facility where women recover from drug addiction while living with their babies, at the end of October, along with its attached transitional housing facility, Laura's Place. CCC president Dr. Andy Mendenhall estimated that no more than 150 beds exist statewide where children can live with mothers receiving treatment, including the 29 at Letty Owings. CCC's closure announcement cited a 52% increase in the program's operating costs over five years while funding opportunities decreased, and said no other provider was found to take over the program.
Central City Concern's closure announcement sets an effective date of October 31, 2026; the center opened in 1989 and paused new admissions in July.
The 200-bed NW Northrup Shelter is set to close permanently on September 18, one year after it opened, and the city said priority services in the area — camp removals, trash pickup, and perimeter security checks — end with the closure. Blanchet House's Bethanie's Room, a 75-bed women's shelter nearby, is already hitting capacity, and executive director Steve Cook said demand is rising even before nearby shelters close.
The shelter building's owner faces a foreclosure suit by Northwest Bank, reported August 27; the closure is one of several this year attributed by the city and county to budget cuts.
Home Forward said it plans to raise the share of monthly income most of its tenants and voucher holders pay toward rent — a tenant now paying 28% of income would pay 31% — to help close an estimated $31 million budget gap, with the change taking effect no earlier than February 1, 2027. Spokesman Rylee Ahnen said about 12,356 households would be affected, including Housing Choice and project-based voucher holders, and the agency expects the increases to reduce the deficit by $6 million. Tenants will get 90 days' notice, and the increases coincide with the end of a one-year rent-increase moratorium Home Forward imposed on landlords who accept Section 8 vouchers.
In July, Home Forward said its budget shortfall was $31 million — double the figure the agency had described earlier in the year, an error interim director Michael Buonocore attributed to previous leadership.
Advantage Services, a nonprofit that employs about 120 people who have experienced homelessness or other disadvantages for cleanup, shuttle and storage work, said it must raise $750,000 in September or faces possible closure at the end of October. CEO Rob Ferris said its largest contract, with Salt Lake City's Urban Services Division, was cut from roughly $2 million to less than $1 million after the city shifted the work to its in-house Clean City team, and that insurance costs rose from $177,000 to more than $400,000 this year. The city's Public Services Department said the contract reduction was a decision to save taxpayer money.
Advantage Services operates Salt Lake City's Transitional Storage Program, which has more than 500 bins where people experiencing homelessness can store their belongings.
Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland raised $1.3 million this year to keep 100 beds open after Multnomah County cut the funding that had supported them. KGW reported that more than 1,000 shelter beds within Multnomah County are set to close by the end of the year as a result of city and county budget cuts.
Multnomah County provided $1.5 million in September 2023 to keep Bybee Lakes Hope Center open on condition of a third-party financial review.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority made its first round of layoffs August 25: a spokesperson confirmed 10 people were laid off, one resigned beforehand, and six vacant positions will stay vacant, with laid-off staff receiving no severance and one month of paid administrative leave. The same day, the agency's two top executives told a King County Council committee that an outside consultant is still tracing $8 million in unreconciled funds identified by this year's forensic audit, a figure COO William Towey said could be higher.
CEO Kelly Kinnison told staff not to expect additional layoffs until after October 5.
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.
Multnomah County's Homeless Services Department will close the St. Johns drop-in center, a day center in North Portland for people experiencing homelessness, on August 31, after the Board of County Commissioners voted to cut its funding as part of addressing a $67 million shortfall in the department. According to the program, the center has served more than 330 people since opening in July 2025, with over 75 daily visitors; the county said its FY 2026 budgeted operating cost was about $530,000.
HSD said it will work to identify possible new facilities; a replacement center would open no sooner than July 2027.
Do Good Multnomah Workers United (AFSCME Local 1790) said a letter-writing campaign — 2,662 letters as of August 17 — preceded the nonprofit's reduction of the layoffs it announced in July from 14 to 8. The workers won union recognition in August 2024 and remain without a first contract; the bargaining unit has shrunk from about 250 workers to fewer than 200 during negotiations, following city and county budget cuts.
Northwest Labor Press reported in August that the July round was Do Good Multnomah's fourth staffing cut in a year.
Management at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told the agency's executive leadership team last week which staffers will lose their jobs in late August or early September, the first staff cuts of the agency's wind-down to a coordination role. Staff represented by the PROTEC17 union sent a letter to the governing board urging the agency to cut two top executives first, whose combined compensation tops $600,000 — what the union called "the direct financial cost of five to six full-time operational staff." The agency currently has 73 staff and has overspent its administrative budget by as much as $1 million this year.
Seattle and King County set a January 2027 timeline to take back $159 million in homelessness contracts from the authority, narrowing it to coordination.
The city of Portland plans to eliminate the RV parking component at the North Portland Road shelter site, its last sanctioned venue for homeless people living in vehicles. KGW reported the change is part of a city effort to cut costs.
The site opened in 2024 with both shelter pods and RV parking spots; the city's other RV site, Sunderland RV Safe Park, closed in September 2025.
Human Rights Watch · on HRW findings on HUD fair-housing enforcement
Human Rights Watch released a report on federal civil rights enforcement finding that HUD closed or halted at least 115 fair housing complaints without findings, which the report said was in some cases in apparent defiance of federal regulations requiring investigation of every complaint. The report said HUD's Office of Fair Housing shrank from 31 staffers to 11, and cited an August 2025 whistleblower complaint by career attorneys describing a gag order barring fair housing attorneys from contacting complainants or the Justice Department.
HUD's proposed rescission of its disparate-impact rule, published Aug. 10, has a comment deadline of Oct. 9.
San Francisco ordered Hospitality House's Sixth Street Self-Help Center to shut down by December 31, with officials citing street conditions on Sixth Street; the nonprofit also took a $250,000 cut over two fiscal years while retaining about $7.4 million in city funding. The closure coincides with the May 2026 opening of the city's RESET sobering center three blocks away, which the sheriff's dashboard says had admitted 1,231 people as of August 10, with 64% declining referrals to services.
The SOMA West Neighborhood Association filed a state civil-rights complaint this spring alleging the city concentrates homeless services in SoMa and the Tenderloin.