Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Twenty-nine journey maps in Multnomah County trace where housing progress stalls
Portland State and OHSU-PSU asked 29 people to lay out their routes through homeless services, building on an earlier survey of 541 in which 98% said they wanted permanent housing. The interviews name the bottlenecks and leave them uncounted.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Portland State's Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative and the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health published "Without a Map", the second and final part of their Pathways study.
- The study's first part, released in April 2026, surveyed 541 unhoused people in Multnomah County and found that 98% of them wanted permanent housing.
- This installment adds 29 in-depth journey-mapping interviews tracing how people move through homeless services and the points at which their progress stalls or unravels.
- The research was co-designed with the TREES committee, a group made up entirely of people who have experienced homelessness themselves.
- Interviewees described being stuck in what they called the churn, where repeated effort runs into missing identification documents, case manager turnover and unreturned calls.
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Why it matters
- constraint The report proposes six priorities, all unranked by how often each failure occurs, so a county reading it cannot tell the cheapest fix from the one that would free the most people.
- exposure People whose circumstances fall just outside a program's priority definition are the ones this evidence puts at risk: denied on a threshold, then left to work out a fragmented system without guidance.
- decision Participants said the successes felt like luck. For anyone running intake, that sets a design question: whether the conditions behind those wins can be made routine instead of coincidental.
A journey map gives you ordering; a survey leaves it out. Ask a person to lay out their route and the sequence comes with it. That is how the report can say hidden homelessness came first for many participants: couch surfing, staying in vehicles, temporary hotel stays, all before the point at which they became unhoused [7]. It is also how bereavement surfaces. More than 30% of the interview participants said the death of a loved one contributed, directly or indirectly, to losing their housing [8].
Thirty percent of 29 is 8.7, so that finding rests on at least nine people [1]. The 98% comes from the other arm of the study, and its residual is small in absolute terms: roughly 11 of the 541 respondents did not report wanting permanent housing [2]. A question about what someone wants measures intent. What the service system did with that intent is a different measurement, and neither arm, as the report describes them, follows comparable groups down different service routes [3][4].
Kathleen Conte, the lead investigator and an assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, described the finding in terms of everything participants are doing at once. "People are trying to stay safe and meet their basic needs while also figuring out a complicated service system, proving they qualify for help, keeping important relationships intact, advocating for themselves and pushing forward through long waits and repeated setbacks," she said [6].
One participant described the current homelessness service framework as a system that "rewards maintenance, not transformation" [10]. Multnomah County supported the study. Lori Kelley, planning and evaluation manager at the county's Homeless Service Department, said the research "gives policymakers and the public an honest look at what works, what doesn't and what truly prevents people experiencing homelessness from reaching their housing goals" [12].
The interviews were analyzed with the people who lived them, and the report quotes a participant on why that matters. "People with lived experience are often brought into conversations like this to share stories, and these stories matter, but what matters just as much is our ability to analyze those experiences because we're not just witnesses, we understand the patterns," the participant said [15].
What to watch
- Whether HRAC or the county publishes how often each bottleneck occurs across the full 541-person survey sample.
- Whether Multnomah County's next homeless services budget funds more than the first of the report's six priorities.
- Whether the county links the survey and interview arms to administrative records, which would test the stall points against exit rates.