Joint Office outlines rapid rehousing evaluation after budget note; staff report strong retention but data limits remain

The Joint Office of Homeless Services briefed the Board on its planned evaluation of rapid rehousing programs, answering a budget note request from Commissioner Myron while cautioning that the six-month timeline set by the note is insufficient for a comprehensive analysis.

Anna Plumb, deputy director of the Joint Office, said the budget note asked for three categories of information: current housing status of those who received rapid rehousing, eviction rates for those recipients, and qualitative experiences of both recipients and providers. "A 6 month timeline is actually not enough time to perform a comprehensive evaluation of rapid rehousing," Plumb told the Board, but she said the Joint Office will fold the requested deliverables into a larger multi-year evaluation and issue an RFP for an external consultant in the coming weeks.

Plumb and Laurie Kelly, planning and evaluation manager, presented program context and outcomes. Their slides reported that in fiscal year 2024 nearly 29,100 households received rapid rehousing assistance; 63% of households identifying as BIPOC accessed culturally specific services and on average received about 11 months of paid rent assistance. Kelly said the Joint Office is changing its retention measure to use a "by-name" list that pulls multiple data touchpoints rather than relying only on phone follow-up. "Our 12 month housing metric would be 91.3 percent," Kelly said, with 24-month retention shown as 85.5 percent and longer-term measures declining modestly.

Staff cautioned that some data are incomplete. Kelly said eviction records are unreliable in HMIS for earlier years and that a rigorous eviction analysis will require linking state eviction data and human-subjects protections to conduct qualitative follow-up. The Joint Office committed to publishing monthly inflow/outflow snapshots on its website starting in January so the public can see who enters and leaves homelessness each month.

Board members pressed for more granular counts and denominators. Commissioner Brim Edwards emphasized the scale of local investment and asked how the large increase in short-term rent assistance funding (shown rising toward $48 million in FY2025) is translating into net reductions in homelessness. Staff agreed to provide numerators/denominators for retention rates and to further disaggregate outcomes by program type, referral source and services received.

The Joint Office framed the planned evaluation around five focus areas: descriptive trends; program design and targeting; operations and alignment for higher-need populations; retrospective review of intensive short-term programs (Housing Multnomah Now, Move in Multnomah, Oregon All In); and expanded outcome measures tied to equity concerns. Plumb said the RFP will be released in the coming weeks and the consultant will help finalize scope and timeline.