The Bybee Lakes Hope Center has found success by rejecting the harm-reduction approach favored by the progressive city’s leaders.
Nestled beside an Amazon fulfillment center and a Columbia sportswear manufacturing warehouse, 20 minutes north of Portland, Ore., is a transitional housing shelter offering a rare glimpse of success in a state plagued by skyrocketing rates of homelessness and drug abuse.
Situated at the edge of Multnomah County, bordering the Columbia River and the Washington State border, the Bybee Lakes Hope Center seamlessly blends into its commercial surroundings. The building’s unremarkable exterior conceals the remarkable work being done inside by an unlikely success story: Alan Evans, the shelter’s chief director.
“I would’ve been dead right now if drug abuse would have been legal when I was on the streets,” Evans, who spent nearly three decades on the streets, told National Review. “We lose more people on the streets every year than Vietnam. Think about that. We are promoting killing people.”
Approaching 40, Evans turned his life around and built a reputation over the years as a successful community organizer. His foundation, Helping Hands, has been a rare bright spot combatting homelessness in a state that has tipped into crisis, with data from the CDC showing Oregon experiencing one of the sharpest national spikes in overdose deaths. Residents now rank among the top in the nation for substance abuse as corporations including Target, Cracker Barrel, Starbucks, Walmart, REI, and Nike have shuttered stores in recent months.
“You probably hear that people want to live on the streets. That people don’t want to change,” Evans says, echoing the talking points of harm-reduction activists. “Well, I’ll tell you something. I lived on the streets for 27 years, and I never met one person who said I want to wake up and be homeless today or I want to be addicted today.”
In 2019, Betsy Johnson, a pit-bull Democratic state senator with little patience for ideological objections to commonsense solutions, had a pitch for Evans. Jordan Schnitzer, a local billionaire philanthropist, had recently bought the old Wapato jail from the county and wanted to put it to good use. It had cost taxpayers close to $60 million in 2004 but never opened its doors because operating the sprawling 155,000-square-foot property was deemed too expensive.
It stood empty, a pristine ghost building with industrial kitchen appliances worthy of a military base and floor-to-ceiling windows that could coax in even the reluctant Oregon sunshine during months of dreariness.
Schnitzer was tired of seeing the county fumbling as people were dying on the streets every day. The bones for a world-class shelter were there, but Multnomah officials had no interest in it. It was too far from Portland’s downtown and too expensive to maintain, they said. Schnitzer wanted someone to transform it into an oasis in a community reeling from the fentanyl crisis and destructive policies that were making homelessness and drug addiction worse. Then, the philanthropist spied a private-sector solution to bypass the patchwork of progressive red tape.
“I grew up with the philosophy from my parents and grandparents that there was an obligation to leave one’s city in better shape than you found it. To be upon the legacy of others,” Schnitzer told NR. He believes that while Portland’s leaders are well-intentioned and hard-working, there’s an arrogance to their thinking. “They think they suddenly were blessed with some divine intervention that they have all the answers,” which has led alternative approaches embodied by Evans to be overlooked.
Unlike the shelters favored by the city’s political and legal elite, Schnitzer envisioned a mostly high-barrier facility where drug use would be prohibited and residents would be expected to contribute, a radical and unpopular approach in Multnomah. By comparison, the low-barrier properties that dot metro Portland, steeped in the philosophy of harm reduction, allow drug use and have minimal entry requirements.
At a United Way fundraiser, Schnitzer pulled Evans aside and asked him a question: Tell me about your life? “I told him how I started an organization that listens to people; that we build customized re-entry plans for the homeless,” Evans recounts. “If I get you the building [Wapato] and give you a million dollars, do you think it would work?” Schnitzer asked.
Evans was noncommittal at the time. The project would be a massive undertaking, and he was already spread thin overseeing nearly a dozen shelters. Evans said he’d think about it, but Schnitzer wouldn’t drop it. He called Evans up after and invited him to tour the property to see it for himself.
The visit worked.
Seeing the building’s skeleton inspired Evans. He could see the foundations for a world-class shelter, which would eventually become the largest in Oregon. If he secured additional funding to ensure smooth operations, and could get past the hurdles of local zoning ordinances, Schnitzer committed to leasing the property to Evans for $1 annually.
The Failure of ‘Housing First’
Bybee Lakes opened its doors in October 2020, a momentous time in the state’s history. A month later, Oregonians went to the ballot box and voted in favor of Measure 110, a state initiative to decriminalize drug possession heavily backed by the George Soros-funded outfit, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). The organization did not respond to National Review’s request for comment.
Portlanders were eager for a change.
Many saw the War on Drugs as a failure, and few believed that hard jail time was the answer for people struggling with addiction. Measure 110 was envisioned as a revolutionary overhaul to this outdated mindset, destigmatizing drug use and ushering in a new epoch of compassion and understanding. Proponents promised to redirect millions of dollars from the state’s new marijuana taxes toward low-barrier treatment facilities, ensuring those in desperate need would finally get help.
The measure effectively firewalled Bybee, which initially pledged to sustain itself on private donations, from public funding earmarked to stem the homelessness crisis. Evans’s approach ran headlong into the “housing-first” philosophy that has become entrenched in Portland, where advocates argue getting homeless people into stable living situations was paramount. Mental-health or addiction counseling was often deemed a secondary step or even entirely unrelated to the issue of housing.
Multnomah officials have often butted heads with Evans over such questions. “It felt like we were held to a different standard because of our philosophy. There was no way for us to apply to the Joint Office of Homeless Services (JHOS) because our model fell outside of housing-first, so we had to apply directly to the county,” Evans said. He couldn’t understand how people addicted to drugs could be placed into housing with other struggling people and not participate in addiction counseling or how shelters could function without even basic rules. The “housing-first” approach was always destined for failure, Evans believes.
“This is not politically correct, but if you put a sick person into healthy housing, you don’t get a healthy person. If you put a sick person into healthy housing, you get sick housing. That’s the only way it would work without wraparound services around them.”
“I mean all the money coming in, if it’s only dedicated to emergency, low-barrier shelters, what you end up with is communities like this one [Portland] which has tons of just low-barrier emergency shelters with no outlet. A person can’t grow in survival mode,” he maintained. “We [Bybee] offer people the opportunity to recover with accountability and compassion.”
In August, reports emerged of tense negotiations between county chair Jessica Vega Pederson and Evans to secure a grant to keep the shelter’s doors open. “We have literally emptied our accounts everywhere to support our operations at Bybee Lakes,” a letter sent to Pederson’s chief of staff explained. “Frankly, many of our donors don’t understand why governments are not paying for what they believe is an essential public function,” a subsequent letter written by a board member of the facility explained.
Evans had asked Multnomah for $5 million to maintain operations until the end of the year, but Pederson countered with just over $800,000 and a demand for a third-party financial audit of the shelter’s books and a “financial recovery plan.” By September, the parties had come to terms with Bybee’s revised ask of $1.5 million in emergency funding.
“The power of what happens in a place like this is the proof in the pudding,” Johnson, the former state senator and long-time Evans ally, told NR, sitting inside Bybee’s spacious library on a rainy October day. “People can find recovery and redemption and reentry at a place like this. But, as we’ve discovered with running Bybee Lakes, it don’t come for free.”
Measure 110 Takes Its Toll
The past two years have been a testament to Measure 110’s shortcomings. Visited in October, Portland resembled a ghost town as the major arteries branching off Burnside Street were overrun by open-air drug markets, and homeless encampments obstructed sidewalks. It was impossible to walk a block without having to leap-frog across the street, hustling back and forth to avoid someone in the throws of a violent psychotic episode or a scrap of fentanyl-powdered tin foil.
“We’ve become a problem-centered society attempting to serve people. And we need to be person-centered in attempting to solve problems. It’s completely backward. It’s a bottom-up approach to a top-down problem, right?” Evans told NR, gesturing his hands in the shape of a pyramid. The rain had kept him from showing off Bybee’s extensive grounds, featuring a victory garden, memorial to homeless people, and “ADA accessible garden beds” bursting when the weather permits with melons and other fruits and vegetables.
The reference to the Americans with Disabilities Act is not a throwaway line. As he showed NR around Bybee Lakes, he spoke at length about “trauma-informed” care, avoiding “triggering” behavior, and a “Rainbow dorm for the LGBTQ community.” Just because he doesn’t agree wholesale with the prevailing progressive shibboleths of our moment doesn’t mean he wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. He’s an intellectual Leatherman willing to use any tool in his tacklebox to help people in need.
Evans cuts an imposing figure, standing well over six feet tall and approaching 250 pounds. But he comes off as a gentle giant, remembering everyone’s first name as he glad-hands and jokes around with residents. Walking through the kitchen, one resident was busy cooking by himself for dinner. “What are you making?” Evans boomed with positivity. “Roasted chicken. Salad,” the older white man said as he cleaned some equipment. “My man!” Evans shot back.
There are dozens of people behind Evans, many formerly homeless people, who make the place hum with pride and laughter, but he is the glue that keeps it all together. A jumble of hard-knocks wisdom and life experience guides Bybee as Portland grapples with a crisis that has sent locals fleeing the city for three consecutive years, snapping a 30-year record of population growth.
“The problem in all our communities is huge and overwhelming,” Schnitzer reflected. “Do I have an answer for the 5,600 people on the streets here or the 40,000 in Los Angeles?” he asked rhetorically. “The solution is figuring out programs that work, one individual at a time. That’s how we measure success.”
“At Bybee Lakes, they’ve had, in the last three and a half years, 2,200 success stories. The letters I’ve gotten would melt your heart.”
That pragmatic-learning ethos imbued by Schnitzer is at the core of what makes Bybee work. Pointing to the “trauma-informed colors” on the glass panes of the intake center, Evans explained that the concept was not something people understood when he was trying to get off the streets. “It was this weird keyword, but nobody truly understood it. And then one guy explained trauma-informed care to me.”
“He said, ‘Alan, if you walked into a restaurant and your waitress treated you like s***, how much would you tip her?’ I said, I would tip her nothing. He said, ‘Well, if you rewound that situation, and you walked into that restaurant and the manager said, Please excuse your waitress, her husband died yesterday, and she treated you terribly, how much would you tip her?’”
The analogy clicked for Evans. “What we suffer from is perception. We always look at people, and we judge them by their actions, rather than their story. And it changed my life.”