A shelter offering temporary housing to Portland State University students is set to close next week due to a lack of funding.
The Landing officially opened at the First United Methodist Church near downtown Portland in 2021 to serve students at PSU dealing with housing insecurity.
Although PSU partners with the church by referring students to The Landing, the church itself operates the space, which is supported by community donations and volunteers.
“The shelter’s original vision was to be primarily volunteer run, operating at a low cost,” First United Methodist Church Rev. Karyn Richards-Kuan said in a statement to the church’s congregation.
Portland State University Campus
Hanin Najjar / OPB
Richards-Kuan said the pandemic forced The Landing to work in a staffing model, with limited personnel. It initially received grants from Multnomah County and the Columbia District Church Extension Society to support that staffing.
“Unfortunately, the initial grant funding and other financial gifts have been utilized and after a great deal of effort we have determined that there is currently no sustainable funding resource available,” Richards-Kuan said.
She said The Landing will cease operation on Friday, June 23.
PSU’s Director of Strategic Communications Christina Williams told OPB there were two students who were staying at the shelter that have been transitioned to other housing.
“Our Basic Needs Hub has been working with the affected students to place them in permanent or transitional housing to ensure there is no risk of any of our students ending up houseless as a result of this change,” Williams said.
Lee Ann Phillips, PSU’s Basic Needs Navigator, works in the Basic Needs Hub to connect students with resources like The Landing.
“The loss of The Landing is big,” Phillips said.
Since Phillips started in her position at PSU in early 2022, she said the Basic Needs Hub had referred 18 students to housing at The Landing. She said there have always been at least three to five students at The Landing at all times.
“I knew that any students who were housing insecure and houseless, or at risk for houselessness, would have a place that they could get emergency shelter at The Landing,” she said.
Phillips said the small, church-run shelter felt safer to students than larger community shelters because it had a capacity of only eight people. Many PSU students also volunteered at the shelter, which also helped the students staying there feel safe and supported, she said.
“Most of the students would spend anywhere from two weeks to, we actually had a student that was there seven months,” Phillips said. “They are now graduating this term, and it’s really exciting to see that happening. They really genuinely said that it saved their life and they would have never graduated if they hadn’t had that support.”
Housing and other basic needs insecurities aren’t uncommon at PSU, the state’s largest urban university with 22,000 part- and full-time students last year. It serves a diverse population, with nearly half the enrolled students being the first in their families to attend college and a quarter are parents.
A report released in 2020 out of PSU’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative revealed that of the students surveyed, more than 60% said they had experienced some form of housing or food insecurity in the year prior. Roughly 16% of surveyed students had experienced homelessness.
Amie Riley is an adjunct professor at PSU and a volunteer with The Landing. She said the shelter’s closure feels “devastating.”
“First Church has done something amazing for some of the most resilient students in our community — students who are sleeping in their car and still showing up and passing college classes,” Riley said. “But the church simply couldn’t hold up this whole partnership without more community support.”
Riley said some volunteers with the church had reached out to the state and the county in efforts to receive additional funding for The Landing with no luck.
Riley said typically there are only about five students staying at The Landing at any given time, but the “return on investment” is immeasurable.
“It’s not one of those big shelters that’s serving hundreds of people or dozens of people every night, but it’s stable enough and it’s a small enough resource that students can build a community with other students,” she said. “They feel like they have a sense of place, and most students are successfully transitioning out of The Landing into permanent housing and full-time employment and successfully graduating from college.”
Riley said from her knowledge, the budget for The Landing has varied from $50,000 to $100,000 over the past few years. She said funding was on the lower end recently with more available volunteers because of the lessening impact of the pandemic, and therefore less reliance on paid staff.
Riley, who has been teaching at PSU since 2015, said every course she’s taught at the university has included either a student experiencing homelessness or close to it. She said she hopes that more resources can get to the students who need them.
“I really feel like this is a problem of connecting the dots versus a lack of will or interest or care,” Riley said. “I do think that these students deserve the right to continue to be hardworking students and they deserve safe housing, and if the right people can just bring their care and attention to the needs of these students, it doesn’t feel like a hard problem to solve in this particular case.”
Phillips, with PSU’s Basic Needs Hub, said she still has resources to offer to students in need: she can refer people to other shelters in the community, and there’s the Affordable Rents for College Students program, which offers subsidized rent to students.
The hub also has other resources for students, whether it’s getting them set up with SNAP for food assistance or a Hop Pass for free public transportation.
“The bigger issue is around students who need emergency shelter in that moment,” Phillips said.
Phillips said one of the things she’s discussing at the Basic Needs Hub is the potential for emergency hotel vouchers for students who might need a place to stay for a few nights before figuring out next steps.
But on a broader scale, Phillips said, student housing insecurity is a systemic issue.
“I would love to see something like [The Landing] again,” Phillips said. “If that isn’t something, then I would love to see universities really address this fact, which many are starting to do, and start looking at how we can do affordable housing for students.”