The homelessness crisis in Multnomah County, Oregon, is among the worst in the country. Home to deep-blue Portland, where the deaths of homeless people quadrupled between 2019 and 2023, according to data from the county health department, Multnomah has a per-capita homeless rate of 1.3 percent, and some shelters are closing due to budget problems.
That means that there is more demand than ever for the county’s public housing resources. Multnomah allocates those resources using a points-based system, which refers those with the requisite number of points to public housing. The county considers factors such as how long a person has been homeless, whether he or she is survivor of domestic violence, and, if applicable, the age of his or her children.
It then weighs those factors against some less conventional criteria: whether the person is a minority, a non-native English speaker, or “LGBTQIA2S+.”
Rolled out in October 2024, the Multnomah Services and Screening Tool awards up to 5 points to non-white, non-straight applicants who speak English as a second language—more than the 4 points it would award a domestic violence survivor with a six-year-old child who has been homeless for over a year.
The rubric, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a public records request, is “designed to prioritize … BIPOC households, LGBTQIA2S+, [and] people with disabilities,” according to a Frequently Asked Questions pamphlet. It awards 1 point for “interest in LGBTQ services,” 2 points for “English as a second language,” and another 2 points for “interest in culturally specific services,” a catch-all term for Portland’s race-based housing programs.
Those programs include the county’s “BIPOC CHAT line,” which offers a “culturally specific” intake process for homeless minorities, as well as two “financial fitness” classes—Getting Your House in Order and Decide Tu Futuro—for African Americans and Latinos, respectively.
Households that score high enough on the rubric are assigned a case manager who places them in supportive housing. Several placements are reserved for racial minorities—or, as some buildings put it, people who “request culturally specific services”—creating a two-tiered system in which more housing is available to “BIPOC” families than white ones.
The placements include spots at the Hattie Redmond Apartments, which “provide culturally specific housing for the chronically displaced BIPOC community”; the Kathleen Saadat Apartments, which are reserved for “people experiencing or at risk of homelessness who request culturally specific services for BIPOC residents”; the Julia West House, which provides “permanent supportive housing (PSH) for houseless elders and BIPOC individuals”; the Aldea at Glisan Landing, which “targets BIPOC, immigrant and refugee households”; the Beacon at Glisan Landing, which “targets BIPOC, seniors, and people experiencing homelessness”; and Meridian Gardens, which provides apartments to “BIPOC individuals and couples experiencing … homelessness.”
Completed over the past four years, those buildings collectively contain 447 apartments—29 percent of the 1,541 apartments that the county has built for long-term housing since 2021. Another development, the Barbur apartments, has “a focus on … immigrant, refugee, East African and Muslim households” when it opens next year.
Policies like Multnomah’s are subject to strict scrutiny, a legal standard that bars the government from considering race unless doing so is the only way to achieve a compelling state interest. The county’s programs clearly fail that test, said Dan Morenoff, the director of the American Civil Rights Project, adding that most of them sound “very unconstitutional.”
“There is no ‘compelling’ reason to choose who sleeps on the streets by race,” Morenoff said. “No governmental housing program ‘prioritizing’—and necessarily de-prioritizing—homeless families by color, as Multnomah County’s screening system openly does, should be expected to survive judicial scrutiny.”
Multnomah County said in a statement that all “Homeless Department-funded services,” including those advertised as “BIPOC”-specific, are “open to everyone regardless of race or identity, in compliance with the Fair Housing Act and anti-discrimination laws.”
“This includes the right for any individual to seek assistance from a culturally specific provider regardless of their protected class,” department spokeswoman Julia Comnes said.
In fact, the Fair Housing Act expressly forbids advertisements that indicate “any preference” for tenants based on race or national origin—even if the advertised dwelling is open to all. Courts have held that ads “with all-white human models” can violate the law, and the typical standard, outlined in 1989 by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is whether an “ordinary reader” would take the ads to “indicate a racial preference in the acceptance of tenants.”
Comnes declined to comment on why the county’s “culturally specific” housing appears to indicate such a preference.
A race-based housing system may seem more at home in Portlandia than real-life Portland, which in 2024 elected a moderate Democratic mayor, Keith Wilson, who promised to crack down on encampments and fund the police. It might also sound like a veritable kick-me sign for the Trump administration, which is seeking to defund housing programs that it says are “facilitating racial preferences.”
But that has not stopped housing authorities in a host of Democratic jurisdictions from rolling out their own race-based systems—even in counties, like Multnomah, where the majority of homeless people are white.
The Free Beacon identified five states and dozens of cities that have incorporated racial preferences into their housing programs. The preferences operate through various mechanisms, including grant requirements and funding formulas, and could jeopardize the funding of any publicly financed projects subject to antidiscrimination laws. Several use points-based rubrics similar to Multnomah County’s, giving race more weight than poverty or unemployment.
In at least two states, Maryland and Minnesota, race appears to be the single largest factor in allocating rent relief.
At a time when the Trump administration has promised to protect “the civil rights of all Americans,” the programs are a stark indication that some people, including the poorest and most vulnerable, are falling through the cracks.
“The identitarian left really took the same approach Iran did,” Morenoff said of the race-based programs: “Fire off enough at the same time that some will make it through the interceptors.”
Some of the most extreme policies are based on an index developed by the Urban Institute, a center-left think tank funded by the federal government as well as by Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s (D.) family foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. The index uses “equity” indicators—including a neighborhood’s share of “people of color”—to prioritize housing assistance across census tracts. Race is the single most important indicator, receiving twice as much weight as “people living in poverty” and four times as much weight as “adults without health insurance.”
Maryland and Minnesota use the index to allocate funds for housing, rental assistance, and, in Maryland’s case, street outreach and emergency shelters, according to documents from both states. A third state, Oregon, used the index to allocate rental assistance from 2021 to 2023.
The upshot is that a poor black area could receive more money than an equally poor white area simply because of its racial composition. Gail Heriot, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said that such schemes were not only unlawful but also unnecessary, given that race-blind alternatives would still have an outsized impact on minorities.
“If members of some racial groups are more likely to be homeless than others, there is nothing wrong with the fact that such programs disproportionately benefit those racial groups,” Heriot said. “But in the absence of really extraordinary circumstances—which I haven’t seen here—for a state or local government to treat one homeless person better than another on account of that person’s race is illegal and unconstitutional.”
Housing authorities in Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, Allison Foster, claimed the department “does not use race in its funding formula for its homelessness programs” but declined to explain why, in a state report from 2025, Maryland said it had used the race-based index to promote “equity.”
“Maryland DHCD used a funding formula, which included each community’s share of rental units as the baseline … then weighted the funding allocations using the Urban Institute’s Eviction Risk Average Percentile Score,” the report reads. “The data used to create percentiles/scores considers housing instability risk factors, COVID19 impact, and equity.”
Other programs do not use numerical rubrics but require service providers to target minorities. Rhode Island says applicants for a homeless prevention grant “must have an intentional focus on eliminating racial inequities … by prioritizing communities of color.” The Oregon Rehousing Initiative, which has dispersed $39 million since 2023, requires projects to give “priority placement” to “BIPOC” and “LGBTQ+ youth.” Washington State in 2024 set aside $1.2 million in homeless funding for “‘by-and-for’ organizations” that “have a primary mission” of “providing services to BIPOC … communities”—including “$167,291 to serve African diaspora immigrants,” “$150,000 to serve West African immigrants,” and “$252,118 to serve Hispanic, native and migrant seasonal workers.”
The state also requires that 10 percent of rent relief grants go to organizations that “serve and are substantially governed by marginalized populations.” And it funds a private grant program, the Washington Youth and Families Fund, that “prioritizes BIPOC and LGBTQ2+ families” for housing assistance.
State officials in Oregon, Washington, and Rhode Island did not respond to a request for comment.
Aaron Yared, the director of policy at Building Changes, which administers the Washington Youth & Families Fund, claimed that “assistance is based on need and is available to all youth and families seeking support.”
“The Washington Youth & Families Fund (WYFF) does not prioritize who is eligible for housing assistance based on race, ethnicity, or identity,” he said of the program, which describes itself as “supporting Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and refugee families with trauma-informed healing services.”
Quotas also appear in the continuum of care (CoC) programs funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which coordinates shelter access and transitional housing. Los Angeles’s CoC pledged in 2022 that “at least 500 Black and Hispanic/Latino” people would be moved from interim to permanent housing each year. San Francisco promised to “increase the percentage of Hispanic/Latinx population accessing services while experiencing homelessness to 30%.” Oakland said its goal was to ensure that 59 percent of people receiving homeless services were “Black or African American” by 2025. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the CoC uses an area’s “racial composition” to “help target financial assistance to those most likely to experience housing loss.”
Officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Prince George’s County did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for the Oakland Housing Authority, Laura Burch, referred questions about the quotas to the office of Oakland mayor Barbara Lee (D.), adding that the housing authority “did not set the outcome targets.”
The Oakland Housing Authority “complies with applicable federal, state, and local fair housing and civil rights laws,” Burch asserted. “Our housing programs do not use racial quotas.”
Officials in the Oakland mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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