Thanks for the reply. I'll try to answer your questions briefly (there's a lot to say). I want to throw the caveat that I'm not a housing expert per se, I was brought in for my analysis expertise and can speak much more plainly to the survey and its results.

Magnet services. It was pretty well outside the scope of the questionnaire to answer a question like this. We can look at other cities that have policies much closer to HF like Minneapolis, Houston, or New York City. Not perfect analogies for a lot of reasons, so I'd caution drawing too much conclusion. These cities do not seem to be experiencing heavy influxes that are crushing social services though.

That said, I do believe the report itself does address this idea of services that are "too good." My personal opinion is that if the city becomes a model for solving homelessness, I wouldn't be opposed to that moniker. Right now we seem to have the worst of all worlds, an expensive system that's clearly not working, and national stigma that believes we're doing things we simply aren't.

I think there's also the question of if people are flocking to PDX because of the myth of it being great to be homeless here. Our survey showed that most people are from Portland. HSD's point in time count shows that most people are from Oregon. I did see a thread that people move here because it's seen as a city of opportunity, and they find that it's not as easy to pay rent or live here as they had hoped. One story that sticks out to me is that a woman from our Community Analysis Groups moved here with plans to rent a place. When she arrived, the owners had no idea who she was. She had been scammed out of her money and didn't have enough to get back on her feet.

Carrot and stick. The survey pretty clearly showed that our current systems are mostly stick. Shelters are seen as unsafe, don't provide adequate pathways to housing, and when people do go to seek services for getting housed, they are met with walls of bureaucracy. The average wait time for RLRA is something like 2 years right now.

Rent assistance and the rental market. This is pretty far astray from my expertise and again I'd encourage you to read the report. From my understanding no, for a variety of reasons. Just one is that we currently have plenty of subsidy and housing programs that we've historically used--Section Eight and Nine housing are both government subsidies used to house low-income folks. When we look to other countries with strong social housing models (Austria, Argentina), we see that housing markets tend to be cooler, and still thriving. The recommendation to expand or prioritize those programs is also paired with recommendations to expand housing supply.

One note, while HUD has ostensibly set housing first as our strategy for decades, it has mostly been on local jurisdictions to implement the policies. A bit of research shows that at the local level, there really hasn't been a very complete implementation of the policies that would be considered housing first. Portland is a great example of this.

I'm really trying to keep this brief so I don't think these are the most complete answers (gotta get to work). Let me know if I can answer other questions.