Homelessness in the Mid-Willamette Valley has reached record levels, exposing the limits of Oregon’s current response and the financial weight of maintaining it. The 2025 Point-in-Time count identified 2,154 individuals without stable housing across Marion and Polk Counties — the highest total ever recorded. Nearly half of those surveyed said they were new to homelessness, underscoring a system increasingly unable to keep people in their homes.
The Scale of Public Spending
A 2024 study by Moss Adams, commissioned by the City of Salem, found the city spent $23.7 million addressing homelessness in 2023. Roughly $10.3 million of that total went to indirect “secondary costs,” such as police calls, emergency response, and public-space cleanup. The same report noted that 87 percent of Salem’s direct-service spending came from one-time grants — a precarious funding model for an ongoing crisis…