A great tool to fight homelessness is to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place.

Temporary rental assistance is not a cure-all. It’s a stopgap. It’s part of any solution.

Molly Heiss, a board member of Deschutes County’s Coordinated Houseless Response Office and NeighborhoodImpact’s deputy director, recently highlighted some of the successes and challenges in rental assistance.

The state program in Central Oregon is run by the nonprofit NeighborImpact. It pulls together state and federal funding as well as money from other sources to offer rental assistance and eviction prevention.

How big and far reaching are those efforts?

For the fiscal year of 2023-2024, NeighborImpact provided rental assistance for a total of 251 households for a total of 674 people. It provided rental assistance for a total of 476 months for about $621,000. The average payment to help a family was about $1,300 for a month. NeighborImpact tries to deliver the least amount necessary to stabilize a household, so it has more money to help other households.

There is a separate program for eviction prevention. From 2023 to now, NeighborImpact has assisted 160 households and 399 individuals. The total spending was $422,000 and the average payment was about $2,600.

Those totals mean hundreds of people were able to, at least temporarily, avoid falling into homelessness. Of course, there are still many other problems. There is not enough affordable housing in Central Oregon or housing of any type. There are too many people struggling with mental illness and addiction.

Landlords face challenges, too. Some landlords have been burned by tenants in the past with unpaid rent or damage to property — or they fear it may happen to them. Heiss told the houseless response office that when Oregon passed Senate Bill 608 in 2019, it provided important protections for renters: rent regulation and eviction prevention. She said it also had unintended consequences of making it more difficult to get rid of bad tenants and led to some landlords leaving the market. And while there is a state program to provide assistance to landlords that mitigate damage from tenants, it can be a lot of work for landlords before they see any compensation.

There are families in Oregon that face a recurring monthly struggle to pay the rent. They may be cutting back on food, clothes for their children — anything to stay afloat. Those families need to be our priority. But we also must not forget to ensure it is easy — and yes profitable — for landlords to offer housing.