From left, Andrea Bell, executive director of Oregon Housing and Community Services; Jeremy Gordon, Polk County commissioner; Jimmy Jones, executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency; Gov. Tina Kotek; and Chris Hoy, Salem mayor, celebrated the opening in Salem of the ARCHES Lodge shelter April 12, 2023. The Salem shelter is one of many that opened across the state last year.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek plans to sign two more executive orders Tuesday targeting the state’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

The new orders come nearly a year after Kotek declared a state of emergency around homelessness on her second day in office. They also coincide with an announcement from the governor’s office that the state exceeded goals she set to build more shelter beds, provide rent assistance to more Oregonians and help homeless residents into permanent housing.

“One year ago, I told Oregonians that the homelessness emergency order was only the first step and that it would take collaboration to act at the scale and urgency this humanitarian crisis demands,” Kotek said in a statement. “Now, we are continuing the fight to bring housing stability to more Oregonians. I want to thank legislators, local governments, shelter providers and housing providers for stepping up last year and delivering results to address our homelessness crisis. We’ve seen that together we can make an impact, and we will continue to push this work forward until every Oregonian has a safe and stable place to call home.”

About 20,000 people were homeless in Oregon on a single night in January 2023, the most recent available data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. About 13,000 of those lacked shelter – Oregon was second only to California in the percentage of unsheltered homeless people.

Kotek set a goal last spring of creating 600 new shelter beds, getting 1,200 homeless people or families into permanent housing and keeping 8,750 struggling families in their homes. Preliminary data provided to her office by Oregon Housing and Community Services showed that the state succeeded in creating 1,032 shelter beds, rehousing 1,293 households and keeping 8,886 families in their homes.

The department won’t share final numbers until late February. By that time, Kotek and Oregon lawmakers will be more than halfway through a short legislative session where they intend to spend more money on housing and homelessness. She has called for another $600 million investment, adding to the $1.2 billion lawmakers allocated last year.

The new executive orders Kotek will sign Tuesday will direct the state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness to provide Kotek with plans for how all state agencies can assist in reducing homelessness and continue the homelessness emergency. She’ll provide new goals for communities around rehousing and preventing homelessness by the end of February based on conversations with local leaders about their needs and capacity.