Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
I recently returned from Humboldt County in California to check on a family member who suffered a stroke last year. The weather was grim for early August — overcast and cool, with fog and drizzle — which suited my mood.
I’d just read that the Eureka-Arcata area ranked first in a 2020-24 analysis of alcohol-induced mortality among people 65 and older. I spent my high school years there, desperate to escape the poverty and drug culture that became part of my family’s story, including homelessness and incarceration.
Lost souls still populate Highway 101 through Eureka, where the toll of meth and fentanyl is hard to miss. Alcohol’s legacy reaches people I knew: a former co-worker drank himself to death, while my former lieutenant in the volunteer fire department drank himself off the force.
I once feared staying in Humboldt County would determine my fate: a jail cell or a ditch, dead. More recently, I left to quit drugs and alcohol and attempt sobriety again.
What I have seen in Humboldt County and my own life made it hard to ignore the recent guest column written by congressional candidate Monique DeSpain about homelessness, addiction and mental illness. Whether in Humboldt County or Eugene, a place’s history does not establish a statewide theory. But I took seriously her critique of Oregon’s homelessness spending and the records of the two politicians she called out: Gov. Tina Kotek and Rep. Val Hoyle, the incumbent DeSpain is challenging.
DeSpain puts addiction and serious mental illness at the center of street homelessness. She wants federal money redirected from Housing First policies toward recovery and treatment.
Responses were swift from letter-writers like Dan Bryant, who emphasized housing costs and low vacancy rates as major drivers of homelessness, and former Eugene mayor Lucy Vinis, who argued that stable housing, treatment and support need to work together.
Bryant is right that scarce and expensive housing leaves low-income households more vulnerable to homelessness when income or housing stability is disrupted. But it does not by itself explain why a person remains unsheltered or struggles to stay housed.
Addiction and serious mental illness can make it harder to leave homelessness or stay housed. Housing instability can worsen those conditions in turn. These forces interact, but why homelessness is more common in some places is different from why a person remains homeless.
The same distinction matters when judging results. Systematic reviews have found that Housing First efforts help people stay housed, while short-term health and substance-use interventions are less clear. That supports a narrower point in Vinis’ argument: housing stability and behavioral-health outcomes are not interchangeable.
Those distinctions limit what Oregon’s statewide problems prove about the officials DeSpain names. Public spending and political promises still deserve scrutiny. Responsibility should track authority: what each official could control, what they did, and what result we should expect by now. If the result falls short, they should explain what they will change.
As governor, Kotek cannot control every legislative, local, financing or market constraint. But her administration set a target of 36,000 new homes a year, while census data shows just fewer than 15,000 permits for new units authorized last year. Permits mark an early stage in the housing pipeline — not homes delivered or affordable to people at greatest risk.
Kotek’s administration should show what counts toward its 36,000-home target and how many permitted units reach construction and completion. Where projects stall, it should identify what it can change within its authority.
DeSpain also cites Hoyle’s record, but the state target she criticizes Hoyle for are the wrong measure for a member of Congress. Hoyle sponsored two House bills supporting housing production, neither of which passed — although some of the rural-housing provisions in Hoyle’s 2024 DASH bill were substantially similar to provisions later enacted through the separate 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Separately, Congress appropriated $9.15 million for three Housing and Urban Development projects Hoyle sought.
DeSpain’s proposals deserve the same scrutiny she applies to Hoyle’s record. Before judging whether her approaches would work, we need to know which federal funding she would redirect, what housing support would be lost or replaced, and whether treatment capacity could absorb the change. She needs to identify who would implement it and what result the policy could reasonably produce. If it fell short, she should say what she would change.
Accountability means little if we blame the wrong people for the wrong results. DeSpain has made the case for judging Oregon’s homelessness system by results. But the burden is hers to explain what she would change through Congress — and how voters should decide if it worked.
