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By James Bickerton
News Reporter
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Portland's new Mayor Keith Wilson has told Newsweek he is "right on schedule" to complete his campaign pledge to tackle the city's homeless epidemic by providing "a safe bed for everybody every night."
Wilson made the remarks at the 2025 annual conference of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, which took place in Washington D.C. over May 13-14, where he advocated for a new "Cascadia" high-speed rail line linking Portland in Oregon with Seattle and Vancouver.
Homelessness in Portland
In recent years the number of homeless people in Portland has surged with Mayor Wilson telling Newsweek when he took office in January 2025 the city had "a little less than 7,000 people unhoused," some of whom were living in tent encampments dotted around the city.
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In 2023 the health department of Multnomah County, which contains Portland, recorded at least 456 deaths among its homeless population, up more than 100 on the previous year, with health professionals attributing this rise primarily to deadly fentanyl overdoses.
Data from the 2022 U.S. Census showed Oregon had the highest rate of chronic homelessness—defined as those who are homeless for more than one year or multiple times over several years—in the United States.
Wilson, formerly a businessman and who is a self-described "moderate," was elected as Portland's new mayor in November 2024 beating rivals he described as "a liberal" and "a law and order candidate."
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He focused heavily on the homeless issue during the mayoral campaign, arguing the problem was causing immense suffering for those directly impacted, as well as damaging the city's reputation as a whole.
Asked how much progress has been made Wilson replied: "It's going great—we're right on schedule. We have 250 beds that are open, we have another 230 coming on in the next three-four weeks, we have another 200 in two months and we'll be at 630 beds by midyear.
"We're building the system to scale up and the goal is 1,500 by December 1. We have private operators that are opening shelters as well. We've got our county partner who has an ambitious goal to add 1,000 housing units to match out 1,500 units. The goal is to really flood the market to make sure everybody has a safe place to sleep with the upcoming winter. I think it's going quite well."
Wilson took aim at progressives he accused of facilitating the crisis, even handing out tents in Portland, commenting: "Letting people suffer and die on the street is not progress. It's helplessness, it's a government not guiding itself with morals…any city that lets its citizenry live and die on the street, it's just cruel."
He added: "The jurisdiction I'm from, the county, was known to hand out tents and when you have a jurisdiction actively fostering that unhealthy, unsafe behaviour—it's really hard to reverse that but we're reversing it now."
Wilson said he was working with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek to boost housing supply as part of which they saved system developmental charges, which builders typically have to pay, for three years for 5,000 housing units to promote construction.
West Coast Progressive Backlash
The past few months have seen a number of progressive Democratic mayors in West Coast cities, many of whom undertook radical criminal justice reform following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer, removed from office.
In San Francisco Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie beat London Breed, the city's first Black woman mayor, in November with a pledge to crack down on crime and homelessness.
November also saw the recall of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, who critics blamed for a crime surge in the city, who was later replaced by former House Democrat Barbara Lee.
Cascadia High Speed Rail
Wilson is an enthusiastic supporter of plans to construct a new high-speed rail line stretching from Oregon to Vancouver in British Columbia, and argued this would help solve Portland's housing crisis by letting people commute in from further away.
Referring to the U.S., which doesn't have any operational high speed rail lines, Wilson said: "Our system continues to be compacted and stagnant. The great cities from around the world are all tending to go towards high-speed rail and we need an opportunity to unlock our economic renaissance which is what's missing in our country right now and high speed rail would move us forward and get us completing again with the world from a leadership perspective."
The International Union of Railways (UIC) defines high speed rail lines as having trains operating at a minimum of 250 kilometers per hour (155 miles per hour) on specially built tracks.
The U.S. High Speed Rail Association paid travel and hotel expenses for Newsweek reporter James Bickerton to attend its 2025 annual conference.
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