New Study Traces the Winding, Often Blocked Paths People Take Through Homelessness

A sweeping new study from Portland State University has mapped, in unprecedented detail, the tangled journeys that people take through homelessness, revealing a landscape in which determination is rarely enough and where progress often depends on luck as much as on policy. The report, titled “Without a Map: A Lived Experience Study of the Paths People Create Through Homelessness,” is the second and final installment of the Multnomah County-funded Pathways study, produced by the university’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative together with the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Drawing on 541 surveys and 29 in-depth journey-mapping interviews conducted with people who have experienced homelessness in Multnomah County, Oregon, the publication offers one of the most granular portraits to date of how individuals navigate, survive and attempt to exit housing loss in a major American county. Its central finding is deceptively simple: nearly everyone experiencing homelessness wants a home, but the systems meant to provide one frequently stand in the way.

The foundation for the final report was laid earlier, when the first phase of the Pathways study was released in April 2026. That phase established, through hundreds of surveys, that 98 percent of unhoused participants wanted permanent housing, a figure that directly counters persistent public narratives suggesting that many people experiencing homelessness prefer to remain unsheltered. The second phase deepened that quantitative picture by pairing it with qualitative evidence. Researchers interviewed participants about the full arc of their experiences, from the circumstances that preceded housing loss to the slow, often contradictory process of engaging with homeless services. By combining statistical breadth with narrative depth, the study aimed to capture not just how many people are affected but how the pathway into and out of homelessness actually unfolds over time.

A distinctive methodological feature of the research was its co-design with the Transformational Research for Equity and Experience in Shelter committee, a group composed entirely of people with lived experience of homelessness. Rather than treating formerly and currently unhoused individuals as passive subjects, the research team positioned them as analytic partners capable of interpreting patterns in the data. One study participant captured the rationale plainly, noting that people with lived experience are often invited to share stories, but that their capacity to analyze those experiences matters just as much, because they understand the patterns rather than merely witnessing them. This participatory approach gave the report an insider’s view of how housing service systems are experienced from below, including the emotional and cognitive labor that participants expend simply trying to remain eligible for help.

Lead investigator Kathleen Conte, an assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, summarized the core insight of the findings by explaining that navigating homelessness involves far more than locating a service and accepting it. People, she said, are simultaneously trying to stay safe, meet basic needs, decipher a complicated service system, prove they qualify for assistance, maintain important relationships, advocate for themselves and push forward through long waits and repeated setbacks. The report frames this as a continuous balancing act in which the demands of survival compete directly with the demands of bureaucratic engagement. Missing a call, losing a document or changing shelter locations can unravel weeks of progress, meaning that the population most burdened by the system is also the one asked to perform the most sustained administrative effort within it.

The journey mapping revealed that for many participants, outright homelessness was preceded by a period of hidden homelessness, including couch surfing, living in vehicles and temporary hotel stays. These precursors are largely invisible in official counts, which means the visible crisis often represents a late stage of a much longer decline. Bereavement emerged as a strikingly common trigger: more than 30 percent of interview participants reported that the death of a loved one directly or indirectly contributed to their housing loss. The finding underscores how fragile housing stability can be when household finances and social support depend on a single person’s income or presence, and it suggests that grief and loss deserve greater attention in prevention-oriented policy, which typically focuses on eviction, rent burdens and employment disruption.

Once unhoused, participants described becoming trapped in what the report calls “the churn,” a state in which continuous effort to secure housing is repeatedly frustrated by systemic bottlenecks. These include missing identification documents that are difficult to replace without a fixed address, high turnover among case managers that forces people to retell their histories again and again, and phone calls that simply go unreturned. One participant delivered a pointed assessment of the current service framework, describing it as a system that rewards maintenance rather than transformation. The phrase captures a structural critique: programs are often organized around keeping people engaged and documented rather than around moving them decisively into permanent housing, which can leave individuals indefinitely cycling through shelter beds, waitlists and intake appointments.

Administrative requirements and rigid program thresholds compounded the problem, creating what the researchers describe as a painful mismatch between a person’s immediate needs and the assistance actually available. Participants recounted being denied services because their situations did not fit precise priority definitions, leaving them to navigate fragmented systems without clear guidance about where to turn next. Lori Kelley, planning and evaluation manager for the Multnomah County Homeless Service Department, which supported the study, emphasized that effective policy must be grounded in reality and that the county’s goal was to center the real-world experiences of people using services throughout the entire research process. She described the research as giving policymakers and the public an honest look at what works, what does not and what truly prevents people from reaching their housing goals.

Importantly, the report does not conclude that escape from homelessness is impossible. Participants also described moments when the system worked, when the right support, relationships and opportunities converged at precisely the right time to move them toward housing. Yet the study found that these successes were more often experienced as lucky breaks than as reliable pathways, a distinction with significant policy implications. When exits from homelessness depend on fortunate timing rather than predictable system design, outcomes become inequitable and difficult to scale. The TREES committee pressed this point in its own contribution to the report, stressing that while numbers, charts and data are incredibly important, remembering the humans living without housing, and what those numbers represent, should be the priority guiding interpretation and action.

Based on the combined evidence, the report sets out six core priorities for action, developed in collaboration with the TREES committee. These include expanding diverse affordable housing models tailored to different ages, family structures, disabilities and safety needs; prioritizing prevention and housing stability through flexible early financial support and livable-wage employment before housing is lost; coordinating and standardizing services with centralized information points to reduce administrative runaround; eliminating practices such as involuntary displacements that strip people of belongings, legal documents and case manager relationships; strengthening community support systems through peer networks and culturally specific organizations; and integrating lived experience directly into funding decisions, program design, policy and research. Conte cautioned that no single organization can build the path alone, noting that people in crisis are asked to navigate housing, health care and other systems that do not always connect. If better pathways out of homelessness are the goal, she argued, those systems must work together rather than expecting people to find their own way without a map.

Subject of Research: A lived-experience study of the pathways people take through homelessness and homeless services in Multnomah County, Oregon.

Article Title: New PSU study maps complex journeys through homelessness in final pathways report

Article References: New PSU study maps complex journeys through homelessness in final pathways report. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: homelessness, Portland State University, Multnomah County, housing policy, lived experience, social services, public health, housing instability, poverty, homeless services, prevention, participatory research