Agape Respite Center Offers a Telling Glimpse of Lincoln County’s Homeless Population

By Brian Bahouth

On Monday, September 30, with several days of rain and wind in the forecast, Agape Respite Center in Newport, Oregon, was a busy place.

Agape provides basic needs for people without homes. The center is a long, narrow building with a pair of doors on the side. It’s a couple of blocks east of the Oregon Coast Highway and a few blocks west of Newport’s historic Bayfront, a quarter mile from Newport City Hall. 

At midday, the aroma of food hangs in the air. A few small groups of people, some with pets, stand outside and sip soup from white paper cups.

Inside the boxlike building is a warren of laundry machines, showers, and shelving, and people coming and going. Just inside the doorway, Agape founder and executive director Jamelle Villareal sits behind an old desk across from several whirling clothes dryers.  

Before starting Agape, Villareal worked for the Lincoln County Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program. She says she relied on the Newport-based nonprofit Grace Wins Haven to provide showers, laundry, mail service, clothing, bus tickets, anything that helps a destitute, and often troubled, person without housing. 

But Grace Wins Haven was going to close, owing to the health problems of its founder and longtime director, Traci Goff Flowers. Villareal explained how Agape came to be. 

“So I said, ‘What do you think about me taking over?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely. I love this idea. I love your heart.’”

Agape became a nonprofit in August 2023 and has delivered the same suite of services as Grace Wins Haven since November of last year. Villareal’s husband runs a ministry, Diamonds in the Rough. For her, religious conviction guided the decision to move forward with Agape.

“Me and my husband just believe in being the hands and feet of Jesus. That’s how we decided to go ahead and give back to those who might be underdogs or overlooked or not loved on or just walked over or looked at like nuisances. We see them for who they are.”

The actual number of homeless people is murky. Every year, the federal government mandates the manual counting of individuals experiencing homelessness on a single day in January, the Point-in-Time Count (PIT). 

Despite widely acknowledged inaccuracies, the PIT is a vital tool for making housing development, shelter funding, and long-term planning decisions.

Below are selected results for the 2025 Point-in-Time Count for Lincoln County. See the full 2025 Lincoln County PIT here.

Lincoln County 2025 PIT:
Total homeless count: 498
Sheltered: 247 | Unsheltered: 251
Homeless youth (0–24 years old): 149 (29.9%)

Villareal has seen the demand for services nearly double from the client traffic at Grace Wins Haven. She says Agape client numbers provide an imperfect but telling glimpse of the actual number of Lincoln County residents who live without stable housing. She contends that the actual number of homeless in the county is undercounted.

“We’re averaging about 55 to 65 individuals a day here,” she said while workers shuffled clothing in and out of nearby dryers. “We are open six days a week. Since November of last year, we have had 719 clients, and almost all of them are from Lincoln County.”

A growing number of families rely on Agape services, according to Villareal, and with winter coming on, she’s glad the Lincoln County Community Shelter and Resource Center will open again for the season on November 1. Still, she and her staff feel the pressure of having to raise money locally to meet a growing demand for needed services.

“We cannot do this without the community’s support. We believe that the community is what’s going to keep this place going, and we have to have that community support. 

“I think that there should be no discrimination if they are housed, unhoused, struggling with mental health, any of that. People just need to see these individuals for who they are, because we’re all one paycheck away from possibly losing it.”

Villareal says an undercount of homeless residents ultimately deprives rural areas like Lincoln County of much-needed public resources.

“It’s not just Portland, it’s not just Salem, it’s not just Eugene,” Villareal said emphatically. “We have a large community here that needs to be housed, needs support, and needs funding.”