On the homeless and housing front: What’s at stake in Oregon.

The story of our homeless and housing crisis told through a political lens is a complex story made up of a thousand side stories. It’s a story that’s hard to capture, let alone measure, because of its depth. Still, it’s a story that is easily manipulated for political purposes.

It is a story of how the rich and powerful have waged countless campaigns against the government and/or the poor by claiming to always have the answers, holding everyone accountable but themselves — especially when it comes to protecting their own self-interest in relation to housing policy.

A story that tends to repeat itself, almost like the story of Chicken Little, told by the old guard and special interests who consistently claim the sky is falling by twisting the story of homelessness and poverty so that the rich and powerful are somehow always the victims.

It’s a story of how federal disinvestment in our social safety net, gentrification and structural racism continues to result in entire communities being displaced without any thoughtful or sophisticated public policy to support their well-being or understanding of the harm created, both personally and systematically.

It’s a story about how poor, low and middle-class communities, mostly people of color, small wage earners and the elderly have been left to go it alone while the real estate and banking industry have profited in the billions of dollars.

It’s a story of the criminal justice system preying on the poor and creating lifelong barriers to housing and opportunity. It’s a story of a broken healthcare, addiction and foster care system. All to subsidize our country’s largest corporations and maintain corporate welfare.

It’s a story about how many people and institutions believe millions of homeowners should benefit from government subsidies with first time home buyer opportunities and mortgage interest deductions programs, but believe millions of other Americans living on a fixed income shouldn’t receive any kind of housing subsidies or benefits at all.

It's a story of even amidst a global pandemic and an ongoing housing crisis rents around the country continue to skyrocket, leaving human beings not able to afford a one or two room apartment, and being forced to double up with others, or live in a tent off an exit ramp and be criminalized for their very existence.

In my home state of Oregon, housing for the poor and homeless wasn’t even a Top 10 issue in Oregon until around 2016, some eight years after the Great Recession began and thirty plus years after the birth of modern-day homelessness and after tens of thousands of Oregonians had experienced life without a safe place to call home.

For years legislators and special interests in Oregon, not unlike many state capitals, watched poor people struggle for decades without solving our broken tax structure, wage gaps or developing any kind of coherent poverty agenda. (It wasn’t for the lack of trying on housing advocates part).

The only reason Oregon avoided everything going sideways on the homeless and housing front for so long was that the housing market remained somewhat soft and relatively cheap for West Coast standards. In many ways this helped reinforce the idea that we didn’t need to invest in large-scale affordable housing or regulate landlords or the housing market or any number of progressive policies because we weren’t like “California” or “Washington.”

From the late 1980s up until the time of the Great Recession in 2008ish local and stateside governments maintained (still do) a strong rent assistance strategy to end people’s homelessness. It wasn’t perfect (and was woefully underfunded) and was no replacement for the massive federal disinvestment in affordable housing stock, but it still supported thousands of people with housing instability.

Local government and nonprofits were able to house a lot of people on the private housing market because vacancies were available, and rent remained relatively cheap. Plus, for much of that time, Oregon’s largest city (Portland) still had a number of cheap SROs (single-room occupancy) to support our lowest income residents, something that no longer exists in Portland or any other community in Oregon today.

It was during this time period (2008-12ish) that everything in Oregon started to unravel on the homeless and housing front. While the rich and powerful (developers, landlords, realtors, larger corporations, wealthy homeowners, travel and tech industry, etc.) began to haul in record profits, many Oregonians were scrambling just to make ends meet. People moved to Oregon in droves. Vacancy rates plummeted. Rents and home prices skyrocketed. Wages stagnated. Our mental health and tax systems remained broken and government no longer had a way to cheaply subsidize housing for people on fixed or no incomes at all.  

The cost of first and last month's rent for an average rental in the city/state in 2012 went from something that was already expensive for many people to something that was more than unreasonable for most working families by 2016 to what it is today, which is more or less robbery.

The entire reason the homeless emergency became popular for local communities was because local governments (that already didn’t have the support they needed from the state or the feds) realized the measly investments they were making in their housing strategy wasn’t going to put a dent into the rising number of people experiencing homelessness coming out of the recession (many of which were new families, elders and returning war vets) because the rising cost of rental housing and home ownership costs.

In time, elected officials (at-least the ones that were sophisticated) began to understand they no longer had the necessary tools available to mitigate the oncoming housing crisis that would lead to our current realities happening on our streets today. Hence, the homeless and housing emergencies.

The reality is the world we find ourselves in today on the homeless and housing front was always going to happen. Back then, the question was at what scale, how quickly would the train come off the tracks and how much could we accomplish before things potentially go sideways.

People began to organize. Coalitions were formed. Tenants built power. Agitators agitated. Elected officials (Nick Fish, Deborah Kafoury, Tina Kotek, to be specific) began to work with advocates and political strategists to think about pathways forward given the enormity of what was beginning to transpire. It was all hands-on deck.

One part of the political establishment became very uncomfortable, while another part of the establishment began to embrace all viable options. The City of Portland and the State of Oregon went from having almost no progressive housing polices (zoning, land-use related to affordable housing, renter’s rights, ongoing revenue options, etc.) post-recession to everything being on the table.

By 2016, our collective efforts began to pay off. Things started to move (after years of community organizing). What followed would be the Portland region voting to support close to one-billion dollars to support building and preserving affordable housing in the region. Followed by a voter approved $2.5 billion homeless services measure in the region.

Things like renter’s rights, holding landlords accountable, zoning and land use policies began to come online, and continue to do so today. The fight continues.

Statewide, we were investing zero bond dollars to develop affordable housing statewide. By 2021, the state began investing $410 million in affordable housing, including construction for permanent supportive housing. Those units are currently being built.

In 2015, the state of Oregon was providing about $10 million going towards rent assistance and shelters statewide. Today, the state is investing roughly $350 million for emergency rent assistance ($200 million was emergency COVID response) plus has invested $115 million for what is called Project Turnkey, a program that works to acquire hotels/motels to help shelter and transitionally house individuals and families around the state.

A document recording fee, which historically was really the only source of ongoing revenue statewide for homeless services and affordable housing was about $23 million bi-annually. Today, it brings in about $90 million. Last, but not least. In 2015, we were investing about $5 million to preserve affordable housing statewide. That number stands today at $165 million.

And still, that doesn’t get us to scale to tackle the housing crisis in Oregon, or anywhere else for that matter. We remain hopeful that Democrats federally will bring forward historic housing investments, but no one is holding their breath.

The reality is for poor people, the great recession never really ended. It’s just kept getting worse. For many Americans, including Oregonians, the rising costs of housing, the lack of wages for poor and blue-collar workers and the cost of living has simply become to much for many individuals and families to manage.

A reflection of this can be seen in the thousands of human beings living in tents and residing in their cars and RVs all across this land. No question, things are bad out there. Throw in a global pandemic, a climate crisis and wildfires displacing poor and working-class people in the West (every season now), and an already existing housing crisis and it’s been a recipe for disaster.

Unfortunately, special interests (backed by the rich and powerful) and opportunistic politicians in Oregon (and elsewhere) have used these circumstances to twist the story of homelessness and poverty into a message that housing advocates have somehow failed in our efforts to tackle the problem as reflected by the number of people currently sleeping on our streets.

By blaming non-profits, local governments, housing advocates and our current strategies (housing first) for the problem of homelessness itself, these same special interest groups, who have protected their own self-interests at every turn for decades, now want to drive their own housing agenda and force local governments throughout Oregon to criminalize the poor, build mass shelters/camps and abandoned strategies to build deeply affordable housing throughout the state.  

It’s my humble opinion these same special interests intend on dismantling many of the things we’ve been able to accomplish. How do they intend on doing this? One of the ways is by electing a Republican Governor (and arguably a Portland city council seat) to office that will pave the way for these moneyed interests to completely control this state’s housing agenda.

The other is to completely demoralize a public that believes government can’t solve homelessness to maintain their stranglehold on our current tax structure to ensure that things like corporate welfare remain steadfast (Think Phil Knight and Nike), and that any kind of future reforms don’t go so far as to cut more into both people and institutions ongoing profit margins (Think landlords, developers, realtors, the wealthy). In this world mass shelters and jail are as good as housing, so long as we don’t have to visibly see the poor and it doesn’t effect our day-to-day lives and commerce.

Honestly, the idea that housing advocates, a hand-full of politicians that put everything they had into the moment and non-profits throughout the state could stop an ongoing 40-year-old national housing crisis, and a system riddled with housing discrimination, structural racism and massive income disparities in the last six-years (since many of these housing policies and investments in Oregon were created) isn’t even based in reality. In fact, it’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who would actually think otherwise, yet here we are. The joy (cruelty) of American politics.

Saying all that, beyond all the noise, what we collectively really should be asking ourselves isn’t if we are investing too much money in housing and social safety net programs in Oregon without seeing the necessary results, it’s are we investing enough?

The policy changes that have taken place and the money being invested on the homeless and housing front should have been happening all along. If the idea is that housing is a public infrastructure meant to support a healthy society then what we are investing in today should at the very least remain the baseline, while we continue to work towards solutions to the larger challenges we collectively face. Regardless, we still have a lot of work to do.

We can’t control outside forces like inflation, recessions, global pandemics, right-wing zealots, short-sided politicians and special interests who believe we should tear it all down for their own self-interests. We can control how we respond. The choice is really up to us.  

Vote Tina Kotek for Oregon Governor and Jo Ann Hardesty for Portland city council.

Our future depends on it.