When state representatives and senators come to Salem to begin the 83rd Oregon Legislative Assembly Tuesday, Jan. 21, they bring a wide range of aspirations and agendas.
Trinidad, a man who lives in the woods of Wallace Marine Park, 2.4 miles away from the Oregon Capitol Building, has his own aspirations. He wants to eat today.
Legislators will discuss hungry and homeless people like Trinidad a lot between Jan. 21 and when the Legislature officially adjourns 23 weeks later, on Sunday, June 29.
“It has gotten so much worse”
Despite all such politicians’ talk, Trinidad continues to live in the park — session after session. “It has gotten so much worse,” he said.
No matter what happens in this legislative session, it won’t help Melinda Lou Kayser. She died last Nov. 19 in front of a Salem fast-food restaurant just a few blocks from the Capitol. “She was mentally ill, sitting in her feces, unable to walk, talking to herself on the sidewalk with just a tarp over her head,” Kayser’s daughter (who asked that her name be withheld) told Street Roots.
A local warming shelter had turned her away. “They told her to try again when the temperature was freezing because maybe that would be considered her being in danger,” Kayser’s daughter said.
Legislators will bandy about millions of dollars this year, but one of Trinidad’s neighbors at Wallace Marine Park said she would be happy if she just had a pair of warm, dry boots for the coming weeks.
Advocates for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness told Street Roots last week that a few pairs of boots might be a lofty expectation this legislative session.
“Grave concerns around the civil liberties issues”
Things may soon get even worse for Oregon’s estimated 23,000 unsheltered people — the latest number given in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual homelessness census.
First, Donald Trump will be sworn in as president the day before the Legislature convenes.
Trump talks about arresting homeless people for being on public property and forcing them to live in government encampments. Those who refuse to comply could be thrown in prison or sent to mental institutions.
Jimmy Jones, the executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency in Salem, said Trump would receive considerable support in his efforts in Oregon despite the state’s commanding Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
State lawmakers paved the way for Trump by recriminalizing drug possession in the 2024 short session with House Bill 4002. The bill created “deflection courts” around the state to permit those charged with drug possession to enter deflection programs or face prosecution.
“I have grave, grave concerns around the civil liberties issues around this criminalization of homelessness,” Jones said. “I find it offensive to use these deflection courts to force people into drug treatment.”
The U.S. Supreme Court also dealt Oregon’s unsheltered population a blow in June last year when the court’s conservative majority upheld a Grants Pass law to impose criminal penalties for camping in public.
In the wake of the court ruling, Oregon lawmakers (including many Democrats) talked about tweaking House Bill 3115. The bill, passed during the 2021 session, requires local laws against homeless camping on public property to be “objectively reasonable” regarding time, place and manner.
Many legislators say the bill requires tighter definitions. Advocates such as Jones fear such talk is political shorthand for watering down the bill’s protection to the point of meaninglessness.
“The ink on 3115 was barely dry when a lot of elected officials began pushing the governor to set those regulations aside,” Jones said. “A lot of Democrats are facing pressure in their home districts. The general public just wants visible poverty to go away. They don’t really care how it goes away, and that puts us in a dangerous position.”
“They’re going to have to lean into prevention”
A handful of Democratic lawmakers admit — albeit privately — that they care less about the people who sleep on the street than they do about registered voters with roofs over their heads.
One representative from a rural district anonymously told Street Roots that he and his fellow Democrats care primarily for what they call the “but fors” — people who would have shelter but for a job loss, natural disaster or medical expenses.
Those people can be helped with state assistance and thereby reduce the visibly homeless population and quell voters’ concerns, he said. Other people simply “want to be homeless” and cannot be helped, the representative said.
Jones said legislators should watch that kind of talk. “They’re going to have to lean into prevention,” he said. “A lot of legislators won’t want to spend the money on rent support, but if the focus is to be on the ‘but fors,’ they need to put their money where their mouths are, and frankly, I don’t know if that’s going to be enough.”
Oregon puts more people on the street than in housing, he added. And it’s not because anyone wants to be homeless, he said.
“The homeless population has grown, and while we don’t know exactly how much it has grown, everyone’s gut instinct is that it has grown considerably,” Jones said. “Most of the economic drivers pushing people into homelessness are getting worse. We’re seeing more first-time homeless people.”
Lawmakers are being short-sighted if they don’t focus on preventing homelessness, said Donovan Scribes, the strategic communications adviser for the Community Alliance of Tenants, or CAT, in Portland.
“What we’re seeing on the street now is high-rent homelessness,” he told Street Roots. “Construction is good, but generally, people in housing right now are getting evicted. More rental assistance for folks is one of the best ways we can keep people housed.”
Other housing advocates echoed Scribes’ thoughts.
“As important as it is to build new stock, we cannot allow thousands of people every year to become homeless,” Cameron Herrington, the director of policy and advocacy for Neighborhood Partnerships in Portland, told Street Roots.
“Construction is going to take time,” he said. “Meanwhile, we have to protect people.”
“We want to close that loophole”
CAT and other housing advocates spent much of the 2023 session trying to rein in rent increases through Senate Bill 611. While it capped rent increases, landlords successfully lobbied for a higher cap.
State Sen. Wlnsvey Campos, D-Aloha, introduced the bill early in the session with an annual rent cap of no more than 8% — or 3% plus inflation (whichever was lower).
When the bill emerged from the Senate Rules Committee in May 2023, the annual cap was 10% — or 7% plus inflation. And the cap didn’t apply at all to buildings less than 15 years old.
“Many of the most egregious rent hikes are happening in those newer buildings,” state Rep. Farrah Chaichi, D-Beaverton, said at the time. “So we will continue to see outrageous rent increases contributing to our growing homeless population.”
Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber, D-Portland, was more upbeat about Senate Bill 611 — telling Street Roots in 2023 that the bill “will help keep more Oregonians housed by stabilizing rents when families are struggling with high inflation.”
Landlords wanted a much higher cap, Scribes said. “In the sausage-making, we got it down to 10% as the absolute cap, but it only applies to buildings 15 years or older. We want to close that loophole this year or bring that loophole down to seven years to apply to more buildings.”
Most Oregonians pay more than 30% of their monthly income for rent and are severely rent-burdened, he added.
“There’s a direct correlation between the rising homelessness we see in every corner of our state and the fact that we have one of the highest numbers of rent-burdened residents in the country,” Scribes said.
Gov. Tina Kotek entered the 2023 session with an ambitious agenda that called for the construction of 36,000 new affordable housing units in Oregon.
“There’s a larger issue here,” Scribes said. “The root of it is corporate price gouging. We’re mostly in an affordability crisis in Oregon. You can get damn near a mansion in Texas for what you pay here.”
“Oregonians need cheaper housing”
Democrats secured majorities in the November election in the Oregon House and Senate. The session begins with Democrats controlling 17 of the 30 seats in the Senate and 35 of the 60 seats in the House. A supermajority in the Legislature makes their spending decisions impervious to Republican challenges.
However, Jones said Democrats face pressure from other forces than the opposition party — especially regarding issues such as rental assistance and eviction protection.
Legislators approved more than $63 million in rental assistance in 2020 and declared a moratorium on evictions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, many other people want that money.
“Eviction prevention has been an especially sore point in the state over the past 10 years,” Jones said. “State legislators have pumped $1.2 billion in state and federal money into eviction prevention since 2020. The Legislature is tired of that level of commitment. They would rather focus on other priorities, such as education and the (Public Employees Retirement System, or PERS,) crisis. Housing has to fit into the middle of that.”
PERS is often decried as a drain on educational resources by local school officials.
Education will ultimately suffer a heavier toll if families can’t afford to stay in their homes, Jones said.
“Oregonians need cheaper housing,” he said. “Construction takes time. We need to find ways to protect low-income residents and our most vulnerable from rent increases that have lost all touch with reality.”
Still, he admitted, rent control remains a difficult debate.
“One camp feels rent controls push landlords to raise rents as much and as often as they can,” he said. “The other camp believes landlords would raise rents anyway. My goal has always been to limit rent increases to what makes reasonable sense and have reasonable guaranteed incomes.”
“It’s not a very sexy sort of process”
Jones said he doesn’t want to sound too cynical about Kotek’s performance since taking office two years ago. “The status of where we are in this administration after two years is pretty good,” he said. “We’re likely to see more progress.”
He expressed particular admiration for the Sustainable Shelter Work Group, which was jointly convened by Kotek and state Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, who chairs the House Interim Committee on Housing and Homelessness.
The work group creates a process for shelters and other organizations receiving state money to report to the state and create a new level of accountability.
Specifically, the work group created ways to (among other things):
Retain an emergency housing account and state funding system for homelessness assistance.
Coordinate new shelter money on a regional level.
Create a new regional model for local shelters.
Create ways to fund nontraditional shelters while maintaining consistent standards.
“It’s not a very sexy sort of process — dealing with data — but it’s a massive improvement over what we had before,” Jones said.
Bills for the upcoming session are still being drafted. However, Jones said he is particularly interested in Marsh carrying the work group recommendations to the entire Legislature.
“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of political will”
State Sen. Deb Patterson, D-Salem, is shepherding recommendations to change the procedures when hospitals discharge patients who are living on the streets. Recommendations include working with shelters and other social agencies to ensure patients are released to healthy environments.
Those recommendations would have carried the force of law if Senate Bill 1076 had passed during the 2023 session. The bill made it as far as a scheduled work session before the Senate Committee on Health Care, before Patterson (who chairs the committee) pulled the plug.
Patterson co-sponsored the bill with state Sen. Kayse Jama, D-Portland, and state Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth. Patterson withdrew her support and declined to hold the work session because she said the bill was no longer necessary.
Oregon Hospital Association officials and others in the medical community are willing to work in “good faith” with service providers, Patterson said at the time.
Jones said any changes to hospital procedures will likely come as recommendations rather than regulations. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of political will to put any burdens on hospitals,” he said.
“We’re heading back to that same status”
In addition to efforts to lower rent caps and protect renters from evictions, Jones said the session will likely see additional efforts to protect people in manufactured homes from equity groups jacking up rent.
He added he doesn’t hear much talk about raising Oregon’s minimum wage, even as inflation pushes people into housing instability. Similarly, there are no plans on the table to increase energy assistance despite energy costs increasing by 30% in recent years.
Jones said he wants to see more money go to local food banks. Food bank demand has increased 300% since 2019, and hundreds of thousands of Oregonians need assistance, he said.
Oregon was ranked the hungriest state in the country in 1997. “I fear we’re heading back to that same status,” Jones said.
In terms of other legislative priorities this session, CAT is part of a network that includes Stable Homes for Oregon Families and the Fair Shot Coalition. They want to combine forces this session to earmark money for culturally specific housing organizations, Scribes said.
“The highest level of evictions is in Black families,” he said. “We’re only 2% of the population, but we have the highest rate in terms of evictions. Post-COVID, Oregon in general has the highest level of evictions in our state history.”
“Don’t obey in advance”
Another marginalized group in imminent peril — especially with the incoming presidential administration — is Oregon’s immigrant community.
Trump made deporting more than 10 million immigrants lacking legal status a cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. Hoping Kamala Harris would defeat Trump, Oregon’s immigrant advocates once had other plans for the upcoming legislative session.
“There’s the agenda we were planning for back in the summer, but there’s also the agenda that’s going to be taking a higher priority with the Trump administration coming in,” Reyna Lopez, the executive director of the farmworkers union Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Farmworkers and Treeplanters United), or PCUN, told Street Roots. “Sometimes we don’t get to pick our priorities.”
Leaders of PCUN are now working on plans to protect people from Trump’s deportation agenda.
“There are lot of organizations and community organizers who are building up their support,” Lopez said. “The clock is ticking, but it’s not going to happen on Day 1. The government doesn’t have the resources to do all of this right away.”
Deportations may take different forms than massive roundups, she said. Extreme rhetoric is often used to scare people into leaving on their own, she added.
“Don’t obey in advance,” Lopez advised. “Don’t self-deport or do anything in haste.”
She added, “We’re also asking every organization to level up and make sure everything is squeaky clean. They could label any of our organizations as terrorist organizations. We know we’re not terrorists, but that could be another tool to silence people who disagree politically with the administration.”
Meanwhile, union leaders are asking lawmakers to approve an Immigrant Rights Package. “This a very important, proactive way to provide a strong offense through a strong defense and create a community where everyone can thrive,” Lopez said.
The package includes $15 million to guarantee legal representation and due process to immigrants facing deportation and other legal challenges. Such legal protections were passed during the 2023 session and have already helped more than 10,000 Oregonians, Lopez said.
Nonetheless, she said, the waiting list for legal services remains formidable.
Rep. Marsh is asking for $10 million in farmworker disaster relief to provide people with time off, disaster pay and other relief when they face toxic smoke, extreme heat and other crises.
In addition, union leaders seek $14 million for eviction prevention and rental assistance and $2 million to provide interpreters for Indigenous language speakers in schools, hospitals, courts and other public buildings.
Although a specific dollar amount has not been identified, advocates also want additional money for the Food for All Campaign to ensure food is available for young people and elders.
“We have a supermajority, but we can’t take that for granted,” Lopez said. “We still have a lot of organizing we have to do to protect our community.”
Even before Trump was re-elected, union leaders were drafting Legislative Concept 26-97 to create Oregon’s first Farmworkers Workplace Standards Board. “This is going to be a really good way for setting workplace standards,” Lopez said. “We could really build a stable workforce.”
“Trying to hold on to what we have”
If nothing else, this session Scribes said he would like to see the protections of Senate Bill 611 extended. “I’m hoping during the session that bringing the cap down is not controversial,” he said. “It shouldn’t be controversial. It’s literally the least we can do. We see the real-life impact on the day-to-day level, and the truth is we’re in a crisis.”
Jones said he and other advocates just don’t want to lose any ground in 2025.
“The policy side is a great unknown,” he said. “There are so many questions about how and how much that are still up in the air. We’ll be lucky to preserve the protections we have in 2025. Most of us who are advocates are trying to hold on to what we have rather than gain new protections.”
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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This article appears in January 15, 2025.