Sue DeRose’s landlords told her they were raising her rent by 10.06% effective May 1, but she could get a $27 discount — provided she kept her mouth shut.
All she had to do was sign a contract in which she promised (among other things) not to protest or sue the corporation that owns her Forest Grove manufactured home park. Instead, she decided to talk to the Oregon House Committee on Housing and Homelessness.
“The biggest problem is this illegal and insulting $27 hush money,” DeRose told committee members. “To be told I cannot talk to you or to a lawyer for $27 — or any amount for that matter — is unconscionable.”
DeRose joined a packed crowd in Hearing Room F at the Capitol in Salem as committee members heard testimony on House Bill 3054. While people in manufactured and floating homes own their residences, they have to rent space for the homes from landlords.
The Democrat-led bill limits increases for space rent in manufactured home parks and marinas to reflect the Consumer Price Index. It also imposes a 10% limit on increased rent for new tenants.
Dark prophecies
Landlords are not happy about it. In fact, if the 2025 Oregon Legislature was a movie, it might be called “The Landlords Strike Back.”
At least many landlords hope to strike back as they look to the Legislature for ways to raise rents and evict tenants after years of feeling unfairly hampered.
“I want to see small businesses succeed, and I want to see more affordable housing,” Jennifer Bagshaw, an Ashland manufactured home park owner, told lawmakers. “Rent control — especially vacancy control — will drive compassionate landlords like me out of business and evict more Oregonians out of their homes.”
Landlords frequently talk about going under if the cost of doing business increases. “I fear, with this legislation, we will have to close every single park in the state of Oregon that we own,” testified Joe Tobin, whose family owns a string of manufactured home parks. And not just his business will be affected, he warned. “It will spell the end of manufactured housing in Oregon.”
Republicans have responded to landlords by introducing bills to repeal rent limits and facilitate evictions while opposing efforts to strengthen legal protections for renters. State Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, told the committee members he doesn’t buy landlords’ dreary prophecies — especially regarding manufactured homes.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations in the last few years — some of them have been arguments — around bills that constrain rental rates,” Golden said.
“Every time, we hear dire warnings about the wreckage that comes from meddling with the free market,” he added. “It has become 100% clear that we’re not talking about a free market here. The cornerstone of free markets and the lubrication for real competition is consumer choice. As a practical matter, the tenants in these parks don’t have that choice.”
Unrelenting increases
House Bill 3054 is the first housing bill to receive a public hearing during the 2025 legislative session, which continues through the end of June.
DeRose said rent in her park has increased 66.7% since 2016. Residents of manufactured and floating homes often can’t afford rent increases, State Rep. Courtney Neron, D-King City, told the committee.
“They’re seniors on fixed incomes, working families and long-time residents who are facing unrelenting rent increases in manufactured home communities that far exceed the modest cost-of-living adjustments they earn or receive,” Neron said.
“Manufactured home parks are home to thousands of Oregonians who deserve fairness, stability, dignity and reassurance that the state is doing everything it can to ensure they stay housed,” he said.
Bagshaw insisted she needs to raise space rents because the cost of maintenance and infrastructure continue to rise. “These things cost big money,” she said. “This year, I’m spending $13,000 on tree maintenance alone. My employee health insurance premium increased by 20% last year.”
She reiterated that her business is on the line. “Without the ability to adjust rents when homes turn over, the rising costs will become unmanageable — forcing small landlords like me to sell,” she added. “The likely buyers will be real estate investment trusts whose profit-driven practices are the ones causing this whole mess.”
Rent and homelessness
Raising rent comes with a cost borne by more than the renter, Jimmy Jones, Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency executive director, told members of the committee during their first meeting of the session Jan. 22.
“For every $100 increase for an average rent in the community, we get a 9% increase in the homeless population,” Jones said. “Those two things are tied directly nationally. We see that every single time.”
Landlords began shaking their fists in 2020 when the pandemic resulted in a statewide eviction moratorium. The moratorium expired in June of the following year. Still, lawmakers passed a Safe Harbor law that protected tenants who applied for emergency rental assistance from evictions while their applications were processed.
Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 611 in 2023 to limit annual rent increases to 10%. However, the cap only applied to buildings at least 15 years old and didn’t apply at all to subsidized housing.
Nonetheless, many landlords continue to complain that it’s increasingly difficult to extract rent and toss nonpaying tenants out. Republicans, led by state Sen. David Brock Smith, R-Port Orford, want to change that with legislation such as Senate Bill 496. The bill would repeal limits on rent increases passed in 2023.
State Rep. Kevin Mannix, R-Salem, introduced House Bill 2297 this session, which would require people to pay accruing rent or face eviction.
Burdened by rent
Madeline Miller, ECOnorthwest senior project manager, told committee members at the Jan. 22 meeting that rent already places a formidable burden on Oregonians. Her company specializes in land-use planning and policy.
Citing data from 2023, Miller told the committee that Portland residents making less than $20,000 per year spend, on average, 89% of their gross income on housing. People who make $100,000 or more spend only 5%. In the middle are people who make between $50,000 and $74,000. They spend half their income on housing.
“Severe cost-burdening is when you spend 50% or more of your income on housing,” Miller explained. “As you can imagine, this is a bigger problem for households that have less money to begin with. If you’re spending 60% of your $1,200 monthly income, that doesn’t leave very much left over at the end of the month for household necessities and child care and transportation.”
Jane Titchenal of Keizer knows about the burden of rent from more than statistics. The single mother’s rent just went up to $1,700. “That’s half my check right there,” she told Street Roots.
Titchenal helped organize a protest at the Capitol building Jan. 18, two days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Beyond providing a bulwark against the excesses of a second Trump administration, Oregon must address a wide range of issues, including housing and homelessness, she said.
“These investment companies aren’t struggling like the rest of us,” Titchenal said. “If we as a community want to end homelessness, we have to recognize our part in it, and landlords have to recognize their part in it too.”
Systemic questions need to be asked, she added. “When you think of landlords, you might think of individuals owning these spaces,” Titchenal said. “My complex is owned by an investment company. You have to ask yourself who is profiting from these rent increases and why.”
Supply and demand
A 2020 report by the United States Government Accountability Office confirmed what Jones told committee members — that a $100 increase in a region’s median rent leads to a 9% increase in homelessness.
Lorelei Juntunen, ECOnorthwest president and CEO, advised committee members at the same meeting to provide rental vouchers and remove barriers to housing production, especially apartments and other multifamily developments.
Development favors the affluent, Juntunen said. “Most of the investment — especially for multifamily development — comes from the capital markets,” she told the committee. “That money is going to go to wherever it can get the highest return and has the least amount of risk. For developers, access to capital has become a real issue.”
Oregon lawmakers have recently dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to housing construction. They ended their 31-day, even-year short session last March by approving $376 million to increase housing construction while easing local urban growth boundaries restrictions.
Despite all that money, Juntunen told committee members that supply has little hope of catching up with demand. “The reason there is a housing crisis is an imbalance between the supply of housing and the demand for that housing,” she said.
Oregon has a lot of catching up to do. “Without digging ourselves out of our current hole, we can’t just keep building for future population growth,” Miller said. “We also have to catch up with the underproduction we’ve been digging into the past several decades.”
Meanwhile, more Oregonians fall into unsheltered homelessness.
Grim arithmetic
Megan Bolton, Oregon Housing and Community Services Department assistant director of research, presented numbers to the Senate Committee on Housing and Development Jan. 22.
Mere hours before she spoke to the committee, Portland State University researchers released their 2024 Oregon Statewide Homelessness Estimates — their fourth report since 2021.
Sharing the results, Bolton told committee members that from January 2023 to January 2024 there was a:
24% increase in sheltered homelessness — representing 1,736 more people in shelters for a total of 8,842 people. Bolton said this “appears to be the largest statewide increase in sheltered homelessness since detailed reporting began in 2007.”
16% overall increase in unsheltered homelessness.
31% increase in shelter capacity. Some 2,450 year-round shelter beds were added across the state for a total of 10,408 year-round beds.
“We do still know that, despite this increase, that no county that completed a sheltered and unsheltered count in 2024 had enough shelter beds for everyone experiencing homelessness,” Bolton told the committee.
Bolton also reported that 21 counties increased year-round shelter beds.
22,072 students across the state experienced some form of homelessness (unsheltered, sheltered or doubled up), representing 4% of all Oregon students. Of those students, 15,377 were doubled up, 1,277 were in motels, 2,438 were in shelters and 2,980 were unsheltered.
The number of unsheltered students seemed to shock committee member Deb Patterson, D-Salem. “Even one night for one kid on the street is just unacceptable, and it’s not OK,” she said.
All told, Bolton reported that an estimated 43,670 people across Oregon may have been experiencing some form of homelessness in 2022.
The racial disparities were evident, Bolton added. Statewide, people of color often experienced homelessness at rates disproportionately higher than their percentage of the overall population. American Indian, Alaska Native and Indigenous Oregonians experienced homelessness at a rate 5.84 times higher than their proportion of the population, she said.
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander Oregonians experienced homelessness at a rate 4.3 times higher than their proportion of the population, she added. Black, African American or African Oregonians experienced homelessness at a rate 3.12 times higher than their proportion of the population.
(Street Roots is using demographic terms from the 2024 Oregon Statewide Homelessness Estimates report.)
Minority retorts
Republicans in both chambers have delivered a quartet of bills to roll back protections on unsheltered people remaining on public property. The nearly identical bills — Senate bills 593 and 645 and House bills 2432 and 2445 — repeal House bills 3115 and 3124 (passed in 2021) governing the removal of homeless people from public property.
The bills follow a June 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the majority of justices, based on a Grants Pass case, ruled that cities could ban people experiencing unsheltered homelessness from sleeping in public.
Another bill this session, Senate Bill 359, allows people to complain to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality if they believe a homeless camp is dumping waste into state waters.
Such Republican-led efforts might appear to have little chance in a Legislature where Democrats control 18 of the 30 seats in the Senate and 36 of the 60 in the House. However, many Democrats tell Street Roots privately that their constituents are angered by visible homelessness. Plus, money is on the side of the highly vocal and organized property owners in landlord/tenant issues.
‘It’s cold out there’
Republican causes may not be all that lost at the Capitol.
Just outside its marble walls, Jones reminded the House committee on Jan. 22 that people living on — or about to live on — the street need immediate help.
“Until we get to the point that we can build an adequate number of units across the state, there’s some evidence here we should take a more aggressive approach to homeless services in general, toward housing — especially toward some of the eviction issues that are facing the state today,” he said.
Bill Bateman, Oregon State Tenants Association president, told the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness he hopes they hear what people are telling them. “Please listen and hear the reports of threats, intimidation, delays or nonexistent maintenance because, ladies and gentlemen, it’s cold out there,” he said.
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This article appears in February 12, 2025.