Jennifer fell $53 behind in rent at the affordable housing complex where she lived in Bend.
She explained the situation to her landlords. They listened attentively. They might even say sympathetically. Then they kicked her out.
Evicting Jennifer last February meant obtaining a court order and arranging for Deschutes County sheriff’s deputies to lock her out of her apartment.
Court records report how all this cost the owners of the Crest Butte Apartments at least $88 — $35 more than Jennifer owed in back rent.
Renters like Jennifer were briefly safe from being evicted in Oregon. State legislators passed a moratorium on evictions in 2020 in response to the pandemic.
The moratorium expired the following year. Minor exceptions were made through a Safe Harbor law that protected tenants who applied for emergency rental assistance from evictions while their applications were processed.
Nonetheless, Becky Straus of the Oregon Law Center told Street Roots that Oregonians have been evicted left and right ever since.
“The housing crisis is an affordability crisis,” Straus said. “Evictions spiked in January when 2,788 Oregon families faced eviction in court — the highest number ever reported in five years of tracking and almost double the pre-pandemic average.”
‘Eviction filings are just the tip of the iceberg’
Affordable housing, it turns out, is a relative term. Ideally, rent should be no more than 30% of a household’s monthly pay. Why?
Credit Edward Brooke for that bit of mathematics. The Republican senator from Massachusetts introduced legislation in 1969 to cap public housing rent at 25% of a person’s gross income.
Then came Ronald Reagan with his budget ax. Congress in the early 1980s cut back on housing programs by raising the threshold to 30%.
For every $100 increase for an average rent in the community, we get a 9% increase in the homeless population
JIMMY JONES
executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency
Mortgage lenders and officials in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have since embraced the 30% rule to measure housing affordability across the entire economy.
Regardless of where the threshold is placed, the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard concluded in 2023 that nearly two-thirds of working-age tenants pay more rent than they can afford.
“The vast majority of these eviction cases are due to rent being unaffordable,” said Straus, the managing attorney of the Oregon Law Center’s Eviction Defense Project. “We know that court eviction filings are just the tip of the iceberg for renters, meaning many more families faced informal eviction before court or owe back rent.”
She added that Jennifer was not able to obtain rental assistance, so she signed a payment agreement she could not meet.
‘Many people are going to lose their homes’
“Eviction defense and tenant services can stop homelessness before people suffer on the streets,” Straus said. “But because of funding cuts, many providers — including the Oregon Law Center — are not able to serve all the families who need legal representation. Without more funding for prevention, more and more people are at risk of being evicted.”
During the 2025 legislative session, experts warned lawmakers that the funding cuts they passed would increase evictions and homelessness.
Jimmy Jones, executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency in Salem, told members of the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness Jan. 22, 2025 that evictions and rent increases carry a cost borne by more than the renter.
“For every $100 increase for an average rent in the community, we get a 9% increase in the homeless population,” he said. “Those two things are tied directly nationally. We see that every single time.”
That statistic comes from a 2020 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Even so, state lawmakers dramatically reduced money for rental assistance and eviction prevention.
“It’s a tough story everywhere,” Jones said. “We saw a reduction from about $172 million in the 2023-25 legislative session to about $44 million in the 2025-27 biennium. That’s not even close to meeting the need, and just solving the problem for the people in eviction court would take something close to $150 million for the 2025-27 cycle.”
When breaking those dollars down to human terms, he said, cruel realities are inescapable.
“Many more people are going to lose their homes,” Jones said. “Some will become homeless. The budget situation ahead will be tough for everyone when the Legislature opens next spring. We are mostly working to hold what we have.”
‘We didn’t truly recover. We didn’t stop the bleeding’
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.
State Rep. Farrah Chaichi, D-Aloha, told Street Roots that lawmakers failed Oregonians by abandoning the eviction moratorium too soon.
“It expired while people were still struggling,” she said. “We didn’t truly recover. We didn’t stop the bleeding.”
Chaichi said she would like to see the Legislature impose a new moratorium when it convenes in Salem for its odd-year regular session starting Tuesday, Jan. 19.
The pandemic may be over, she added, but there seems to be an unending stream of crises.
“I’ve been curious about what ICE’s detention of family members has done to people’s ability to pay rent,” she said. “We could do a moratorium for families whose loved ones have been abducted by ICE.”
She also likes a proposal by her fellow state Sen. Mark Gamba, D-Milwaukie, to tie wages to housing prices.
“This is one of the best things we can do,” she said. “We don’t have a living wage where people can afford to live in Oregon.”
Gamba’s proposal is a clay pigeon that keeps getting shot down. Yet he persists because it’s important, he told his constituents in 2023 when the proposal appeared as House Bill 2699 (its second attempt at passage).
“This is a critical homelessness-prevention measure,” Gamba said. “Except for the very wealthy, housing is nearly always the largest cost impacting an Oregon family. I firmly believe that this concept will not only prevent a huge number of Oregonians from being shoved out onto the street, but will also enable many folks who are currently houseless to rebuild their livelihoods and move back into shelter.”
‘This is a drop in the bucket in the housing market’
The rent crisis and the resulting spike in evictions hit hard in Corvallis. The mid-Willamette Valley community has a population of 62,000 people, including the approximately 25,000 students at Oregon State University.
Although Corvallis has only 10% of the population of Portland, its residents face the greatest rent burdens in Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development.
Benton County averages approximately 300 evictions per year, researchers at the Evicted in Oregon project at Portland State University reported.
During the eviction moratorium, this was reduced to about 30 per year, so the end of the moratorium resulted in a tenfold increase of people losing their homes in Benton County.
Statewide, PSU researchers’ latest numbers — from July 2025 to June 2026 — report that:
- 29,263 Oregonians were served with eviction notices.
- 2,570 additional Oregonians were served with eviction notices since July 1.
- 9% of those served with eviction notices were represented by an attorney.
- 47% of landlords were represented by an attorney.
- And in Multnomah County:
- 12,270 Multnomah County residents were served with eviction notices.
- 1,132 Multnomah County residents were served with eviction notices since July 1.
- 15% of those served with eviction notices were represented by an attorney.
- 66% of Multnomah County landlords were represented by an attorney.
In addition, 35% of Multnomah County residents served with eviction notices were people of color. The statewide percentage of people of color served with eviction notices was 29%.
Corvallis activist Danielle Chambers has been fighting against the tide as she runs for a seat on the Corvallis City Council.
“I was previously working with a group of organizers and activists on a Tenants’ Bill of Rights which aimed to help prevent evictions, among many other things,” Chambers told Street Roots. “Although this group has more or less dissolved, I’ve incorporated our work into my current campaign.”
There is some good news in Corvallis, she said. Some 2,000 units of housing with rents under current market rates are in various stages of planning, permitting or actively being built in the community.
“Even still, this is a drop in the bucket in the housing market,” Chambers said. “It will help greatly, but consider that 20,000 people — or a third of our workforce — drive into Corvallis every day for work, many of whom want to live here but are priced out.”
In a community with so many college students vying for housing, she said, many renters are at the mercy of landlords who feel free to charge whatever they want and evict those who can’t fork it over.
Corvallis has only a 6% vacancy rate, according to the 2025 American Community Survey.
‘Landlord influence is extremely strong here’
Of course, many college towns have too many students chasing too few apartments. That’s nothing new. However, Corvallis Community Development Director Paul Bilotta told Street Roots that his city faces some uncommon factors that might make it the canary in the housing crisis coal mine.
“We have a large university contained in a smaller city,” Bilotta said. “This distorts the rent burden calculation because it means we have a lot of college students who pay more than 100% of their annual salary in rent, which isn’t something that can usually happen outside of the college years where financial help comes in from parents and loans.”
All this gives landlords extraordinary leverage, Chambers said.
“Landlord influence is extremely strong here due to tight market conditions and being well-organized,” she said. “These include groups like Multifamily NW, Linn-Benton Rental Housing Association and many mom-and-pop landlords.”
Her Tenants’ Bill of Rights seeks to educate tenants and landlords on their rights under Oregon law and provide a means of contesting and delaying evictions in certain situations such as in cases during the school year where families have student-age children.
Bilotta said housing problems can go beyond the price of rent.
“When you dig a little deeper on the vulnerability scale, even the creation of affordable housing units are not enough because some people have a need for additional service supports to be able to be successful in the housing units and remain there,” he said.
‘More difficult for people who are already struggling’
Officials at Benton County Coordinated Homeless Response Office have created what they call the Flexible Housing Subsidy Pool to provide shelter for people while also providing them with services to help them stay housed.
“It has been extremely successful with few, if any, evictions,” Bilotta added.
Rental prices and evictions are definitely a dire problem, he said, but he’s hearing less about them at the street level.
“We pulled our phone logs, and in 2025, about 4% of the calls were about eviction,” he said. “In 2026, there has only been one eviction-related call.”
However, he added, his department is seeing an uptick in questions from tenants about rental law resources in general.
“Some of that could be eviction concerns, but they didn’t express it that way,” he said. “General tenant rental law resource calls in 2026 have already exceeded the 2025 call volume and make up about 30% of our calls this year — up from 17% last year.”
The people who call don’t immediately find the help they need.
“We don’t always know why a tenant wants to access legal resources,” Bilotta said. “We are just a navigation resource, not a place to get legal advice.”
Chaichi said she also gets those sorts of calls at her legislative office at the State Capitol Building.
“About all we can do is tell them to call 211,” she said. “That’s a good place to start looking for resources.”
The 211 Oregon service connects people to resources for housing, food, utility assistance, child care and health care.
It’s a great service, Chaichi said, but definitely nothing even vaguely resembling a long-term solution for what Oregonians are facing.
“The end of the eviction moratorium made it more difficult for people who are already struggling,” Chaichi said. “We ought to have some kind of moratorium. There should be an income threshold or burden requirement where we can protect you from eviction.”
This article appears in July 29, 2026.