Affordable housing and support services fall far short of demand. And, as a surge of evictions looms, the worst is yet to come.
There are fewer than a dozen postal addresses along the short stretch of 97th Avenue, between Burnside and Glisan streets, but it’s home to twice as many households. Under the tarps and tents, in cars and campers, resides the unofficial neighborhood, lining both sides of the road.
And Will, a 63-year-old former body shop owner who lives in a camper, is probably the closest thing this community has to a mayor. By his account, he looks after the people on the street, helps people in tents get into cars, and even pays for having the weeds mowed back along the side of the road.
“I know everybody,” he said, sitting on the gate of his ’57 GMC pickup truck with a Bible in his hand. This is the neighborhood where his auto body shop was located, so this is where he returned when he became homeless in 2017.
“I had money my whole life,” Will said, giving only his first name. “Now I only get $1,000 a month, and I’m a senior citizen. I’ve worked my whole life. I owned a shop, by God. Come on. I paid taxes for nine people for 30, 40 years. … I didn’t think it was going to be like this. This is crazy.”
His Social Security income is not enough to get into a place where he would want to live, he said. “I feel like my government let me down.”
“There’s too many higher class, lower class, and now there’s a real low class of people now, like us,” Will said. “And we can’t get up because we don’t have five grand to get into a place.”
But Will doesn’t want a tiny studio apartment, a “cracker box,” as he calls it. He wants his own place, a home, where he can work on cars, his lifelong passion and a way to make a few bucks in retirement. Modest as it is, he’s not expecting that dream to come true in this city’s competitive housing market. He’s thinking about going out to the woods and building his own place.
“I just don’t see any future waiting around for housing to get cheaper. I’ve been waiting around three years. I’m not going to wait around any longer.”
Staggering Demand Marisa Zapata sympathizes with Will’s situation. He’s like most people who want a stable home that suits their needs. But that’s not necessarily how the nation’s housing programs for low-income people work in this country, said Zapata, director of the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative with Portland State University.
From her perspective, there are two housing markets in this country: One that serves people with higher incomes quite well and another that requires government intervention for the most basic of housing, still only reaching 1 in 4 qualified renters in need.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 17 million at-risk renter households eligible for rental assistance do not receive it due to funding limitations. Sixty-three percent of these households have children or are headed by a person who is elderly or has disabilities.
“As long as we continue to see the role of government is to patchwork how the housing market fails to address affordable housing … then we’re just on this lazy Susan,” Zapata said. “The housing market, like capitalism, was created to serve people with wealth.”
A report by Zapata’s collaborative examines what it would take to solve homelessness, both politically and financially.
One of the top priorities was to “right size” the scope of the challenge, Zapata said.
“When the public looks at the topic of homelessness, they’re literally responding to the people they see on the streets,” she said, referring to the nearly 3,000 unsheltered people officially tallied across Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties.
“That’s a very small percentage of the people who are actually experiencing homelessness,” Zapata said.
The collaborative’s report, “Governance, Costs and Revenue Raising to Address and Prevent Homelessness in the Portland Tri-County Region,” concluded the actual number of people experiencing homelessness in the tri-county area in 2017 was more than 38,000. Almost three times that many were housing insecure or were at risk of homelessness due to paying more than 30% of their often-low income on housing costs, which federal guidelines classify as cost burdened. About 83,000 low-income households in the region paid more than half of their monthly income in housing costs, limiting their ability to pay for other basic needs, and putting them at greater risk of becoming homeless.
Will’s $1,000 a month in Social Security falls well short of what is needed on average to afford even a small apartment in Portland. Average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Portland is around $1,400 per month, and it’s about $1,600 for a two-bedroom unit, according to statistics kept by market analyst Rent Jungle.
Nationwide, 1 out every 4 renters — nearly 11 million renter households — have extremely low incomes, and the country is short 7 million homes available in their price range.
Across the U.S., only 36 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition annual report titled “The Gap.” Those figures don’t include the nearly 570,000 people who are currently experiencing homelessness in the United States. In Portland, extremely low-income renters make $22,400 or less, and there are an estimated 54,000 households in that category in the Portland-Vancouver metro area. For every 100 of those households, there are 27 affordable units to choose from.
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The shortage is staggering, so it is not surprising that government-subsidized housing seeks to provide the most units of housing for its buck, typically in dense, multi-family complexes. But that’s not what ultimately meets the larger need, Zapata said.
With its report, the PSU collaborative looked at what it would cost to actually provide housing that reflected people’s choices, Zapata said.
It’s a complex issue, one that taps into judgments around poverty and who deserves not just adequate but quality housing.
The costs are beyond what local resources have yet to bear. In the tri-county area alone, rent assistance to the tens of thousands of severely rent burdened households would range between $8.7 billion and $16.6 billion over the next 10 years, according to the report, on top of $2 billion to $4 billion to house the existing homeless population during the same period. Those figures don’t account for what is already being spent to assist low-income households, and are far beyond the 30-year, $653 million Metro housing bond voters passed in 2018 and the $258 million bond Portlanders passed in 2016.
“What is our motivation in the kind of housing we produce and provide?” Zapata asked rhetorically. “The conversation has always been focused on how do we spend the least amount of money on the fewest number of people. … Instead, if we start to ask how would we empower people to live their best lives, we end up with a very different set of solutions and a whole lot more money.”
Ultimately, with adequate funding for housing and support services, the costs will decline and money will be saved by preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place, Zapata said. It’s an investment.
“All people in this country receive support services in some way or form to stay in their housing,” Zapata said. “We don’t consider roads or schools support services, but they are. And so what we look at with people who are living in poverty, or with health issues, or they lost their jobs, is they may need different kinds of support.
“While we think about the really profound policy and preventions that we would have to do to never end up in this situation again, one of them is reorienting how we think about housing in this country.”
A Moving Target In 2003, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness encouraged local communities to create 10-year plans to end homelessness, focusing on the chronically homeless. Portland and Multnomah County unveiled their joint plan in 2005.
Upon the plan’s conclusion in 2015, the Portland City Budget Office conducted a post-mortem on its efficacy and confirmed for the record what people were already seeing for themselves. Homelessness was increasing, not decreasing, despite ramped-up coordination and funding efforts at the local level.
In its first seven years, efforts under the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness were credited with placing more than 12,500 households in permanent homes and preventing nearly 4,600 households from becoming homeless.
“If, during that time period, no new households became homeless and if those placed in housing were able to retain their housing, Portland would have solved homelessness 6 times over,” the report stated. “Although the 10-Year Plan also targeted supportive services and improved housing retention and homeless prevention strategies, the inflow into homelessness continues to exceed the community’s capacity for placement and support.”
So it’s not surprising that in 2015, with thousands of people still experiencing homelessness and 12,000 more doubled up in unsuitable or unsafe housing, the city declared a State of Housing Emergency. After repeated extensions, that emergency status is now in effect through April 2021.
Inadequate Support Since 2014, the Joint Office of Homeless Services , a collaboration between the city of Portland and Multnomah County, has been the point agency for addressing homelessness, providing rent assistance, eviction prevention, permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing and emergency shelter. Last year, it spent $32 million on homeless and housing services.
With a Housing First philosophy — that people should be provided housing first and that other issues such as health and addiction can more easily be addressed with that stability in place — the joint office has emphasized placing people in permanent supportive housing, maintaining more than 12,000 people in housing as of 2019. As the city concluded five years ago, the numbers of people on the streets remained constant due to market forces that push more people into homelessness and puts tens of thousands more very low-income households at risk each year, according to the Joint Office. Those market forces, combined with generations of systemic racism, disproportionately affect communities of color, which represent a much higher rate among homeless populations than in the general population.
No number of shelter beds will fully address homelessness until they are matched by the number of actual homes for extremely low-income households, according to Joint Office Director Marc Jolin. That, along with adequate support services, is fundamental to seeing fewer people on our streets, Jolin said.
“If we had the necessary inventory of deeply affordable housing, paired with support services, our current shelter capacity would be more than sufficient, because people would be transitioning through those beds into housing,” Jolin said. “And they would succeed in that housing and not return to homelessness.”
Even so, other challenges compound the lack of supply, including restrictions from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on eligibility and documentation requirements that exclude people who would otherwise qualify for needed housing. People who can’t document how long they have been experiencing homelessness, or document the extent of their disabilities, may not be able to get into permanent supportive housing. Veterans without an honorable discharge may not be eligible for a housing voucher. Resources for long-term rental assistance fall far short of the demand, and disability benefits haven’t kept pace with increases in the cost of living, particularly in a market like Portland, Jolin said.
“For example, people who receive Supplemental Security Income — people who’ve been found to be so disabled that they will be unable to find employment in the market — receive less than $800 a month,” Jolin told Street Roots. “That leaves housing completely out of reach, let alone other needs and expenses they might have.”
“If federal benefits for people with disabilities, seniors and struggling families, among others, actually reflected our cost of living and our true level of need, it would be easier to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place,” Jolin said. “And even if some did still become homeless, it would also be easier to end their homelessness.”
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Anita Halliwill is one of those Portlanders trying to survive on a $750 SSI disability check. She lives in her own mobile home in Southeast 82nd Avenue but pays rent for the land underneath, plus water, gas and electric.
“By the time all the bills are done, there’s $15 left in the deposit: $5 of that goes to bus tickets to get to the store; $10 goes into gas,” she said, waiting in line outside the Clackamas Service Center for a food box. With nearly all her money going to housing, Halliwill said she has gone without the eyeglasses she needs, and she hand-washes her laundry because she can’t afford to get her washer and dryer hooked up.
“Where are the finances for just simple things to get the leg up, to get the other leg up, to get another leg up?” Halliwill said. She was cheerful at the start of her conversation with Street Roots, but after talking more about her housing, she started to cry. If she doesn’t pay the rent on the land, she forfeits the trailer she lives in, and in the meantime, she worries the property will be sold out from under her.
“I am totally freaked out,” she said, trying to hold back tears. “Because where would I go, what would I do? Nothing. There would be nothing.”
Housed, But Not For Long In September, the National Council of State Housing Agencies released some startling figures: By January 2021, between 100,000 and 150,000 Oregon renter households will be unable to pay rent and at risk of eviction. Together, they will owe between $250 million and $378 million in rent by the end of this year, when the Oregon and national eviction moratoriums are set to expire.
Unpaid monthly rent totals approximately $22 million to $28 million in the city of Portland alone. At the current rate, Portlanders will have fallen $120 million to $125 million behind on rent by the end of September, according to industry data and Census figures presented by Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office.
The situation is particularly grim for communities of color, who are disproportionately both renters and service industry workers in fields hardest hit by the recession. Black and Indigenous households in Portland pay on average 40% to 60% of their incomes toward rent, according to the report distributed by the mayor’s office. Even if incomes returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, it would take the average Black family in Portland almost six months to save enough to repay one month of back rent.
Nationwide, renter households are behind on their rent to the tune of billions of dollars. By January, when the nationwide eviction moratorium expires, they will owe between $25 billion and $34 billion. That’s why without meaningful renter assistance, not just temporary moratoria, the nation could be facing an “eviction tsunami,” said Urban Institute’s Maya Brennan.
“I think the ripples are as likely to be as bad as the foreclosure crisis or possibly worse, because the numbers of evictions we’re talking about already rival the foreclosure crisis before the pandemic,” Brennan said.
In a typical year, the United States processes about 2.4 million eviction filings and rules for evictions in about 900,000 of those cases, according to the national eviction-tracking organization Eviction Lab . But even with state and local moratoriums across the nation, eviction proceedings are still moving forward. In the 22 U.S. cities Eviction Lab tracks, there have been more than 83,180 eviction filings just during the pandemic.
At one point this summer, an annual study by the Urban Institute found that nearly one-third of adults reported that their families could not pay the rent, mortgage or utility bills, were food insecure, or went without medical care because of the cost during the last 30 days.
“I’m at the point where realizing how many people are facing really serious material hardship is no longer surprising, it’s just very frustrating,” Brennan said. “We know enough as a country to know that it’s not reasonable to have more than a third of parents reporting that they couldn’t pay for their housing last month. That’s not reasonable, and we know enough as a country to know solutions to be able to fix that, yet that’s the stats that we find in this survey.”
Brennan got into the world of housing advocacy after a stint as a landlord-tenant hotline counselor before going to grad school. In that role, she heard the stories of renters being forced out of housing despite best efforts to follow the rules or because they didn’t have the money to participate in the court process to protect themselves. Eviction rules vary state to state, she said, some with more protection, some with less. And often even just a filing can be disastrous, even if the final ruling isn’t against the tenant.
“We really still have a system where if you have been down on your luck or you decided you were going to, say, pay funeral expenses for a relative, even though you didn’t know where you were going to get your rent money after that, it is entirely possible you spend years after that getting denied the right to move into a reasonable apartment,” Brennan said. “You find that the only landlords who will take you are the ones who are going to exploit you. And that’s not a typical landlord, but it’s the situation that people get put into when the system does not work to protect or serve them.”
The Urban Institute estimates it will cost $15 billion a month in assistance to help renters stay housed during the crisis. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives approved $100 billion for emergency rental assistance in the Emergency Housing and Protections Relief Act of 2020, but nothing has moved in the Senate. Other organizations are calling for rent forgiveness, with support for landlords to cover costs. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has introduced a rent and mortgage forgiveness bill that would direct relief funds to property owners and lenders.
In Oregon, an eviction moratorium for nonpayment of rent is in place until Dec. 31, with renters given a six-month period, until June 30, 2021, to pay back rent owed, in addition to their current monthly rent owed after the moratorium expires.
“A six-month repayment period is really not enough,” said Coya Crespin with the tenant advocacy group Oregon Community Alliance of Tenants. “A lot of people have just lost work, so it’s going to take some time to rebuild and find something new and afford food on top of repaying rent on top of paying rent in the same month. So I think there is a real level of fear of being homeless right now.”
Even with some jobs returning as businesses reopen, many people have lost their employment permanently or have no back-to-work plan. The hardest hit are people in the service sectors with lower-income wages. Unemployment nationally has gone from a peak of more than 14% in April to 8% in September — still nearly twice the rate before the pandemic recession hit in spring.
“We’re talking to a lot of service providers like restaurant workers who don’t know if they have a job to come back to. There is a fair amount of anxiety around what’s going to happen when the eviction moratorium is lifted,” Crespin said.
Brendan O’Flaherty, an economics professor with Columbia University, has worked out a grim projection based on unemployment figures and their correlation to homelessness. He estimates that by the end of this year — based on unemployment figures from earlier this summer — homelessness could increase up to 45%, an addition of 250,000 people. That would put the number of people living without the benefit of housing in our country well beyond 800,000.
“We’re in uncharted territory,” O’Flaherty said, who was clear that his figures are not precise predictions — the numbers could be larger or smaller for many reasons, he said. “It’s important to think about those reasons, but the prudent thing is to start thinking.”
So how are we to interpret his figures?
“I think it informs you to act that there is a good chance of a very large increase in homelessness,” O’Flaherty said.
The Fallout Evictions and unpaid rent loom large over the work at JOIN, an organization in Portland that works to transition people from homelessness into housing. They are the two major obstacles for clients as workers negotiate with private landlords to create a long-term housing relationship.
“It will come up in someone’s screening for getting accepted into an apartment,” said Katrina Holland, JOIN’s executive director. “So at JOIN, we end up paying the first month and deposit and subsidizing that, but we also help to try to pay off back debt so we can get someone into housing. Or we end up paying higher deposit because incorrectly people assume there’s a higher risk in the individuals we’re placing.”
As the pandemic’s economic upheaval continues, Holland and others in the housing world are paying close attention to the eviction crisis that awaits. One out of 10 renters across Oregon are missing rent because they’re unable to make payments as recently as August.
If the renters struggling today become homeless tomorrow, Holland warns that social programs like hers won’t even come close to filling the need. She and other advocates are talking with lawmakers in Oregon and Washington, D.C., urging action that is above and beyond current resources, canceling rent and mortgages for people who can’t pay, and taking the risk of unprecedented measures. Social programs won’t be able to absorb the economic fallout.
“I don’t even think those of us who are familiar with this kind of struggle that people face really understand and can wrap our heads around how bad it could be,” Holland said. “We are talking about, again, tens of thousands of people who will be newly homeless or are repetitively homeless with evictions on their record.”
That fallout will affect more than just someone’s housing status, Holland said.
“Given our understanding of how housing undergirds so much of our livelihoods, from health to education to workforce to socioeconomic mobility to participation in the economy as a consumer, these impacts will be seen and felt far and wide,” Holland said.
“It will not just be people losing their homes and being on the streets. It will be previous participants in our economy,” she said. “It will be children who maybe were going to school regularly, which affects their future. It will be people who were managing their chronic conditions or diseases, that will find difficulty in seeing their providers now. It will be more camping. It will be people living in their cars. There are limits to being doubled up. It could affect our housed folks that take in people who don’t have a house anymore. The impacts will be seen and felt and heard far and wide across the economy.”
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org ; follow her on Twitter @jozuhl This story is part of Finding Home, a series of in-depth articles examining national perspectives around America’s growing housing and homeless crisis. Read more from this series. Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. 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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