More than 4,000 Oregonians lost their homes in last summer’s wildfires. One of them was the aunt of state Rep. Lily Morgan (R-Grants Pass).
Morgan’s aunt lived in House District 5, represented by state Rep. Pam Marsh (D-Ashland). The two representatives discovered a bipartisan connection when they met the morning of Jan. 21 as members of the House Committee on Housing.
“Housing, while it was a critical issue, has become a crisis in our district,” said Marsh, as committee members started the 2021 legislative session with introductions and an overview of Oregon’s growing housing plight.
Marsh’s district, covering mostly Jackson County, lost 2,500 homes to the Almeda wildfire on Sept. 8 — including 1,800 manufactured homes and RVs that provided shelter for low-income people.
“My particular focus on housing right now comes from the immediate experience on the ground in our region,” she told her fellow committee members.
At least 1,000 Oregonians who lost their homes in last year’s wildfires are still without permanent housing, according to the Oregon Department of Housing and Community Services.
Rep. Wlnsvey Campos (D-Beaverton) said she also takes housing personally. While serving in the Legislature, she continues to work as a case manager for Family Promises Beaverton, a transitional housing program that helps families experiencing homelessness obtain stable housing.
“I bring a lot of perspectives from my day-to-day job in the numerous conversations I have with the folks in the community who are struggling to maintain housing, who are on the brink of losing their housing, or who have already lost their housing,” she told her fellow lawmakers.
The Beaverton School District has one of the highest rates of student homelessness in the tri-county area. District officials reported that 1,971 of the district’s 40,725 students, approximately 4.8% are homeless. But there are higher rates of homelessness among students in more than 60 other districts outside the metro area, reaching as high as 21% in the Prospect district in Southern Oregon and 23% in the Falls City district in the mid-Willamette Valley.
“I also have the perspective of having experienced housing insecurity myself in my childhood, having lived in a hotel room from the age of 8 until I left for college, also having seen the results of no-cause evictions,” Campos said.
Rep. Julie Fahey (D-Eugene), chair of the House Committee on Housing, praised the diversity of perspectives brought to the Jan. 21 virtual meeting.
“The housing crisis may look a little different in each of our districts, but all of us have constituents who are really struggling to find an affordable place to live,” she said.
Andrea Bell, the director of housing stabilization for the Oregon Department of Housing and Community Services, outlined for the committee what results she and her fellow department officials want to see emerge from this year’s legislative session.
They are pushing for the passage of House Bill 2100 to update Oregon’s system for providing money to local efforts to address homelessness. Now, most of the money funnels through local Community Action Partnerships.
The bill allows 20% of state homeless resources to be shared with a greater diversity of organizations, including organizations geared toward specific cultural communities. “This is about maintaining what we have and moving out,” Bell said.
Department officials also want to see lawmakers pass Senate Bill 82, which promises to create a fund that would generate up to $7 million to address homelessness in Oregon.
They also seek an additional $1.2 million to update Oregon’s Homeless Management Investment System, which provides hard data on the homeless crisis.
“Because of the scale of the homeless crisis that we have here in Oregon, we’re going to have be highly strategic with our dollars, and we’re going to have to continue to do program evaluation to really do a gut check statewide of the resources that we have and whether they’re effective so we know where and how we may need to course correct,” Bell said.
Other legislative priorities include obtaining $4.5 million in long-term rental assistance for at-risk youths, including youths aging out of foster care.
Caleb Yant, deputy director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, also advocated for $10 million for Wildfire Damage Housing Relief Program and the need for more department staff as demands for resources outstrip the department’s capacity to provide them.
He also advocated the creation of a new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office “to ensure that we’re doing more than just paying lip service to equity.”
“We’re really trying to build that into the culture of our agency,” he said, “but we need to build on the structures to support that work.”
Along the themes of diversity and inclusion, Yant also urged lawmakers to pass House Bill 2094 to expand the definition of veterans who can receive housing assistance. The bill would include LGBTQ+ veterans who received general, rather than honorable, discharges because of their sexual orientation.
“What a year 2020 has been, I think, for all of us — from responding to flooding in the early part of the year to helping communities navigate the COVID pandemic to the devastating wildfires we saw across the state and, of course, the reckoning on racial injustice,” Bell told committee members.
“It has required OHCS, as a state agency, to continue to expand our role in crisis response and recovery,” she said. “Looking back at 2020, one of the things that stands out for me is the word ‘unprecedented.’ Everything was unprecedented.”
In the last eight months alone, she said, her department has received more than double the amount of money in its 2019 session budget. The department and local partners delivered more than $75 million in rent and utility assistance in the past seven months — more than the previous biennium.
Margaret Salazar, the executive director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, said the department launched a five-year plan in 2019 to provide 25,000 new homes.
“I’m thrilled that we’re not halfway through the period of time yet, but we’re more than halfway toward this goal,” Salazar told lawmakers. “We closed a record number of affordable rental transactions in 2020 in the midst of a pandemic.”
The five-year plan breaks down to a series of priorities, she added.
“The first one is responding to housing inequities and disproportionate impacts of housing instability on people of color, protected classes and underserved communities,” she said.
In addressing homelessness, Salazar said, the department’s major priority is preventing homelessness with a focus on providing shelter for children and veterans.
“You may not be aware that Oregon is essentially in the top five states nationally, and unfortunately, that’s a dubious distinction of being one of the highest rates of unsheltered families with children — one of the highest rates of rural unsheltered homelessness and veteran unsheltered homelessness as well as youth homelessness,” she told the committee. “We have a lot of work to do.”
The Legislature must rise to the challenge, she said.
“There is a need for the state to step in and to help to lead here and to create a coordinated and concerted statewide effort to prevent and end homelessness with a focus on ending the unsheltered homelessness of Oregon’s children and veterans,” she said.
In addition to the bills mentioned by Bell and Yant, Salazar advocated for House Bill 2096 to provide $24 million for farmworker housing tax credits.
Allan Lazo, the executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, urged committee members to use the session to address the problems of systemic racism.
The problems have deep roots, he said.
“Part of that history includes the intentional exclusion of communities, and especially Black communities, through the use of single-family residential zoning,” Lazo said. “Single-family residential zoning was intended in its beginnings in the early part of the 20th century to exclude members by race explicitly.
“That framework was taken away by the Supreme Court, but our land-use system and the way we think of single-family residential zoning evolved into normalizing that pattern,” he said. “And even today, it results in racial inequities across the board that are tied to lack of access to those opportunities like homeownership.”
Homeownership among white Oregonians is 65%, he said, compared to 46% for Indigenous Oregonians, 43% for Latinx Oregonians, 35% for Black Oregonians and 26% for Oregon’s Pacific Islanders.
The disparity is wider than it was when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, Lazo said.
Members of the Senate Housing and Development Committee heard similar testimony during their first meeting of the session later in the day Jan. 21.
Shannon Singleton, Gov. Kate Brown’s housing policy advisor and the co-coordinator of the Racial Justice Council, urged senators to pass Senate Bill 291.
The bill directs the governor, working with the Racial Justice Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, to study laws related to housing and to provide results to legislators no later than Sept. 15, 2022.
However, Singleton said she and her fellow council members hope several amendments find their way into the bill as it makes its way through the Legislature. Specifically, they want the bill to prohibit landlords from rejecting housing applications based on:
- Any arrest in an inactive case that did not result in conviction.
- Participation in or completion of a diversion or a deferral-of-judgment program.
- Any conviction that has been vacated or expunged, or for which the applicant received a stay of imposition of sentencing and complied with the terms of the stay.
- Any conviction for a crime that is no longer illegal in the state of Oregon.
- Any conviction or any other determination or adjudication in the juvenile justice system.
The proposed amendments would also require landlords to accept all supplemental evidence provided by the applicant with a completed application to explain, justify or negate the relevance of potentially negative information.
Salazar, in her remarks to the afternoon Senate committee meeting, echoed what she said on the House side in the morning.
“Our vision is that all Oregonians have the opportunity to pursue prosperity and to live free from poverty,” she said. “As you can tell, our vision is much broader than four walls and a door. We see housing as a platform for households to be successful and thrive and for communities to be successful and thrive.”