Landlords are evicting Oregonians at unprecedented rates. Tenant advocates say there’s no end in sight.
The eviction crisis has arrived in Oregon.
In 2020, the nation feared an eviction wave, anticipating a mass of renters unable to pay rent after losing work during the pandemic. COVID-19 spurred unprecedented efforts — and funds — to protect tenants, but researchers and advocates say those efforts represented a temporary stopgap for longstanding issues. With those efforts waning, the floodgates are opening.
Landlords filed at least 2,324 evictions statewide in January alone, according to Portland State University data.
“The number of evictions way outpaces what we were seeing, you know, before the pandemic,” Kim McCarty, executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, said. “So we're truly in an eviction emergency that's leading to a crisis that is very visible, and everyone can see around them.”
Oregonians face skyrocketing rents, inflation and wages lagging behind the rising cost of living. After a brief respite under pandemic protections, evictions are surging with no real end in sight, according to tenant advocates.
A federal eviction pause
The threat of eviction loomed large at the onset of the pandemic — cities were in lockdown, cases and deaths surged, and workplaces shut down. People lost jobs, income and the ability to make rent. Federal, state and local governments cobbled together real-time responses, creating a complicated patchwork of funding and moratoriums offering an umbrella to those thrust out of work by the pandemic fallout.
By September 2020, the federal government intervened, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ordered a temporary halt to residential evictions to prevent eviction and slow the spread of COVID-19.
Lawmakers and government officials extended eviction halts through July 31, 2021, through a series of government actions, including a final extension by President Joe Biden that allocated $46.5 billion for emergency rental assistance.
Nationally, these efforts seemed to pay off. Princeton University's Eviction Lab found the nation “witnessed the largest drop in eviction filings on record” in 2020 and 2021 due to expanded legal protections and new social safety net programs, many from the American Rescue Plan. According to the Eviction Lab, an estimated 1.36 million U.S. renters sidestepped eviction due to these efforts.
With these protections expired, renters — particularly low-income renters — face high rents, low wages and spiraling inflation.
Oregon
The same trend holds true in Oregon.
Oregon’s eviction moratorium, ordered by then-Gov. Kate Brown, went into effect in April 2020 and helped keep eviction rates low — evictions dropped from 676 in March 2020 to 124 in April 2020 after the moratorium began.
In June 2021, the last month of the moratorium, there were 473 eviction filings in the state. In July 2021, the first month without the moratorium, evictions almost doubled, rising to 792.
Oregon’s “safe harbor” protections essentially replaced the eviction moratorium. Extended several times, the protections prevented landlords from evicting tenants with pending rental assistance applications. These protections expired September 2022.
While state efforts during the "safe harbor" period largely held evictions in check, eviction rates slowly and continually rose. By August 2022, eviction filings reached 2,025 and peaked in October 2022, when filings surged to 2,390.
All told, landlords filed 18,424 evictions statewide in 2022. Of those evictions, 14,182, or 77%, were for nonpayment.
Since last August, eviction rates remain elevated and show no signs of decline. In January 2023, there were 2,324 filings, outpacing January 2020 eviction filings by more than 1,000, according to PSU data.
Living is expensive
While advocates and lawmakers initially feared tenants would emerge from “safe harbor” with months of accumulated rent, McCarty said this isn’t the core cause of the current crisis.
“I think it's a combination,” McCarty said. “We think that evictions are happening for other reasons that have already been happening.”
While many did face an untenable level of back rent after the end of “safe harbor,” even without that phenomenon, people still faced challenges accessing childcare, getting full work hours or other COVID-related disruptions. But the pandemic isn’t the only reason Oregon is facing an eviction crisis, McCarty said.
“All of those elements are still in play,” McCarty said. “But the one that wasn't in play was inflation and the role that inflation is playing in housing costs.”
While the pandemic called attention to an acute eviction threat, since it waned, there has been less of an appetite for addressing more systemic issues contributing to the rent crisis, such as tenant protections and the astronomical cost of housing.
Portland led the nation in rent increases in 2021. In the span of a year, rents rose an estimated 39% in the city, according to Redfin. In 2022, the median rent increase in Portland was 23.6%, far surpassing the national increase of 15.2%.
Rent is soaring, and not only is the high cost of housing a leading cause of eviction but rents are poised to keep rising, McCarty said.
“You know, the fact that rents, as of January, could go up by 14.6% in a building over 15 years old,” McCarty said. “And then, if it's younger than that, it can go up by any amount.”
Last September, Oregon's Office of Economic Analysis announced a 14.6% allowable rent increase in 2023 – the highest increase in decades. As McCarty noted, the cap only applies to buildings more than 15 years old; for any building newer than 15 years, the cap on rent increases doesn’t apply.
The system for calculating rent increase was designed to prevent unaffordable rents, McCarty said. But because allowable rent increases are based on the consumer price index, the rate of increase is unusually high as a result of inflation.
“The current allowable rent increase is the result of a formula that lawmakers believed would prevent the displacement from happening when rent could increase to any amount,” McCarty said. “No one could have predicted that the COVID public health emergency, a war in Europe and other economic factors would lead to inflation that makes the current rent cap unreasonably high.”
Affordable housing is out of reach for many. More than 22% of Oregonians are spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data, placing them beyond the federal standard of livability. Monthly SSI income, for example, is $914 — the affordable rent for this wage would be just $274 per month. For a full-time minimum wage earner in Portland, affordable rent caps at $767 per month, a price below going rates for even just a room.
The convergence of factors led to the current moment, in which eviction filings are higher than ever.
“It is unprecedented numbers,” McCarty said.
The result of these evictions is myriad. They worsen the housing crisis, diminish the quality of life, and contribute to health issues correlated with the strain of poverty and housing instability — issues that exacerbate all existing social and economic inequities. At a time when the state faces a housing shortage and worsening homelessness, continued evictions will only make things worse.
“The result of the allowable increases is essentially an eviction,” McCarty said. “In this rental housing market, the result of evictions is more homelessness that will compound the homelessness crisis.”
Peter Hepburn, a specialist at Princeton University's Eviction Lab, said even when someone doesn’t become homeless after eviction, it can take a long time to stabilize, and the impacts can be lasting.
“Homelessness is sort of the worst-case scenario, obviously,” Hepburn said. “But it's almost certainly not the most common experience. A lot of people doubled up with family or with friends, couch surfing, trying to make ends meet and then trying to find another apartment, which is going to be that much harder because you have an eviction record.”
Without steps to address the systemic issues underpinning the ongoing housing crisis, McCarty said, evictions will likely continue to rise.
“It isn't stopping,” McCarty said. “It's not ‘Oh, there's a few less.’ It's getting more and more each month.”
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.
© 2023 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 404
