Rena, a person experiencing homelessness in Bend, sits in front of her tent with her dog, Scooby, in October, 2022.
Joni Land / OPB
Newly sworn-in Governor Tina Kotek called the housing crisis a humanitarian disaster and signed three executive orders to respond to it. They include establishing a homelessness state of emergency in many parts of Oregon, directing state agencies to prioritize reducing homelessness and creating a housing council to develop a budget and recommend specific policies. We get more details and analysis from Marisa Zapata, the director of the Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. New Oregon Governor Tina Kotek wasted little time in calling attention to the state’s housing and homelessness crises. In some of her first actions as governor, she said that we are facing a humanitarian disaster and she signed three executive orders to respond to it. They include establishing a homelessness state of emergency in the most populous parts of Oregon, directing state agencies to prioritize reducing homelessness and creating a new housing council. So what will these orders actually mean? Marisa Zapata joins us to answer these questions. She is the director of the Portland State University Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative. Marisa, welcome back.
Marisa Zapata: Thank you. How are you doing today, Dave?
Miller: Doing very well. Thanks for joining us. Before we get to some of these specific executive orders, I just want to start with the big picture because you’ve been on the show many times over the years and you’ve often said that homelessness is a question of a lack of housing, a lack of affordable housing, in particular. Are these executive orders from the governor a sign that the state’s chief executive agrees?
Zapata: Yes, absolutely. The first order, of course, is related to the production and supply of housing and so that’s front and center and the acknowledgement that we need more affordable housing if we’re going to actually prevent and resolve homelessness.
Miller: So when the governor made these announcements, what was the first thing that went through your mind?
Zapata: I was excited to see the series of them. I think it shows that she’s thinking about things holistically. The other thing was immediately digging in and seeing that she’s actually looking at all three parts of a response to homelessness. So she is centering the production of housing. She is also thinking about prevention, resolution and then also shelter.
The shelter part is always the one that gives me the most pause because of course, we know in the Tri-County area in Portland, the push has been to what we would consider inhumane or ineffective approaches to shelter. And we know that there’s also this kind of stuck loop around shelter versus housing. And I think what her orders are, she’s at least given herself the flexibility to do is say that in some places we do need more shelter, right? Communities need some amount of shelter, but we also need to make sure we are pushing towards the prevention of homelessness and the resolution of it through affordable housing.
Miller: So let’s then dig deeper into the housing piece, because that really is where the governor led. Her goal is to get to people in the state, building 36,000 new units a year, which is about 14,000 more than the current number. What difference does setting a statewide housing production goal make?
Zapata: I think that it’s about trying to say we are going to make the funding available and that’s where it will come to, you can set the goal, but if the legislature doesn’t want to honor a budget that would actually help reach that goal, then it becomes moot. But I think it’s saying like these are the numbers that we want to be able to see come in. How do we make the money work in order to actually meet those goals?
Miller: How do we? Really what this gets to is what you think is the proper role of the public sectors, of taxpayer money, to create more housing units? Because obviously, the private system, the market has a way, the market has also gotten us where we are right now. Now, the governor is stepping in saying we need to ramp this up. So, what is the best use of public money to address a lack of housing?
Zapata: So you’re thinking about it two fold, right? The private market will never produce housing for people of the lowest incomes and in some places, even places for people who are on the lower end of moderate income. And so the question then becomes what you’re saying, what are we willing to do as taxpayers to remedy the market failure? And that becomes the question of, are we just going to wholesale the building our own public housing that is managed by government, community land trust, tenant organizations, or nonprofit organizations? Are we going to try to make market incentives work? I think we see the limitation of market incentives, particularly, again for people with the lowest income.
I think that we’re going to be really having to think hard about just wholescale investment and development of housing at taxpayer support. I use taxpayer support instead of expense, because we also know that some of our biggest housing subsidies are actually to homeowners through the mortgage interest tax deduction. So they’re already receiving a subsidy. And we’d like to just see a more equal playing field in terms of who else is receiving significant housing subsidies.
Miller: What would massive public housing look like right now? And I guess when I say massive, I guess, I think the era of 20-story New York City style public housing is probably not going to happen in Portland anytime soon or in other parts of Oregon, certainly. So I’m thinking though, just many, many units. What’s the model that you think might work?
Zapata: Well, I think that we want to be thinking about housing that would be publicly accessible along with market rate housing and that can happen in a single building, that can happen through single family homes. That can happen through duplexes, right? So one of the things about HB 2001 that went through, which basically eliminated the right to exclusive single family home zoning districts, means that we can have a range of housing types. I actually would really love to see us get away from the assumption that affordable or public housing needs to be apartments and tiny units. I think that it reflects one of the limitations of our thinking, which is spending the least amount of money on the fewest number of people.
Whereas if we’re really thinking, and particularly when we get into homelessness, thinking about how we support people living their best lives, it could be that a row house or a duplex becomes one of the better choices or even a single family home. And then you were just developing housing that anyone could live in, right? You don’t have to think about it as the person who is homeless will go into X unit. If we’re thinking about how we work to make sure that we’ve got all of the housing that we need available and then saying, how do we support X individual and living in that housing? That would be game changing. And it would also reduce or eliminate the stigma that often surrounds the terror of hearing ‘public housing that comes to mind with the 20 stories and concrete and so forth.’
Miller: You noted earlier, that you see failures with the market incentives model. But that is the model that came to my mind when I read the second of the governor’s executive orders, when she said that she wants to create a Housing Production Advisory Council to develop a budget and recommend specific policies that would basically help the private sector work with local and state government agencies to meet that goal. What’s your skepticism about market incentives?
Zapata: I think again, it’s just when we’re thinking about homelessness, we see the majority of people experiencing homelessness into the 0 to 30% median household income range. There aren’t gonna be market incentives that will get us to that. When I use the extreme of someone who is, say, on disability, we’re never going to have an incentive that makes a developer want to build housing that is at that income level because why would they? They’re going to be losing money. So that’s where you could be thinking about matching low income housing tax credit with the private market or at rate rental units. And then thinking about maybe some of the units are fully publicly subsidized. That’s what I assume that the governor and our local implementer will be thinking about is how we put . . . and it gets really complicated because everyone will say, ‘oh, we’re going to put an affordable unit in here and an extremely low income unit in here. And then also put in a market rate unit.’ And people, I think, it starts to sound very confusing when it’s really just saying that some of the units will be designated for certain uses. And then the complexity is putting all of the funding streams together to make that development actually happen.
Miller: I want to turn to the declaration of the state of emergency due to homelessness in the most populous parts of Oregon: Portland, Central Oregon, Salem, the Eugene area and Medford and Ashland. What does a state-declared state of emergency actually mean in practice? What will it let city or local or state leaders do that they couldn’t do before?
Zapata: I think that’s still one of my questions and I’ll admit that this is I think a confusing area, right? And so I can read the order and it’s saying and talking about expediting agency processes, so ideally allowing for procurement and budgetary decisions to be done faster. I think the power in it is actually assembling and saying from the central part of the state agencies, have to be coordinated in their work as well and that this is a priority, because we do know that homelessness is a multi-agency approach. So I see that as particularly compelling. There is the Interagency Council on Homelessness and that has just been getting going, but I think that it really remains to be seen, on my part, what we’re really opening up outside of these potential expedited barrier processes, in terms of budgeting and purchasing.
Miller: In terms of budgeting, the governor is also asking lawmakers to put $130 million dollars towards unsheltered homelessness. What would you want that money to be spent on?
Zapata: Great question. I think I would like that money to be spent on emergency shelter where it’s truly needed. So we can think of someplace like Hood River, really struggling to meet their needs around homelessness and making sure that they have actual access to emergency shelter. The need for emergency shelter is not necessarily exemplified by how many tents you have outside. So I think that this is actually a very tough needle to thread at the state level. And again, it’s one of the strengths of the order that the governor has allowed this space, to be able to to think about ‘what do localities actually need?’
I want to see the least amount of money spent on shelter that we need for a particular location. I don’t want that to be measured around the number of people that we see outside. I would like that to be focused on where we can acquire property, through motels. We know that motel models for emergency shelter are really proving successful in helping people move into permanent housing, where that’s available, but where you’re purchasing the motels, you’re also creating a land banking opportunity.
And then lastly, I’d love to see some focus on alternative shelter models. We know that villages can be helpful and those are the tiny pods, the little pods that people can live in. We know that those can be powerful models while people are waiting for housing.
Miller: What’s the time frame that you’re envisioning for the initiatives the governor announced to actually bear fruit?
Zapata: I think that depends on the legislature and the cooperation of the localities in trying to make this work. I like to live in my dream world, that someone’s got power, so everything can happen tomorrow. I don’t know, I think it’s a great question. It just depends on, again, like the cooperation of our local jurisdictions and the unique circumstances in terms of what buildings can be acquired, how fast can housing be purchased? We do know that, say in the Portland Tri-County area, we have luxury apartment buildings that are for sale and empty, those could be acquired tomorrow. We know that there are naturally occurring affordable housing developments that are also for sale that would serve as a great prevention strategy to keep people in housing and may also have open units. So I think maybe it’s more about like, what are the innovative strategies people are looking at, to actually get moving on?
Miller: Marisa, thanks very much for your time.
Zapata: Yes, thanks for having me.
Miller: Marisa Zapata is the director of the Portland State University Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative.
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