Oregon’s Capitol building in Salem, Ore., Dec. 12, 2024.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
In the last two weeks of the Oregon legislative session, which ended late Friday night, housing advocates, including the Community Alliance of Tenants, the Oregon Housing Alliance and the Urban League of Portland, sounded the alarm and protested in Salem over funding cuts. They said the programs for emergency rent assistance and programs to prevent eviction must remain funded to prevent thousands of individuals and families with children from being evicted and becoming homeless. Lisa Bates is a professor of Black Studies at Portland State University and helps run a research program studying evictions across Oregon.
We talk with Bates about the lack of legislative funding for homelessness and housing programs, and what’s needed in her view to address the ongoing homeless and housing crisis.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In the last two weeks of Oregon’s legislative session, housing advocates sounded the alarm over funding cuts. They said programs for emergency rental assistance and eviction prevention had to remain funded to prevent thousands of people from being evicted and becoming homeless. But in the end, lawmakers made significant cuts to those programs.
Lisa Bates is a professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. She helps run a research program studying evictions across the state of Oregon, and she joins us now. Welcome back to the show.
Lisa Bates: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: What were you and other housing advocates asking for from the legislature, in terms of eviction prevention services for the coming two years?
Bates: Well, advocates were really asking to continue to fund, and even to increase funding, for programs like legal services for people facing eviction cases, other kinds of diversion support assistances to help people to either cure or make restitution with their landlords or to be able to transition into other housing opportunities, and particularly for emergency rent assistance as part of preventing and diverting eviction cases.
Miller: How much money was ultimately allocated?
Bates: My understanding [is] about $45 million has been allocated out of the original proposed budget of about $175 million, maybe a little bit less. So it’s a really significant decrease.
Miller: How does that compare to the current level of spending?
Bates: It is much, much less. And I would also make note that here in Multnomah County, the county has cut some of these programs too. So other local funding is also in jeopardy at this time that would have been a backstop for some of those.
Miller: Can you help us understand what this money actually goes toward? Let’s say somebody gets a letter saying the proceedings for eviction have now begun. How might this money help them?
Bates: Well, for one, it supports many of the tenant advocacy or other community-based organizations that someone might be calling. So if they’re calling 211, or they’re calling the Community Alliance of Tenants’ hotline, or other organizations where they’re seeking help … what do I do next?
Many people facing eviction, probably most people facing eviction, don’t really know what to do. They’re getting the legal documents in the mail and they often don’t know what the next steps are. These funds would also support the legal service providers that help them – whether they have a court case or they’re in the pre-court phase – with communicating with their landlord, with being represented in court [for] the small number of people who go to a trial for their eviction.
In some places, you can get support and assistance at court. So you’re a tenant who’s being evicted, you show up in the courtroom, again, typically don’t really know what is going to happen. But there may be attorneys, paralegals or other support services there that will help you to walk you through the process, help you with what we call a “stipulated agreement,” which is like a settlement that you create with the landlord to avoid going to trial, or help you apply for emergency rent assistance. And then, of course, emergency rent assistance, where you might get some back rent paid or one to three months of future rent paid, to try to create a softer landing for you from that eviction case.
Miller: How effective are these programs at keeping people in their homes?
Bates: They’re effective. There are not enough supports available for people. But our research shows that, for people who are receiving legal services, and particularly emergency rent assistance, there is a stabilizing factor in terms of them being able to stay in their home. In general, more than half of the people who have an eviction case in Oregon are displaced through eviction.
They either have a judgment of eviction against them, which requires them by court order to leave their unit, or they agree to leave the unit as a condition of having a case dismissed, at least half of the people. What we’re finding is that for people who don’t get any support – low income folks, People of Color, immigrants, families with kids – when they don’t get support, the majority of them, perhaps three out of four, not only are moving out of their homes but are experiencing serious housing instability and even homelessness.
A lot of times, when we talk about homelessness, we think about the numbers that are counted every year in the Point-in-Time count – that is people who are in shelters or who are on the street. But there is another set of folks who are very unstable, precarious and are indeed homeless who are what we call “doubled up.” They moved in with other folks, they’re couch surfing, they might be in and out of short-stay hotels. Many people who are evicted end up in that space.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for just the relative numbers there, because I feel like we talk a lot more about the Point-in-Time count, which represents, I think, much more visible versions of homelessness than people who are doubled up, couch surfing or bouncing from temporary place to place. But what are the relative numbers?
Bates: There are probably more people who are doubled up than who are counted in the Point-in-Time count. At least twice as many people are homeless in Oregon that we know about. Just as an example, in 2024, the statewide Point-in-Time count was something like 17,000 or 18,000 people being counted as homeless by the narrow definition.
But we know that in the ‘23-‘24 school year, there were 22,000 Oregon kids who were homeless during that year, when you count the expanded notion of doubled up. So just kids alone, we know that there’s many more than the folks who are counted by that narrow definition.
Miller: How have eviction rates changed in Oregon since you started studying them a number of years ago now?
Bates: Oh, eviction rates have gone up every single year. So 2024, for every 1 in 20 renter households, there’s an eviction case filed. When we go back in time 2023, it was 1 in 30, it’s getting more and more ...
Miller: Why is it getting worse?
Bates: Well, I think we’ve talked over the past couple of years about cost of living. There are many financial pressures for people, post-pandemic employment issues, but largely the cost of rent. We do have rent regulation in Oregon, but it does not cover housing younger than 15 years. So new supply is not covered by a rent regulation.
We are seeing that the amount that people owe in their nonpayment cases is going up, because rents are going up and they’re just outpacing people’s incomes. This is a low-income state and there are a lot of people who were already very heavily cost-burdened.
Miller: What do you think this reduction in eviction prevention services, broadly, is going to mean for Oregonians?
Bates: It will mean that there will be an increased number of people who are unhoused in Oregon. I have no doubt about that. Again, we’re finding that when people don’t receive support and assistance, they are most likely to be unhoused. When they do receive rent assistance, exactly the opposite in Multnomah County, about 3 in 4 households that receive emergency rent assistance through the Eviction Diversion Program do stay housed in their unit.
Miller: Are they able to stay housed without ongoing support, or is the only way they can stay in their homes is with some sort of permanent subsidies or help of some kind?
Bates: I think that’s an important question. From our research, we don’t quite know yet. We’re doing additional follow-ups with folks that we’ve surveyed over time. But I can say that I think the kind of argument is, this is just a band-aid. You’re just temporarily helping people.
Miller: Right. I guess that’s the implied premise behind my question, but it’s an honest question.
Bates: And what we’re finding is … we wouldn’t call it a band-aid, we’d call it a tourniquet.
Miller: To stop the bleeding.
Bates: Yes, and it’s an emergency life-saving measure to stop the bleeding that you need in order to make a next step. It may be that many people who face eviction for nonpayment, particularly if they have a lot of arrears, they do need to move to a cheaper place. They do need to combine households.
But to do that from a 90-day period, where you’re housed, you’re whole, well, you’re not in a car, you don’t have a judgment of eviction against you on your record, your kids didn’t have to get shipped off to go live with a cousin, all the kinds of traumatic and upsetting things that we find are happening to people when they’re evicted, your chances of moving on are a lot better.
Miller: There’s another societal expenditure piece of this question, which is, is it possible to compare the cost of eviction prevention to the cost of homelessness response? In other words, if someone is evicted and becomes homeless, how much are we spending as, say, Multnomah County residents or Oregonians because of that? And how does that compare to what it would have cost to help them stay in their apartment to begin with?
Bates: Many times more, because you have to think not just of the cost of trying to bring someone who’s been in shelter back into housing, but also all of the family, health and mental health problems that come along with it. You’ve got kids who are disrupted in school, you’ve got adults whose jobs may be disrupted. They’ve moved across the county and now they can’t figure out how to get to work because they don’t have a car that works very well, or they’re … you know what I’m saying? There’s a lot of extra pieces that happen.
I think this was more clear … We talked about this constantly during the pandemic. And our research team and the Homeless Research Action Collaborative, put together some estimates showing that the kinds of evictions that we were anticipating in Oregon were going to be multi-billions of dollars of social costs, particularly in the shelter system and trying to bring people back from being unsheltered or living in a shelter.
And somehow that connection of cause-and-effect seems to have been lost in this legislative session. These are not separate issues. This is a continuum of experiences. It is probably true that most people who are in a shelter right now, if you ask them, like, “what’s the thing that happened to you right before you got here,” they weren’t living in an apartment and getting evicted, but that story is a longer story.
People who become doubled up, the reason that we’re very insistent that that is part of the homelessness, the larger definition, is that you may have a social safety net right now for an emergency, but the more you use that net, the more that it frays. Those relationships become very stressed and that’s what we’re hearing from tenants in our research. If you’re borrowing money from friends or family, you’re living on their couch, you’re moving in and out, that might be a sort of one-time thing that you can rely on. And future instability will lead you to sort of worse and worse consequences.
Miller: Lisa, thanks very much.
Bates: Thank you.
Miller: Lisa Bates is a professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, where she helps run a research program that studies evictions all across the state of Oregon.
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