Despite a Dem supermajority lawmakers choose austerity rather than prevent homelessness
Session Lessons: Oregon Lawmakers choosing to do nothing instead of something 💽
My housing work in the Oregon Legislature wrapped up on Wednesday. The transportation bill is now dead. Sine Die is here and I thought I would provide another Session Lessons installment.
This post explores the political conditions that resulted in this devastating cut and the myriad of other options lawmakers could have taken.
As American politics have continued to track to the right, the gap between the people with real needs and those whose whims are address by political power grows. Even in Oregon, the party that is supposed care about gay people and Black people is facing elite capture.
For a moment I was hopeful that Oregon State housing politics were trending in a positive direction with the Governor’s proposed budget requesting record-high investments towards filling in public market failures. But those hopes vanished when the state budget forecast took a nosedive and emergency rent assistance funding and eviction prevention services were cut by over 80%.
Early signs legislators were abandoning tenants for… 🤷🏻♀️
One of our coalition leads and the facilitator for this particular group of advocates confessed that this has been one of the worst sessions she’s worked in. To put that into some perspective she’s been in the trenches both in Salem fighting for rent stabilization back in 2018 and in DC during the Grants Pass Supreme Court Case.
It’s bleak out here.
Our troubles started when we were working on SB 722 — a wonky bill that would have made improvements to Oregon’s rent stabilization statute. The current statute includes a pretty large exception to new construction; meaning if a building was 15 years old or younger it would not be subjected to a rent increase cap. It also included another aspect that banned the use of AI software to set rents.
Advocates have been fighting this exemption for years. We missed our opportunity last year because a legislative ally was sick at the time of the vote and we didn’t have enough votes without him. So we thought we would try again.
Everyone was willing to get onboard with SB 722 because of the AI price fixing ban, but they were not interested in the rent stabilization part. There seemed to be an opinion shift within the legislature where even the Democrats on the Senate Committee on Housing and Development weren’t sympathetic.
Legislators chose to prioritize an unsupported fear that reducing the new construction exemption would chill new housing development over the almost 100,000 renters who would be protected from rent hikes.
SB 722 died, and we killed it because it was amended to cut out the rent stabilization portion. And on it’s own, the AI ban was not strong enough. The troubles continued when a bill to ban application fees died, when Rep Marsh had to take the teeth of of her bill protecting manufactured home park residents. At every turn, it seemed like tenants were being abandoned for asking too much and not thinking about the poor landlords.
Eviction prevention funding cut by ~80% for the sake of “balancing the budget”
When a bleak budget forecast was announced in May, everyone was bracing for program cuts. But no one expected cuts of this magnitude.
Emergency rent assistance is the last option available to prevent a family with an eviction for non-payment of rent to stay in their home. It’s designed to help people facing an acute crisis and keep them from spiraling into further economic distress and long-term housing instability.
Evictions are at an all time high, with over 74,000 eviction filings in 2024 alone.
Combined with eviction defense programs run by organizations like the Oregon Law Center and the Commons Law Center, emergency rent assistance has a 70% success rate for people retaining their housing.1
But eviction prevent isn’t sexy, it’s not a ribbon cutting ceremony, it’s simply giving money to tenants to pass on to their landlords who are going to turn around and charge them for the next month of rent. It’s effectively a supply side subsidy, guaranteed money for landlords.
However, unless rental housing becomes decommodified, wages rise rapidly across every sector and rents stay the same, we’re obligated to fund these programs if we want to see our housing crisis resolved.
How could a democratic party supermajority let this happen?
Budget cuts like this are a form of austerity politics. The idea is deceptively simple: in an economic downturn, everyone needs to tighten their belts and make do with less money so we can weather the economic downturn. It’s seen as wasteful to be spending, hemorrhaging, money that the state doesn’t have.
To give Oregon some credit, unlike the federal budget, the State’s budget has to balance. It’s allowed to issue debt through different bonds but it can’t perform any deficit spending. Because of this legislators feel a lot of pressure to make sure the State is able to meet is financial obligations.
But austerity doesn’t necessarily mean less money is being spent. Oregon is spending money, and spending a lot of it — it’s more of a question of who is getting money.
Of course, unlike at the federal level, Oregon is not out here spending money to boost shareholders and bombing Palestinians, but they are operating within the same fundamental lies that support sever budget cuts.
Austerity offers a false promise of sustainability. In reality it only promises inaction which has devastating consequence. It undermines democracy, trust in systems, and promotes white supremacy and misogynistic cultures and political systems.2
What governments “save” when they enact budget cuts to social programs cause increased strain on existing systems, and higher costs in the future.
According to research from Portland State University, evictions could cost Oregon $720 million to $4.7 billion annually in downstream expenses for shelters, medical care, foster care, and juvenile justice.3
And these are costs the State passes on to local governments and the poorest Oregonians.
We have other choices.
So if the Oregon budget has to balance and we’re expecting to receive less money in tax revenues what are our options?
rainy day fund (money for this exact purpose)
implementing new taxes (or getting rid of the numerous tax subsidies)
issue new bonds (taking on more debt)
Each of these three options come with many different considerations.
Accessing money from Rainy Day Fund for example requires a 2/3rds vote which is out of reach even with the supermajority. I don’t know what would be required to reduce it. However, the legislature could have reappropriated some of this budget’s rainy day allocation — money could still be saved for some other kind of rainy day, and some could have been used to ensure current service level for critical programs like eviction prevention.
Implementing new taxes only requires a 3/5ths vote which is covered by the supermajority. New taxes or increasing taxes is tricky because to many people they are considered political suicide. But reforming existing tax subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction (the largest housing subsidy the state offers) is an obvious choice.
And finally issuing more bonds simply happens in one of the Joint Ways & Means subcommittees to be voted on in both chambers. And while the State is limited in what bonding can be used for, it’s still a valuable tool for many of our slow housing development woes.
The answer is organizing
I’m not trying to share these examples as explicit policy recommendations, but rather to demonstrate with even a little bit of creative thinking, other options emerge. I will also be frank that these other options are much harder than jamming through budget cuts.
Even with a dem supermajority, legislators failed pass a transportation package because of the tax skeptic moderates. These are the same moderates who opposed restricting rents and capping rental application fees.
I refuse to say there is a lack of “political will” to make different policy choices because it removes all agency from the equation, it forgets that political will is built through organizing.
But these conditions will continue unless the political leverage can be built to force these legislators to vote differently or replace them altogether.