Fighting to keep the shitty bandaids or fighting to maybe make things better?

Session Lessons: Exploring the question that our lawmakers cannot seem to figure out 💽

Welcome to Session Lessons — the things that I’m learning during Oregon’s Legislative Sessions 💽

It’s 2024, an even-numbered year. That means the short session and the end of the 2-year budget cycle (the biennium). Normally, a short session is reserved for smaller bills, policy reforms, and tweaks, there typically isn’t a lot of money that is available for spending, but things are shaking out a little differently this year.

We had a promising budget forecast, and a Governor, Tina Kotek, who has put all of her political stakes behind being “pro-housing.” There are two big housing bills, Tina’s Bill and the Senate Omnibus bill (SB 1530) that are eating up a big portion of this year’s budget. In early drafts of the bills, they commit tons of money to infrastructure to support more housing development, some other controversial items, as well as some uncontroversial items.

I want to be clear, I am not calling her pro-housing. The scare quotes are to denote how she has positioned herself and how people in the affordable housing development and policy world view her. It’s going to take a lot more than a big dollar commitment to theoretical housing in a few years for me to call her pro-housing.

I gave my first in-person testimony of the session for SB 1530 (with the -3 amendment) during a hearing in the Senate Committee On Housing and Development in support of emergency rent assistance — money paid to landlords who file non-payment evictions against their tenants. I spoke about getting behind on rent after losing my job right after eye surgery and using emergency rent assistance to stay housed. It’s not lost on me how gross it is that the tenant’s perspective is the most compelling testimony in these situations.

This money is absolutely needed. Non-payment of rent is the largest cause of eviction in Oregon. According to the research conducted by Evicted in Oregon, 84% of cases filed in January 2024 were for non-payment of rent.

The eviction process is extremely fucked up. Evictions use summary proceedings, which are much quicker than other civil processes like foreclosure, divorce, and family court (to protect a landlord’s “income”). Oregon law also requires an eviction judgment, the final decision about whether or not a tenant can remain in their home, three weeks after their first appearance. That’s hardly enough time to find resources, mount a defense, or even find new stable housing.

It’s so much easier (and cheaper) to keep people in their homes than it is for people to regain housing after an eviction or periods of homelessness. This is because access to many social services requires a permanent address and landlords are allowed to discriminate against tenants if they have an eviction on their record. And for the “chronically homeless,” not having a home is so incredibly traumatic, that living indoors after periods of unsheltered homelessness requires a huge adjustment that many people struggle with. SO! If keeping people housed is all you’re considering, then this is pretty much a no-brainer.

But what if harm reduction is still really harmful?

Meanwhile, when you look more closely at these emergency rent programs, you’ll discover that they’re also kinda fucked. Emergency rent assistance comes with so many strings attached that it’s barely usable. You can’t just apply on the 27th of July knowing you won’t have rent for August. The eviction process has to be in place for a tenant to apply for the funds. To qualify, tenants are required to have received an eviction notice / lease termination and a set amount of time to pay the unpaid rent — either 72 hours, 10 days, or 30 days depending on some factors.

I can’t even get a haircut, or book a visit to my gyno within 10 days, let alone 72 hours. And the State says “Sorry to hear you’re having a bad time. Here’s a link to a nonprofit with an application to prove that you’re not scamming us. Cross your fingers and hope for the best because there might be a waitlist.” SO! The harm reduction option means that tenants have to know about this program, have to already be in crisis, with very little time to figure out their next move, apply, and wait for who knows how long before they can get the money they desperately need to stay housed. 🤮 BLEH my skin is crawling.

A ton of policy reforms come to mind to make this harm reduction less harmful. One really small one could be a suspension of the eviction process while a tenant has applied and is waiting for assistance (or to be told there is no money left). This was the case during some additional pandemic housing protections but it still expired after a set amount of time, people were still evicted while they were waiting for assistance.

Another could be changing the requirements to allow tenants to apply before they get an eviction notice, increasing the overall timeline, and reducing the number of non-payment filings altogether. Another reform would be to just get rid of evictions for non-payment of rent altogether (that’s something I want to see).

The bad news is, none of these reforms can happen without a fight. Even the small ones. This is where I’m learning a lot more about feasibility — against my will. Feasibility means making concessions and negotiating with yourself before you even start making a case in the public record or booking lobbying meetings. It’s walking yourself back to something you think you can get.

Part of this is because the stakes are really high. Getting a program funded is hard enough. State budgets have to balance; states don’t get to write blank checks to the US military like Congress does. So that means every program and the State government itself is competing for a slice of the same budget pie. To complicate things further, there are a limited number of meetings you can make with any legislator, there are specific deadlines that bills need to pass to progress forward.

With the stakes so high, policy wonks become pickier about the types of policies and budget requests they prioritize — especially during the short session. Because to a lot of people, something is better than nothing. There is a very real fear, that focusing on a reform will take away from the overall effort required to even fight for funding an existing program. With emergency rent assistance, if you’re trying to do both, you have you answer questions like: why should we fund this program if it needs fixes so badly?

These types of questions are stupid, I know. It’s not fair but questions like it are asked all the time. We had to fend off similar questions during the ERA campaign. County officials kept saying, “We have an eviction defense program already, and it’s funded so why are you doing this?” And lawmakers don’t like hearing what we have is garbage.

We should be able to update and evolve existing programs. We should be able to say this program deserves money and it deserves to get better.

Fundamentally, the dichotomy between maintaining the status quo and pursuing basic reforms is artificial and unjust. It reflects systemic failures rooted in decades of neoliberal policies and structural inequalities. But it’s the tool we have. To truly address the housing crisis, we need to build the leverage, and the people power necessary to disrupt the logic baked inside our legislative institutions and markets.

And that requires us to touch grass. It requires community building and mutual aid. It requires talking to your neighbors, your co-workers, and people who are different than you. It requires getting things wrong. It requires having difficult conversations. It requires writing testimony for bills that make you want to squirm and listening to meetings so boring it makes you want to cry. And it requires spending resources, capital and relational, in the things we believe in. The answer is get organized.