Housing legislation sacrifices too much for too little

When you negotiate with yourself, you lose 🏡

One of the previous weeks when our newsletter was supposed to go out, I was sitting in a public hearing at the Oregon State Capitol. The building is under construction right now so instead of walking through the rotunda and basking in all of the colonialist power of the place, we came in the back, past the legislative offices, and through a hallway that felt eerily like a high school.

I know most of our readers don’t live in Oregon. But I promise, this is not only an Oregon problem. It’s also not just a state legislation problem. This is a problem that exists at every level of law-making and in every governing body.

I work for an organization called Neighborhood Partnerships. NP convenes several different groups: the Oregon Housing Alliance and Residents Organizing for Change and the Oregon Economic Justice Round Table. (They also manage Oregon’s IDA program aka state-sanctioned economic redistribution in the form of tax credits.)

Residents Organizing for Change (ROC) is my crew. It’s a state-wide network of affordable housing residents, people in need of affordable housing and front-line staff of affordable housing. ROC exists to be a means of political engagement for folks who have experienced homelessness because they know our housing system and its problems better than anyone. Members primarily engage with statewide advocacy, but interest in local and county politics is increasing.

It’s a weird job. I’ll write an analysis of the nonprofit organizing world at some point, but ROC’s given me access to a lot of interesting spaces and people.

One of those spaces is the Capitol. I was in Salem to testify in support of Senate Bill 603¹ — The People’s Housing Assistance Fund, a legislative concept that ROC introduced by way of Senator Wlnsvey Campos. SB 603 was a demonstrative guaranteed income program for Oregonians in need of stable housing. It also includes a study with Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative to study the program and avenues to make it permanent.

Throughout the legislative process, I watched the bill become something completely different from the concept ROC members wanted to introduce. This is a story about how progressive policy gets choked out for political viability. And still dies.

“We want G’s for everyone in the family” 💸

Back in 2021, before I started working for Neighborhood Partnerships, ROC convened a state-wide summit with lots of affordable housing residents. One of the activities during this summit was a “There Oughta Be A Law” brainstorming session where participants got to talk about what new legislation they wanted to see in Oregon. While I wasn’t at this summit, I saw the jamboard, and the responses were overwhelming: universal basic income.

From there, ROC formed a policy working group and began researching and thinking through big concepts like how much money, who gets the money, who gives out the money, where does the money come from. I’m taking the time to explain all of this because ROC had big dreams. In one meeting Katia, a front-line staff member, said, “We want G’s for everyone in the family!”

I feel defensive about our original concept because a statewide UBI program could have been one of the coolest things to ever happen in Oregon. We wanted to go bold. We wanted to change the conversation.

And yes, we expected a fight, but ROC couldn’t even sway our allies.

We were asked why a housing organization would be interested in UBI and why it wasn’t being brought through economic justice coalitions, or if we considered working with smaller localities. Policy wonks at my organization and at other progressive policy think tanks just groaned and said it’s never going to pass.

And this had real consequences. We weren’t able to make the policy the best it could have been — cohesive and compassionate, sustainable and universal — because no one believed in us. And with hindsight, there is a long list of things I wish we’d done, but those are lessons for next time.

When you negotiate with yourself, you lose 🪦

One of the first concessions we made early on in the policy research phase was turning a proper program into a demonstration program + study. Everyone said the bill would go farther, that it would be easier to pass if it was a study bill because that means you only have to get legislators to agree to “let’s see what happens” rather than “let’s start a whole new program.”

But this operates from a flawed assumption: that people who are skeptical of helping people pay their rent with direct cash will be convinced by data.

One reason this is flawed is this data already exists. When we were talking with the PSU Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative about the study component of SB 603, they told us they didn’t need The People’s Housing Assistance Fund to prove giving money to poor people will help them. UBI and UBI-like programs like SB 603 are a staple in other countries. Many of the UBI pilots around the country already demonstrated how this money goes to food, shelter, medication, and clothing before it goes to drugs or vacations. And even if it did end up going to drugs or vacations, plenty of employed and housed people spend their paychecks on drugs and vacations, why does it matter?

Another problem with the above assumption is that data doesn’t persuade people. More often than not, data is used to lend credibility to an existing argument or belief rather than change it. “It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.”²

And unfortunately, the story most of the public has internalized in spite of evidence otherwise is helping people meet their basic needs with money will just enable bad behavior and will keep them dependent on handouts forever. Opposition testimony for SB 603 claimed that this money would go straight to fentanyl dealers, one of the senators on the Senate Housing Committee even asked if the state would be liable if people harmed themselves or harmed other people with this money.

As much as we’d like to believe we are rational creatures making decisions based on truth, being rational is just a funny little story we inherited from the Enlightenment. Yes, I am being uncharitable. More accurately, it’s the narrative we tell ourselves about what truth is and what authority is peddling it, and what meaning we can create from it that is persuasive, not the data itself.

When we negotiate ourselves back for the sake of political viability, we’re doing work for the landlord lobby. We’re giving credibility to their propaganda and leaving real people behind.

My co-worker and I get long, desperate emails from people who heard about our bill through the news coverage and want to know how they can be a part of this dead program. It’s heartbreaking.

But isn’t some progress better than no progress? 🫠

Part of me dies a little bit when I think about that question. I think it depends on how we measure progress and what consequences (compromises) we’re accepting. And we are being far too generous with our definition of progress.

When SB 608 passed in 2019, progressives around the country heralded it as “state-wide rent control.” But this ~rent control~ allows rents to be raised 14.6% this year, and doesn’t even protect buildings that were built in the last 15 years. The fight to get SB 611³ passed, a slightly stronger version of SB 608, has been really difficult, and we still don’t know if it will make it out of committee.

If it’s this hard to pass basic rent stabilization or a universal basic income pilot program through state legislation, then our goal to decommodify housing is next to impossible. Too much hinges on the same corrupt systems and backroom deals. It’s too susceptible to political theater and the whims of the power-hungry. And the legislative cycle is really slow.

This isn’t to say that no meaningful change can happen through legislation. Having a policy introduced during a legislative session lends a lot of credibility to the legislative concept. It has to have a sponsor, it gets vetted through a drafting process and checked over by several lawyers. There are also some important preemptive policies that were enacted at a specific legislative level and will need to be repealed at that same level.

In my observation of this year’s session, far too many organizations see passing laws as an end in itself. I’m sure grant requirements contribute; many of these organizations are funded by the Oregon Housing & Community Services Department.

Another thing to note, a long-time Oregon Housing Alliance member made a comment about how this year had the most progressive housing policy priorities she’d seen. That might sound like a good thing, but many of these housing coalitions include community development corporations (CDCs) and other non-profit landlords. Simply being progressive isn’t going to house people. We need to shift the balance of power away from actors who keep housing scarce.

But ultimately, we cannot work on housing legislation for the sake of working on housing legislation. We need to use legislation as one of many tools in the fight for housing for all.

1. Senate Bill 603: The People’s Housing Assistance Fund

2. Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

3. Senate Bill 611: Reasonable Rent. Read the testimony if you want to be sad.