Gov. Tina Kotek had a long record of passing landmark housing legislation in her previous role as Speaker of the House. Given that Oregon faces a housing crisis, Kotek started her term with a pledge to ensure the state builds 36,000 new homes every year. I asked Michael Andersen, a housing researcher at the regional think tank Sightline Institute, for his perspective on that goal.
Why are that many homes necessary?
“The main reason is that our population will keep growing, especially in job-rich areas. If we fail to keep up with job growth, then we'll all end up bidding against each other for the homes that exist. In which case the Oregonians with more money will win, but only after driving prices even higher for the same old homes. That under-building is what's been driving prices up since the 90s. And that's the other reason we need to aim for 36,000 — to ease existing suffering, we need to climb out of the housing hole we just spent 20 years digging.”
Why is it an ambitious goal?
“Getting to 36,000 homes per year would be very hard but not unthinkable. We averaged 34,000 in the 1970s, when there were 45% fewer Oregonians. In the 90s it was 26,000.”
What’s it going to take to meet that goal?
“The main reason any given home doesn't exist today is that it would cost more to create & run it than Oregonians are able to pay. Theoretically, taxing and spending could cover that gap, but that'd literally require billions of dollars every year and the state's entire general fund is a little under $30 billion for two years. So — in addition to what public investment we can find — we can't find homes for everyone without making it less expensive for both the public and private sectors to build stuff. We need to create a process that will systematically review all the rules that have been piled onto the cost of building stuff since the 70s, at both the state and local levels. Every one of those rules exists for a reason. For some of them, the benefits outweigh the costs. For others, they don't. But at the moment, we're not truly weighing them.”
