This won't end up hurting us. Much.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/03/millions-of-australians-eligible-for-5-first-home-buyers-scheme-may-be-unable-to-afford-repayment

#housingisaright

YIMBYs say rents in san francisco are so high because there's not enough housing. So, we must build more.

Board of supervisor eliminated a bunch of regulatory hurdles to entice development.

Developers say they won't convert downtown's abandoned offices to rental units, in spite of the give aways, because rents aren't high enough in SF to make it worth their while.

#housing #housingisaright #sanfrancisco

Portland Metro area folks,

Ask Metro Council to Protect Local Investments in Long-Term Housing Solutions

Like many other US cities, Portland has a housing problem. The rent is too damn high, the pay is too damn low, and evictions are too easy for landlords. The city government first declared a housing emergency in 2015, nearly ten years ago, when there were almost four thousand people unsheltered in Portland. There are now nearly three times that many unsheltered people in the city.

The problem is exacerbated by gentrification, increasing inequality, climate disaster, pandemic illness, and the trauma to unsheltered people of repeatedly having their belongings seized and destroyed by police.

In 2018, Portland area voters approved an affordable housing bond, and in 2020, Metro voters approved funding supportive housing services, for those experiencing or at risk of homelessness in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties.

As Street Roots reported in November, these funds have helped launch, among other resources, in Portland, a day center for LGBTQIA2S+ people, a recovery center serving people of color, apartments for those in recovery, and affordable housing for a displaced community. Although the housing crisis continues, these measures have helped get people into housing, prevent evictions, and provide desperately needed shelter.

While the affordable housing bond will not be renewed, the fate of the Supportive Housing Services Measure is uncertain. The measure is due to sunset in 2030, but last month Willamette Week reported on a proposal that would extend the measure to 2050 and amend the measure in various ways, including lowering the tax rate for high-income households (incidentally, high-income households are the only households to pay the tax at all).

The proposal was negotiated by some members of HereTogether, a coalition of service providers, and by the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce, a subsidiary of the Portland Business Alliance.

That's right, the PBA, the Chamber, the group that includes major international corporations, major real estate developers, mainstream media outlets, and government agencies; the same deep pockets that account for a full third of lobbying of Portland City government; the same business lobby that has worked to undermine environmental regulation; the same fat cats that have fought against charter reform, the Portland Clean Energy Fund, Preschool For All, and decriminalizing low level illicit drug possession; the same business alliance that manages the privatized policing of the Downtown Clean & Safe Enhanced Services District;
the same special interest group that just lobbied city council to renew and expand that enhanced services district, to increase fees there by 11%, and to increase the geographical area for their enhanced services district, effectively raising taxes on downtown businesses and residents, to give their executives and other staff a 30% raise.

These are the folks who want their taxes lowered.

The chamber of horrors--I mean, commerce--likes to repeat that Portland and the Metro area suffers under an unusually high tax regime, but that is simply. not. true.

As reported in Street Roots earlier this year, Oregon's state and local taxes are in the middle of the pack among US States.

We have no sales tax. Property taxes are limited and increasingly uneven. At the federal level, corporate and business tax rates have been falling since the 1980s, and real estate investors and developers get extra tax breaks. The only taxes that are relatively higher in Portland--though still lower here than in many other cities--affect the region’s most affluent families, those with incomes over $400,000.

The 2020 measure taxes both businesses and high-income households to provide funds for
Supportive Housing Services. The personal income tax for this applies to individuals with taxable income over $125,000 and joint filers with taxable income over $200,000, and applies a 1% rate to amounts over that income rate. So, a joint filing household making $250,000/year currently pays $500 a year for this 1% marginal tax. Or around $41/month. For a family of three, that's less than a trip to the movies.

This is what the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce objects to. They seem to think they need to go to the movies more than other people need help with housing.

What they are proposing for 2026 is a 10% reduction in the personal income tax rate, from 1% to 0.9%. , and for 2031, a 25% reduction, for a personal income tax rate of 0.75%. This means that for a joint household making $250k a year, their $41 per month in 2024 would go down in 2026 to $37 a month, a savings of four dollars, or, maybe a latte per month.

In 2031 their tax at point seven five percent over 200,000 would be about thirty one dollars a month, a savings of ten dollars per month from the current rate.

On the other end, though, a 10% reduction in individual tax means collective reduction in funds of about $17.5 million per year or $87 million over 5 years. A 25% reduction means $44 million less collected, or about $836 million over 19 years.

So...in exchange for a tax break of $4 a month for that same $250k a year household, the tri-county area served by Supportive Housing Services funds has to give up about $17.5 million annually.

Do we want to solve our homeless crisis or not?

What, you ask, could $17.5 million pay for in a year? 450 households' rent could be paid at $1,400/month plus $5,000 for move in and other costs. AND there would still be enough left over to pay 93 case managers a livable $80 thousand dollars a year for salary and benefits.

Seventeen and a half million dollars could also buy four existing motels for conversion to deeply affordable studio apartments.

So those $4 lattes add up.

But, you might say, are the Here Together providers okay with this?

Some of them apparently are willing to accept less money in exchange for the deferred sunset.

But not all members of the coalition are on board with this. As Willamette Week reported, for instance, "Latino Network is listed as a member but [does] not support reducing homeless services in favor of a tax cut."

And some coalition members are all for it: Willamette Week failed to mention in their report that the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce is itself a member of Here Together.

Looking at the big picture, we know the incoming federal administration will be handing out tax cuts to the rich. We do not need to add on to that locally. Moreover, the incoming federal administration could withhold federal dollars from Oregon. We need to ensure local revenue is as robust as can be. The incoming federal administration is attacking immigrant communities, and these local funds are essential to serve folks who are denied access to other resources. Now is not the time for us to backpedal on local progressive tax policies!

If you live in the Metro area, you can let the Metro council know whether you think a latte a month for a rich person is a bad tradeoff against supporting those experiencing or at risk of homelessness in Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties.

easy email template:
https://welcomehomecoalition.org/call-to-action-ask-metro-council-to-protect-local-investments-in-long-term-housing-solutions/

or email the councilors directly:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

#PortlandOr #PDX #Oregon #Metro #Housing #HousingIsARight

Selections from a message from the director of Hygiene for All in Portland, Oregon
https://www.h4apdx.org/

The Supreme Court of the United States’ decision in favor of Grants Pass threatens whole community health and wellbeing across the United States.

See below for What the case was about? How will it impact unsheltered Americans’ human rights & civil rights? Why it harms efforts to end skyrocketing rents, housing insecurity, & homelessness, and threatens our health & wellbeing and WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PROTECT OREGONIANS?

What was the case about?

Grants Pass faced a significant housing shortage leading to a high rate of homelessness among its residents. The city lacked affordable housing options, forcing hundreds of individuals into homelessness, who were previously homeowners and workers in Grants Pass.

Grants Pass has nearly zero resources for homeless individuals, with only one private transitional housing program that did not accept people with physical or mental disabilities and required its clients to work for free and pray several times a day. This left a large portion of the homeless population no shelter alternative except staying on the streets.

In response to these circumstances

Grants Pass, first tried to get rid of homeless residents by buying them bus tickets to other jurisdictions. The other jurisdictions sent people back, asking Grants Pass to stop foisting Grants Pass’ policy failures onto their communities.

Then Grants Pass tried extreme enforcement of existing laws to serially displace and harass houseless residents.

Unsuccessful, the city passed stricter ordinances imposing a 24/7 city wide sleeping ban, stipulating homeless residents leave the city or face fines or jail … even if merely using a blanket, sleeping, or resting within City limits. Police told those with nowhere to sleep except on public property, or in a car on public property to relocate outside City limits to a place called Devil’s Spill or face criminal penalties.

The ordinances targeted activities they creatively defined as “camping,” but in fact specifically prohibited and made even the use of a blanket a criminal offense- claiming using a blanket constituted making a temporary living arrangement/ or” camping.”

The enforcement of these ordinances effectively criminalized the basic activities of sleeping/ staying warm with a blanket all people must exercise in order to avoid dying. Police and City Council members were clear, however, that the law should be enforced if and only if residents did not have an apartment or house. In essence this made the mere act of existing within the city limits of Grant’s Pass while homeless a criminal act, subject to fines, and jail time.

Why H4A & Our Lawyers Argued Against Grants Pass

Lawyers argued the case very narrowly - asserting that fining or jailing someone using a blanket to stay warm if (and only if) they were houseless, was cruel, unusual, and unequal punishment.

Our lawyers argued against Grants Pass on the grounds

That the punishments inflicted were grossly disproportionate to the “offense.”

That for unhoused residents, such ‘offenses’ were utterly unavoidable for human survival

That without a home, a person has literally no other choice than to meet their bodily human needs on public property.

That the law was only applied to those without housing; with those internations openly described by those passing the ordinance and those enforcing it

The Legal & Policy Implications

The Supreme Court rejected the arguments outlined above, ruling instead that Grants Pass was within its rights to pass and enforce its ordinances. The SCOTUS’s misguided decision has ramifications for states, towns, and other localities across the nation, in that it:

Gives our local governments carte blanche to enact laws that violate basic human rights to life,

Permits our cities to violate our most vulnerable neighbors’ civil rights to equal protection and treatment under the law,

Incentivizes towns to invest in practices proven to increase houselessness and steepen barriers to resecuring housing;

Encourages our elected officials to divert and reduce the investments in housing and services we need to staunch and reverse the flow of people from the safety of housing to untold hardships on the streets.

This decision allows localities to enact ordinances that make it illegal for houseless people to simply exist within their borders. It opens the way for cities to pass the buck on their housing failures to surrounding states, cities, towns, communities. It allows cities to abdicate actually solving growing homelessness through the proven homelessness reduction strategies of increased affordable housing, in favor of hiding homelessness from the public eye.

With this ruling, more cities and states will adopt sundown laws. This will incentivize neighboring jurisdictions to do the same in cascading fashion. The end result could very well be that those without housing find themselves unable to legally sleep, rest, or keep warm anywhere in the United States if area shelter is full or unavailable; a situation which will condemn them to a life of endless incarceration and fines.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PROTECT OREGONIANS?

1. Write your elected representatives in Portland and the State Legislature asking them to protect HB 3115 - which mandates that local governments wishing to regulate encampments and prohibit people from sleeping or living in certain places at certain times ensure those restrictions are “objectively reasonable” taking into account the totality of the circumstances, including the impact on people who are experiencing homelessness.

https://www.portland.gov/contact-elected-official

https://gov.oregonlive.com/legislators/

-> Tell them you support HB 3115 which protects civil and human right

-> Encourage elected officials to commit to the evidence backed solutions for ending homelessness - investing in truly affordable housing, purchasing apartments and units, long term rental assistance, and the services to help people get back on their feet and into housing.

-> Urge them to reject wasting tax dollars on policies shown to prolong and increase homelessness . (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G8SUYEHEIOZ5Mtz6Fgtmi_dPl1KxPbmjWhXBWcXorCw/edit?pli=1)

-> Ask them to invest public dollars in the rental assistance, apartment building purchases, and new unit construction that actually create the additional 68,317 units of extremely affordable housing that households making $23,700/year REQUIRE to remain housed and safe.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PuP00Fb4abH9gjyew_jT9gr9vwXZtLg8xcAscMhwo0I/edit
https://welcomehomecoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/EnglishLanguageRegionalAffordableHousing101.pdf

2. Write, talk to and vote for City, County, Metro, & State candidates/ elected officials championing affordable housing investments and services that will end houselessness.
https://www.portland.gov/elections/city-office-candidacy/2024-city-candidates
https://www.multco.us/elections/candidate-filings-metro-and-multnomah-county-may-2024-primary
https://www.oregonmetro.gov/regional-leadership/metro-council
https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_State_Senate_elections,_2024

-> Urge them to pursue new revenue to continue the successes of Portland Housing & Metro Housing Bonds which have opened up 6,500 new low income housing units produced by the ( 1359 more units than promised, and still slated to create more) . These funds are set to run out of funds in the near future, leaving a still massive gap that must close if our most vulnerable households are to find relief from paying 50% and more of their earnings to keep a roof over their heads.
https://welcomehomecoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/EnglishLanguageRegionalAffordableHousing101.pdf

3. Challenge and reject candidates who favor flushing money down the toilet punishing your homeless neighbors and keeping them unhoused.

-> Ask them why they’re pursuing punishment shown to increase homelessness by over 2 -percent year upon year and fail to reduce the numbers ending up on the streets for the first time
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G8SUYEHEIOZ5Mtz6Fgtmi_dPl1KxPbmjWhXBWcXorCw/edit

-> Tell them all evidence shows the only way to reduce homelessness is increasing housing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0APR7dt-uZ8

Talk to your friends, neighbors and family & ask them to take action and vote in favor of candidates that want to end homelessness rather than pander to haters and conceal systemic inequities.

For a deep dive: Here is an edited transcript of Q and A between Ryan Downer (Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs) and Kelsi Korkran (Co-counsel in Grants Pass V. Johnson) click HERE [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wNsPFmHvd5fIaCsSdASY_3OZDct6DVxyV_yy4tVdASw/edit]. For a video of the conversation click HERE [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLZB_jF46dw]

#Portland #Oregon #PDX #PortlandOr #Housing #HousingIsARight #SCOTUS
#HousekeysNotHandcuffs

https://kolektiva.social/@anarchademic/112871727147534459

They have jobs, but no homes. Inside America’s unseen homelessness crisis. (WaPo Story, June 29, 2024)

Homelessness, already at a record high last year, appears to be worsening among people with jobs.

Homelessness at record highs--in some regions, up over 60% in the past year--also appears to be worsening among people with jobs, as housing becomes further out of reach for low-wage earners, according to shelter interviews and upticks in evictions and homelessness tallies around the country.

A record 12.1 million Americans — or about 1 in 4 renters — are spending at least half of their incomes on rent and utilities, putting them at increased risk of eviction and homelessness, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Meanwhile, there is hardly anywhere in the country where a person working a full-time minimum-wage job can afford a one-bedroom rental, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Among those who are homeless, inflation continues to play a major role. In interviews with 30 people in 17 states who recently became homeless while employed, nearly all said exorbitant rents had not only tipped them into homelessness, but were preventing them from securing new housing.

“I work 50 hours a week, and it’s still really hard to keep up,” said Aaron Reed, 22, who makes $21 an hour at an Amazon warehouse near Nashville, and returns to his mother’s Hyundai SUV to sleep. He shares the back seat with their black Lab, Stella, while his mom sleeps up front.

The pair have been homeless since October, when Reed’s mother was hospitalized for covid and lost her job at a department store beauty counter, forcing them out of the extended-stay hotel where they’d been living for seven months.

Plus, everything costs more when you’re homeless, said Reed . . . . He and his mother spend $50 a day to fill the gas tank, so they can leave the air conditioner running overnight in 99-degree weather. There’s no way to cook, so they eat prepackaged foods or takeout for every meal. And without access to running water, they spend about $80 a month on large jugs of bottled water they keep in the trunk.

Deborah Bower, a dog groomer in San Ramon, Calif., has been homeless since October, after breast cancer treatments wiped out $100,000 of her savings. These days she either sleeps in her small SUV, which she parks in a movie theater parking lot, or in $95-a-night hotel rooms, where she often brings along her own dog, Bean, as well as others she’s watching overnight for clients.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/28/homeless-lack-of-affordable-housing-economy/
archive https://web.archive.org/web/20240728183144/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/28/homeless-lack-of-affordable-housing-economy/

#Housing #HousingIsARight #Houselessness

Good article on investment firms' takeover of housing: https://ricochet.media/justice/housing/we-cant-buy-and-sell-our-way-out-of-this-housing-crisis/

"Almost 10 per cent of our nation’s houses — 1.3 million homes — are sitting empty, accumulating in value for re-sale. More than 235,000 residences are listed on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, representing 4.9 per cent of the country’s long-term rentals. Large financial firms own 20 to 30 per cent of Canada’s purpose-built rentals. In Edmonton — a province without rent controls — 48 per cent of rentals are held by financialized entities, up from 1.6 per cent 30 years ago [...]. Our homes are no longer homes; they’ve been turned into investment vehicles for speculators of all shapes and sizes who are doing what investors do — artificially pumping the value of their assets and extracting increasingly exorbitant rents. The only way to restore housing affordability is to decommodify the places we live."

#PolCan #HousingIsARight #HousingCrisis

A 3 year waitlist would be short at this point. Often it's 5+ years, or they close the waitlist for a year or two, only opening it up for a brief window, and then they'll tell you that that advertised 5 years is closer to 7. It varies from area to area, and a lot of people don't seem to understand that. It's not as easy as they seem to think, and if you have to move due to poverty and needing to find something cheaper, you might move out of the area you applied in, so you get to apply and get to the back of the next waitlist.
Housing is a human right, and we need to start treating it as such, not as a fucking commodity/investment.

#HOUSINGISARIGHT #poverty #housing #homeless

The "mortality risk of people who have experienced homelessness is about 3.5 times higher than that of the housed population"

#HousingIsARight
#housing

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/first-national-calculation-mortality-us-homeless-population