Bilingual case manager Jorge Cruz, left, and senior case manager Fasseh Abdullahi talk with a person facing eviction in the Multnomah County Courthouse, Portland on Jan. 28, 2025. (Photo by Anna Lueck/OPB)
Toni Powell had a tumultuous life in Los Angeles, surviving foster care, domestic violence and addiction. So, in 2020, after her mother died of cancer, she decided to move away. She had seen Twilight, a vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest, and aspired to live somewhere like it: lush, green and beautiful.
“Once I saw Lake Oswego, even though these are multimillion-dollar homes, I was like, That’s my goal. That’s where I want to be,” said Powell, a 43-year-old single mother, who recalled thinking: “I’m going to get as close to it as I possibly can.”
She settled in Hillsboro, where a domestic violence shelter was a respite from homelessness for her and her 11-year-old daughter. Like many others in Oregon’s post-pandemic housing crisis, she has staved off eviction through temporary jobs and government-funded assistance. She lives in an apartment with the help of a rental voucher from Community Action of Washington County, an anti-poverty organization.
Still, a housing shortage and surging rental costs have pushed many people like her to the brink of homelessness. In 2023, eviction cases reached the highest total since at least 2011, according to a recent report from Oregon Housing and Community Services.
“It’s unreasonable. It’s not feasible, what’s happening now,” said Powell, whose human resources job at Portland Community College ends in October. “If it wasn’t for assistance, I would be homeless today.”
In recent years, large homeless encampments in cities as different as Grants Pass, Bend and Portland have served as a visible indictment of the state’s faltering housing and social services network. Yet housing and tenant advocates say the surge in eviction cases underscores a largely unseen reality: Many Oregon families work daily for wages that aren’t enough to afford the roofs over their heads.
“People just can’t keep up,” said Becky Straus, managing attorney of the nonprofit Oregon Law Center’s Eviction Defense Project. “Even hardworking renters, who are maybe even experiencing wage gains, are putting all of that into their housing, because rent increases have largely eroded any of those gains over the last five years.”
Property management advocates argue that recent changes to the state’s eviction law through House Bill 2001, which became law in March 2023, made it easier for tenants to repeatedly forgo paying rent. They say the legislation has forced landlords into difficult financial situations, prompting some to increase rent, evict tenants and sell properties.
“The problem isn’t being solved,” said Charlie Kovas, the president of the Rental Housing Alliance of Oregon, a nonprofit organization that advocates for rental property owners, property managers and vendors. “It’s being kicked down the road.”
Evictions in Oregon
Evictions begin when a landlord delivers a written termination notice to a tenant. The case may then go to court, where landlords and tenants can reach an agreement or go to trial. If a judge or jury agrees to evict, a local sheriff’s department can then remove the tenant and lock them out of the property.
It’s difficult to quantify precisely how many Oregonians are being evicted from their homes today because only case filings, rather than terminations, are recorded. Many tenants informally agree to leave before their case goes to trial, avoiding fees and other challenges that come with fighting their case in court.
(Chart by Tony Schick/OPB)
But data indicates that things are getting worse. In 2019, landlords filed an average of more than 1,500 eviction cases each month in county courthouses statewide, according to data compiled by the nonprofit Oregon Law Center and presented in December to the Senate Interim Committee on Housing and Development.
Since Oregon’s pandemic eviction moratorium ended, that number has climbed, with an average of more than 2,100 cases each month since October 2022, according to Evicted in Oregon, a Portland State University group that researches evictions. Last year, it topped 2,300 cases and twice surpassed 2,600.
“People are in a very serious situation, and it’s not helped any when you consider that there isn’t any other place to go,” said Kim McCarty, the executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, a tenant advocacy nonprofit. “It’s awful that people are living in cars, in tents and on the street. It shouldn’t be happening.”
Those who face eviction in Oregon today are representative of the state’s most intractable problems. Some have struggled to recover from losing their homes in wildfires. Others have been saddled by medical debt or the loss of a loved one.
Increasingly, Oregonians working at hospitals, grocery stores, gas stations and restaurants are needing assistance because housing costs have priced them out of a stable life, according to anti-poverty groups. Multiple studies indicate that vulnerable people — seniors, women, farmworkers, people with disabilities and renters of color — are most at risk.
“When tenants are rent burdened, even a minor economic event, such as a reduction in work hours or a large medical bill or a car repair, leads to eviction,” Kevin Cronin, the policy and advocacy director for Housing Oregon, an affordable housing advocacy organization, said in a December public hearing with the Senate housing and development committee.
The state in recent years has sought to address this problem through legislation with billions of dollars in public investments. In 2023, Gov. Tina Kotek approved a housing package that set new building requirements for cities and carved out $200 million for affordable housing and homelessness prevention. That same year, she approved a $2.5 billion budget bill to fund the state’s Housing and Community Services Department and $48.5 million from the state’s general fund toward housing efforts, aiming to support renters and cut bureaucratic red tape for developers.
Then, lawmakers passed a $376 million housing package last year to boost production, fund infrastructure like roads and land acquisition, and support renters. Housing advocates say the funds have helped them serve more people, but it’s still not enough.
“It’s been incredible. It’s helped us build a lot more housing,” said Jacob Fox, executive director at Homes for Good in Lane County, Oregon’s second-largest public housing authority. However, he added: “These huge investments that are being made are just a drop in the bucket in the 15,000 units that are needed across Lane County.”
Kotek’s plan for housing
Kotek has tied her political legacy to fighting the housing crisis. She has called on lawmakers to continue to support her administration’s agenda, claiming that the state is making progress.
She says her homelessness state of emergency has prevented homelessness for 24,000 households, financed 2,800 affordable housing units and provided infrastructure for over 25,000 affordable and market rate housing units.
“We have blunted the humanitarian crisis on our doorsteps,” Kotek, who is halfway through her term, said at the Jan. 13 speech at the state capitol in Salem. Still, Kotek said she was “impatient about the pace of progress” and called on government leaders to “do more.”
(Chart by Tony Schick/OPB)
Kotek’s administration remains far behind a goal she set when she took office of adding 36,000 units a year. That’s proven through permit data. Local governments issued nearly 17,700 housing permits in 2023, according to a federal database. Preliminary numbers for last year point to a similar trend: 13,179 permits were issued through November 2024.
The governor has allocated $173.2 million in her 2025-27 budget toward disrupting homelessness and preventing 20,000 evictions by bolstering shelters and rental assistance. In a Jan. 16, press conference, Kotek acknowledged the high number of eviction cases. She said she would like to have even more money toward eviction prevention in her budget, calling it “the most cost-effective way to help people not experience homelessness.”
“I have heard from some legislators who are like, ‘Your homelessness package is quite large,” she said. “I’m like, yes, because we’re in a crisis. And it is improving. But we need to stay the course. If I had more dollars, or if the federal government wanted to give us more money for rent assistance, I would know where to spend it.”
Republicans have criticized the governor’s proposed budget and say her administration is not making progress quickly enough to curb the state’s housing and homelessness problems.
“The concerns that Oregonians are facing right now around affordability are extraordinary,” House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, said in the Jan. 16 press conference. “Oregonians themselves are calling on us to do more with less and not ask them to write that blank check. They don’t want to do that. They’re not prepared to do it. They can’t afford to do it.”
Oregonians struggling to afford rent
While Oregon’s population increased in recent decades, the state didn’t build houses at the same pace, creating a shortage that was only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Home buying increased and construction largely stalled as the nation faced economic turmoil and supply chain problems.
Since then, housing costs and inflation have worsened. Wages haven’t kept up with the increasing cost of rent. One in four Oregon households today spend more than half of their total income on rent, and more than 85% of eviction filings since October 2022 have been due to people not paying rent, according to the law center.
“There’s a lot of poor people here, and housing isn’t that much cheaper where people are poorer,” said Lisa Bates, a Portland State University professor who leads the Evicted in Oregon team.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
(Chart by Tony Schick/OPB)
Oregonians today live in a state with the ninth most expensive housing costs in America and the 14th highest cost of living, according to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, a state agency that studies national economic trends.
“It’s hard to maintain those high costs, and when a rent increase comes, it’s even more challenging,” said Autumn Rackley, the housing director for NeighborImpact, which provides eviction services in Central Oregon, where rental costs that surged in Bend are beginning to creep up in nearby Prineville and Madras.
“We feel like we’re making an impact with everybody we work with, but still the need is greater than we can fill,” said Rackley.
Policies meant to protect renters and landlords
Oregon Democratic lawmakers pushed for policies granting additional rights for renters in the wake of the pandemic, which upended many Oregonians’ working lives and rocked the state’s social safety net. This includes House Bill 2001.
Among other reforms, the law requires landlords to give tenants a 10-day notice of eviction for not paying rent rather than 72 hours. It also permitted eviction cases to be dismissed so long as payment — including from a rent assistance provider — is made before a judgement. And it gives tenants more time between the initial complaint and a trial to pay their rent.
Since the law’s passage, housing advocates say the law has helped give people more time to get the legal help and rental assistance they need to avoid eviction. According to the law center, the number of eviction cases being dismissed has nearly doubled, and default judgments against tenants and negotiated move-outs have been cut in half.
But Tia Politi, the president of the Oregon Rental Housing Association, which represents thousands of small landlords statewide, says: “I think we are training a legion of people to be dependent on the government.”
Politi says the changes to the state’s eviction rules have created a backlog of eviction cases, noting that tenants are “falling further and further behind.” Politi said repeatedly facing such cases can hinder a person’s future rental prospects.
“Who did they think was going to rent to them?” said Politi. “It will hurt them dramatically.”
Politi acknowledges that rental assistance is necessary for certain tenants, particularly the elderly or disabled, but says some of her clients’ tenants are repeatedly receiving rental assistance who don’t need it.
“It’s wildly inequitable,” said Politi. “I have had some of my clients’ tenants get rent assistance again and again and again over a period of a year and a half to two years — able-bodied people in their thirties … While other residents, especially elderly residents, who don’t know how to work through the system, and disabled residents, are missing out.”
Rep. Kevin Mannix, a Salem Republican, is proposing two bills this legislative session that would reform the state’s eviction laws.
One would create a “three strike rule” that allows landlords to terminate a lease after a tenant’s third “material violation or late payment upon 30 days’ notice with no right to cure.” The other would require a tenant “to pay accruing rent to avoid termination for nonpayment” and award attorney fees to the landlord “if a tenant does not pay rent until the date of trial.”
“We need a rule of reason in regard to renters’ rights, and we are nicely protecting good tenants right now,” Mannix said. “But in so doing, we went too far, and we are overprotecting bad tenants.”
Asked about the criticism of the state’s eviction law, Kotek acknowledged that there are landlords and tenants “who could be better people,” but added: “I think that those are the exception, not the rule.”
She voiced confidence in the state’s eviction law, saying it has helped provide stability for tenants. She added that “there are a lot of landlords and property owners who do it right and people are staying housed because of the notification and a little bit of grace that has been put into the system.”
“I can’t explain why we’re seeing the eviction numbers other than people frankly can’t afford their housing,” Kotek said. “I think that’s the biggest driver. People just don’t make enough and their rents keep going up.”
This story was originally published by Oregon Public Broadcasting.