SHOCKER: Portland’s housing crisis is getting worse.

A newly released report from the Portland Housing Bureau shows the city has grown less affordable in the last year, despite declaring a housing state of emergency and offering an array of new policies aimed at creating affordable units.

The latest State of Housing report, in its second year, shows average rents have increased 7 percent in the last year, and that portions of the city affordable to people of modest incomes have continued to shrink.

Most concerning: No Portland neighborhoods are currently affordable to an average Latino household, the report finds. Average black, Native American, and single-mother households had already been priced out.

Even worse, the report suggests the city’s black population is decreasing, which it calls “a troubling indicator of inclusiveness and racial equity in housing and opportunity in the city.” DIRK VANDERHART


RUSSELL COURTIER, the 38-year-old white supremacist gang member accused of the racially-motivated murder of a Gresham teen in August, was indicted last week for a drunken bar assault that occurred 11 months before the alleged hate crime.

The new indictment—for second-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon after he allegedly beat a man unconscious with a pool ball in September 2015—comes after a Mercury story showing that prosecutors originally didn’t pursue charges against Courtier, even though he admitted the assault to his probation officer. If he had been convicted for the attack, he likely would have been jailed in August, when he allegedly killed 19-year-old Larnell Bruce.

Courtier was indicted on the hate crime charges in September for killing Bruce, who was black, after the Mercury exposed him as a member of the European Kindred prison gang. DOUG BROWN