Over the last 10 months, following the overwhelming defeat of a ballot measure that sought to secure universal eviction representation in Portland in 2023, a group of door knockers from the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) resumed their canvassing efforts.

They weren’t organizing around a campaign. Instead, they were simply trying to connect with renters in lower-income, often overlooked areas of the city like East Portland to figure out what their concerns were and attempt to mobilize them politically. 

“We literally would just find apartments that we were able to access the doors of, like external doors, and we would just talk to renters and ask them about their challenges: how much has your rent gone up? What are the problems with your housing? Is maintenance being done?” TJ Noddings, the co-chair of the Portland DSA’s housing working group, said.

What the door knockers heard, weekend after weekend, was one major concern. 

“Basically everyone we talked to just cannot afford to live here anymore,” Noddings said. “That's the primary thing on their minds: they're worried that if they lose their current housing, they won't be able to get new housing because they won’t be able to afford it.”

Now, with the universal eviction representation campaign behind them, a coalition headed by DSA and the Renters Action Network launched a proposal for a Renters Bill of Rights—a set of nine policy proposals designed to protect renters and boost their political power. 

In addition to their conversations with renters, the group behind the proposal took inspiration from events in another Northwest city. 

Last November, following the defeat of the Eviction Representation for All campaign in Portland, voters in Tacoma narrowly approved a sweeping Tenant Bill of Rights of their own—overhauling the city’s rental policies by a margin of fewer than 400 votes. 

The policies in Tacoma’s tenant bill of rights form the backbone of the Portland program. The first six planks of the program—including requiring that landlords give tenants at least six months notice before raising rents and protecting children and education workers from evictions during the school year—are taken directly from the Tacoma policy. 

Of the final three planks of the program, one is familiar: a resurrection of the Eviction Representation for All proposal defeated last May. 

Noddings said the proposal, which pledges to “establish a right to counsel in eviction court,” remains a critical measure for Portland renters, given the high rate of evictions in Multnomah County, and research showing that legal representation significantly reduces the eviction rate. 

“I believe in eviction representation,” says Angelita Morillo, a Portland City Council candidate and renter who supports the bill of rights. “I think that most people don’t know their rights or don’t know if their rights are being violated, so eviction representation is really important to keep people housed. But I think that this bill of rights is a very separate and different set of guidelines.”

One major difference between last year’s ballot measure and what the coalition is proposing now is that the coalition isn’t attaching any particular funding mechanism to eviction representation—a source of trouble during the measure's campaign. 

The ballot measure defeated in 2023 would have funded universal eviction representation with a 0.75 percent tax on capital gains. The funding mechanism that was criticized for the effect it might have had on small businesses and non-wealthy homeowners. 

This time, Noddings said, the coalition wants to start with what it wants its end results to be and work backwards to figure out the best way to fund and implement its preferred policies from there. 

“We’ve left it open-ended enough and flexible enough that when it comes time to implement this at the city council level if that's how we achieve it, that there’s still a lot of room for cooperation and ensuring that the policy itself is balanced, enforceable, sustainable, and has a funding structure where necessary that folks are happy enough to pass,” Noddings said. 

Portland's local government is a main area of focus for the coalition in a way that it wasn’t when the eviction representation ballot measure was introduced. A total of 11 City Council candidates across all four districts have pledged to support the bill of rights, making it possible that the new Council will have a majority in favor of a pro-renters’ rights agenda. 

A number of the points in the renters bill of rights could be likely addressed by a sympathetic Council. Morillo says she could see a pro-renter council moving quickly next year to cap fees like pet rent and laundry fees.

For Lauren Everett, an organizer with Portland Tenants United, it’s important that the new Council have more renters on it than the current one does. 

“There’s basically two classes of people in this country and it’s people who own land and people who don't own land—and that includes houseless people,” Everett says. “So if the people who don't own land aren't represented in our representative government, that's extremely dysfunctional.”

Other rights would have to be won at a statewide level. The eighth point in the bill of rights is a demand that local municipalities be allowed to enact rent control measures, a practice currently banned in Oregon, which has a statewide 10 percent cap on rent increases for market rate apartments 15 years or older.

Making that kind of change happen will likely require a great deal of renter political power, which means that the canvassing work and effort to politicize renters will continue. 

“A campaign like this is going to create a centralized place for renters to mobilize,” Morillo says. “The need is definitely there, [but] I don’t know if we’ve had a tenant organizing thing like this in years. I think a lot of people think they’re the only ones experiencing a certain issue. They don't realize that this is happening so broadly in their community.”

Coalition members also want to make the argument that the enactment of the renters bill of rights is important not just for renters, but for a city at large that is still dealing with high rates of commercial vacancies and a slower recovery from the economic effects of the pandemic. 

“We all acknowledge that there is a housing crisis in this city, there is a homelessness crisis on our streets, and if we want to put an end to the homelessness crisis, that starts with keeping people housed,” Morillo says.