Portland city councilors provided inklings of their first legislative work this week, signaling their intent to address construction permitting, rental pricing, and residential vacancy rates as key tools to address the city’s housing affordability crisis.

The first round of Portland City Council policy committee meetings kicked off Monday, laying the groundwork for how the city’s elected leaders will tackle everything from the economy, to homelessness and housing, climate, infrastructure, transportation, public safety, and more.

Among the most impactful policies likely to come up for consideration is a proposal to ban the use of anti-competitive rental practices, including algorithmic pricing software used by landlords. The legislation is coming from District 3 Councilor Angelita Morillo. 

The councilor briefly mentioned her intent to bring a policy forward during the Council’s first Homelessness and Housing Committee meeting Tuesday.

“I’ll be bringing forward a policy to ban artificial intelligence rental price fixing …and to make it stronger than I think we’re seeing being passed at the state level,” Morillo told her colleagues during the first Housing and Homelessness Committee meeting Tuesday. “I think that Portland is an ambitious city. We’ve got a lot of renters, and we can do that there.”

Morillo talked about the harmful impacts of companies like RealPage during her campaign last year, calling out the company’s practice of collecting and sharing private rental income data with an array of property owners as part of a larger rental price-fixing scheme that prevents competition in the local market. 

Morillo isn’t the only one with an eye on the issue. The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against RealPage last August, along with attorneys general from Oregon and seven other states.

The Justice Department’s complaint alleges the company’s pricing algorithm “violates antitrust laws” and “deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans.”

Earlier this year, the DOJ amended the complaint to include six of the country's biggest landlords, who oversee more than 1.3 million housing units in 43 states and Washington D.C. The complaint asserts the property companies' use of algorithmic pricing software allowed them to collude to keep rents high, rather than competing with each other by offering lower rents to entice new tenants. 

Morillo previously worked as a policy advocate for Partners For a Hunger-Free Oregon and is candid about her own experiences with homelessness and housing instability. 

“I think that we are in a time where renter’s rights are going to be really important,” Morillo told the committee Tuesday. “Making sure that we keep people housed long-term is going to be really important.”

The councilor said she’s also interested in an “unhoused bill of rights” for the thousands of Portlanders living without stable shelter. 

During the same policy committee meeting, District 1 Councilor Jamie Dunphy fired off a number of issues he’d like the committee to delve into.

“I want to be creative. I want to look into intensive reuse and see what we can do with some of the existing empty buildings,” Dunphy said. “Not every building will work for those things, but some of them may.”

Dunphy, a small-scale landlord who said he rents out one of the two homes he owns to a family, said he’d also like to examine the city’s policies around property foreclosure, as well as unoccupied properties.

“I’m interested in having conversations around a vacancy tax, and trying to urgently get some of these vacant buildings tenanted,” Dunphy added, noting interest in both commercial and residential spaces.

“I happen to know that there are units in South Waterfront that have never been tenanted, and I want to bring that intensity to East Portland. We have vacant land in East Portland. We have places to build rapidly in East Portland.”

Dunphy and District 4 Councilor Eric Zimmerman also brought up the city’s permitting processes and timelines as a future topic of inquiry.

The next Homelessness and Housing Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, February 25.