Portland City Council yesterday passed an ordinance that officially enacted a housing emergency in Portland. The commissioners also got an earful from dozens of speakers, some who waited hours for their chance to tell the council just how much trying to find affordable housing—or even keeping the housing you have—seriously sucks in this city.
Though many gave impassioned, well-prepared, moving testimony, the one who stood out (Read: Got lotsa hoots, hollers, and several rounds of applause) was Community Alliance of Tenants’ Executive Director Justin Buri. He was invited to speak by the council, so he got more than the allotted three-minute time generally allowed for testimony, and he used every. single. minute. to stand up for Portland renters. Really, you should watch it, because it’s a wonder to behold.
The video should start at the 48:12 mark. Buri starts talking at 48:30 if you want to fast forward. If it still won’t do it correctly for you, click here to jump right to the Youtube video where Buri’s testimony begins.
Enjoy:
If you can’t watch it—or if you want to follow along—there’s a full transcript of Buri’s testimony after the jump.
My name is Justin Buri, Executive Director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, Oregon’s only statewide, grassroots, tenant-let, renters rights organization. With over 1000 tenant members, our mission is to educate, organize and empower Oregon tenants to demand and obtain safe, stable and affordable rental housing. Low-income tenants—predominantly low-wage workers, families with children, people living with disabilities, seniors and people of color—are CAT’s primary membership base.
In Portland, and the rest of Oregon, tenants face housing injustice in the form of increasing rents, discrimination, unsafe housing conditions, and the constant threat of retaliation or eviction. Portland is one of the most gentrified cities in the nation and has among the highest rates of rent increases, displacement, and no-cause evictions. Landlords and developers issuing such evictions and dramatically raising rents are forcing responsible and reliable tenants into one of the worst rental markets in history, without considering the impact on the individual tenants, or our community. Portland’s unprecedented low vacancy rate gives landlords more power over tenants, increasing incidents of discrimination and retaliation. These conditions make it easy for a landlord to refuse when a tenant asks for a repair or demands accounting for bogus fees and deposit charges. These challenges that renters face, especially rent hikes, evictions, and other forms of displacement, are especially dire for tenants with high barriers, and members of protected classes under the Fair Housing Act.
Tenants cannot wait for incremental change. We need bold, courageous action to address this human-made disaster. Building-wide, no-cause evictions are popping up like brush fires across this city, fanning the flames of displacement as our communities continue to bleed. The flood of speculation from Wall Street, corporate landlords, and private investors, buying up buildings to empty them and raise rents, has dire consequences on people’s health, economic stability and their children’s educational opportunities.
We need real leadership from our Housing Commissioner, our Mayor, and from our City Council. We are in a Renter State of Emergency.
In CAT’s 19-year history, we have never seen it this bad. Tenants are in dire distress and in need of immediate relief. Mass evictions of entire buildings, 30-, 50-, even 100-percent rent increases, are impacting our communities, and threatening the social fabric of our city, and there is no end in sight. We can count the number of cranes in the air right now, building more luxury apartments, but how many of those new apartments will be affordable to low-income, or even middle-income tenants? When are we going to recognize that building only market-rate, luxury apartments, will never “trickle-down,” to lower income tenants, no matter how many we build, despite all the zoning changes, cash incentives, and sweetheart deals we offer to developers?
How long does this Council think it takes to find a decent apartment in this rental market? How many affordable apartments are available in your neighborhoods, likely with good schools, transportation options, low crime, and neighbors you know and trust?
How long would it take you to move, if you received a no-cause termination notice tomorrow?
Now imagine if you had bad credit from a foreclosure, medical debt or student loans. Would you qualify? Imagine if you received a no-cause notice after you asked for a repair. Would you put that landlord as a reference on your next rental application?
Imagine you had a criminal record, because you had once been sleeping outside, and arrested from these homeless sweeps. Imagine if you had been racially profiled, or a victim of the racist US War on Drugs, that targets African Americans and people of color.
Imagine if you made minimum wage to support your family, and worked the 72 hours per week it takes to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. Where would you find the time to move?
Where would you live? Would 30, 60 or even 90 days be enough? In order to move, you have to take days off of work to find a vacancy, pay multiple application fees, hope and pray you are finally accepted, move your family, change your children’s school, find a new bus route to work, pay the deposit, first and last month’s rent, pay the movers, clean the house, and pray you get even a fraction of your deposit back.
How long would that process take for you? Is 30, 60 or 90 days enough? Do you have money in your savings to do that? For the majority of tenants, the answer is no.
Low income tenants, people of color, people with disabilities, working families making poverty wages, and seniors in a fixed income are being told, “if you don’t like it, move,” which really means, “you are no longer welcome to live in this city.”
Tenants are tired and in distress. Tired of moving, tired of our homes making us sick, tired of paying over half of our income on rent. Tenants are tired of being silenced, out of fear of retribution or a bad reference from their landlord. Tenants are tired being told that our voices, our experiences, our stories, don’t matter. Tenants of tired of hearing, “housing will have to wait, we have more important priorities right now.”
Tenants make up almost half of Portland’s population, and deserve to be heard.
It’s time for bold, courageous leadership from our Housing Commissioner, our Mayor, and from our City Council. If you want to see examples of leadership, look to Chair Kafoury and the County Board of Commissioners, who have committed to housing every homeless veteran by the end of the year, through A Home for Everyone. Look to Governor Kate Brown, who helped champion $62 million for housing in her first year. Look to Speaker Tina Kotek, who fought to include tenants with Section 8 as a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, and fought to include rentals in this year’s Inclusionary Zoning bill, which ultimately died in the Senate.
If you want to see examples of real courage, look to all the renters that are here today, despite the fear of retaliation from their landlord when they speak out.
It’s time to recognize that Portland is not livable, equitable, nor sustainable, when tenants are being pushed out of their homes. It’s time to recognize that housing is a human right, and should not be left to the under-regulated free market. It’s time to prioritize the needs of all Portland residents, not just the landlords, investors, tech companies like AirBnB, and developers. It’s time to prioritize people over profit, and recognize that everyone who lives here has a right to this city.
We can no longer wait for incremental change, or accept the bread crumbs that are thrown to us, so we can count us as a win. If the intent of this 90-Day Proposal, is to act as the first step and building block to real change, and have the commitment of this Housing Commissioner, Mayor and Council, of enacting real immediate change, then we can support it. If the intent of this 90-Day proposal is to say that you all have done something, and go back to business as usual, then we cannot support it.
We are calling for a moratorium or suspension of no-cause terminations for one year, and to increase the notice period of rent increases over 5% of rent, from the current 30 days, to one year. 30-, 60-, or even 90-days’ notice is not enough, either to move quickly or absorb a shocking rent increase, especially in today’s disaster-like housing crisis.
We will no longer accept that your hands are tied due to explicit or implicit preemptions on Oregon state law. If that is the case, then demonstrate the courage and leadership necessary to either change them or challenge them. The Supreme Court of the United States has reaffirmed disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act.
Both the City of Portland and the State of Oregon are currently compiling their Analysis of Impediments to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. Evictions, rent hikes, displacement, and substandard housing are fair housing issues, and should be treated as such. These unjust laws and policies – such as the ban on rent control, inclusionary zoning, and the practice of no-cause evictions – should be challenged under the Fair Housing Act, just as the landlords will likely challenge this modest, 90-Day proposal, by Housing Commissioner Saltzman.
Tenants can no longer wait, for our Housing Commissioner, Mayor, and City Council to act. We need bold, courageous leadership in this human-made disaster. We are in a Renter State of Emergency.
Thank you
*drops mic and walks off stage*
Brew Dr. Kombucha recently purchased the house I was renting/running 2 businesses out of… if that’s not some gentrification on some portland level I don’t know what is. But seriously… renting in portland is insane
Buri comes in at 48:50, by the way.
3 Bedroom apartments in Rockwood are going for $1300.
Can’t wait to see all the U-hauls on I5 headed away from town when the rain comes back. Oh sweet rain, please separate the true Oregonians from everyone else. This long summer has really created a lot of disillusionment of what it’s like to really live here. Soon newcomers will see what a real Oregon winter is like, and I really hope they hate it.
Can’t wait to see all the U-hauls headed away from town on I5 as soon as the rain comes back.
This month my partner and I were forced to leave Portland, where we’ve lived, paid taxes, and held down solid jobs for 7 years. We lived in a 400 square foot studio apartment in Sellwood. I worked 50+ hours a week as a department manager at Zupan’s. He worked two jobs, juggling positions at both Lewis & Clark and PCC.
Our rent was over 60% of our combined income. Repairs requests, even ones relating to safety issues, were never completed. The building was quite literally falling apart. We’ve taken our education, work ethic, money, and social responsibility elsewhere.
When hard working, honest, responsible people can’t get by, they get out. To hell with Portland.
Everyone agrees it’s a big, sucky crisis. But I seldom read much about what concrete, effective actions a city can take to help.
Maybe pass a law that says rent can only increase a certain percentage each year? Is that legal? I don’t know, and I’m surprised Portland, Seattle, and SF don’t seem to know what to do either.
A
Azure: That’s the point. Buri is putting down his big ante (a year notice on large rent hikes, stopping all no cause evictions, etc) hoping that the council will weigh their thoughts on progressive legislation vs their political careers because all of this shit is perfectly, legally stacked in favor of the property owners.
My girlfriend’s landlord, all legit-like, just upped the rent by $200 with a month’s notice because her roommate was taking off to greener pastures and though “fuck it, he’s not my landlord anymore, I can call this asshole out”, failing to consider that my girlfriend would have to continue to pay rent as she had done for nearly a decade (under increasingly shitty circumstances). It’s retaliatory, it’s greedy and she needs to find a place in six months.
She will not find a place. If she does, it will be some shitty APM Shithole with pipe burns in the carpet. In a year, that shitty APM Shithole will be sold, renovated, flipped. It will have a nice dishwasher.
We’ve got to start somewhere, because this shit is just intolerable.
Jack R, I’m sorry for your situation…but I can’t possibly understand how a 400 square foot studio in Sellwood cost you over 60% of your combined income…I’m a bartender and my girlfriend works at Nordstrom. We have a 1200 sq ft apartment on 23rd street in NW that costs us 1450/month. By my calculations, you and your partners’ combined income would have to be less than 30k to make the apartment I’m currently living in cost 60% of your income…wtf?
I can get a 700 sq foot studio in NW right now for 1100 dollars. Unless you and your partner are both making well below the poverty line, 60% of your income should land you much much more than a 400 sq foot studio in Sellwood…your story can’t be true.
Mule: This might be a shock, but a whole lot of people live below the poverty line. Have you seen it lately? It’s right there.
@Spaceman – They’re not living below the poverty line if they’re working 50 hours/week as a department manager, and their partner is working two jobs on top of that. There’s no way that math checks out.
I didn’t see the guy’s rant at the city council as anything special at all. He sounds like he wants to curtail the power of property owners to control their own property rather than have the city council address the reasons that rents are going up. They’re not going up because landlords are being arbitrarily greedy, they’re going up because there is a shortage of housing in Portland, which drives up the price. Portland refuses to expand the urban growth boundary. The city makes it as difficult as it can for builders to add housing. They give tax breaks when they gentrify poor areas of town and then everyone seems surprised when gentrification drives up rents. Portland has pretty solidly elected people whose actions have made the city less viable for the working poor, but nobody ever calls them out on it.
Rents are going up because there is nothing stopping landlords from raising them – period! That the “market” is tight simply exacerbates all the issues Buri outlines. The ban on rent control should be reversed, and public housing, not affordable housing as it is currently left to developers, should be constructed. If the city needs the funds to exercise eminent domain, one of the overarching problems needs to be resolved, which is raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Oregon is near the bottom in the country for corporate tax rates. We should leverage that while everyone is moving here like crazy. The corporations have nowhere to go to get a “better” tax rate, they aren’t going to move out of state.
I don’t mind paying 1000 dollars a month for rent as long as I get value back. But, I don’t get it. I was hoping for better here. I am still holding out for better but our leaders must listen to us and take further actions with regard to livability. I want to feel like a cherished, and invited guest and there needs to be places we can go to network publicly and indoors during daylight hours into the twilight hours for folks who don’t have the choices others have. In other words public sanctuaries for those who aren’t just tourists going around buying out the stores. Work on our our behalf at least half as much as council does accomodating the needs of the land baron building owner movers and shakers.
We are getting tagged from all ends. Low Corporate taxes, no sales tax on luxury items on all the billions being carted out of here nationally and internationally, through the port and such. the big shoppers and sellers have a virtual piracy ring going on here and we don’t get back in trust one red cent. If Oregon is going to flourish , somebody has to pitch in. That’s all of us, but tourists won’t stop visiting and shopping here from all over the world if we tax them fairly on their purchases. Right now, we are battling the feds over planned parenthood funding. But, all we need do is look at the money not collected on the billions of dollars, duty free being shipped out of Oregon to know that we are getting shafted regarding infrastructure investment. I’m not saying the builders should shoulder all the responsiblity for the livability perks provided their user bases. I am saying we must start looking at a policy of social inclusion rather than social isolation and putting people into slot categories and watching that they don’t step out of line. It starts with not bending over for big business and commerce and nudge them to include more livability factors. That goes from the parking lot owner to the Bank president. they take with both hands but they also must give something back to us to create more social parity. Commerce has always been a balance of accounts recievable as well as accounts payable. Pay it forward to us Portlanders and I promise you for all of us we will be a worthy investment.
“When hard working, honest, responsible people can’t get by, they get out. To hell with Portland.”
I’m not disputing the fact that its getting increasingly difficult for some people to live in Portland. But I know lots of people that make below 30k/yr that do it just fine. To paint the picture of a city where two fully employed people can’t even afford a “falling apart” 400 sq ft apartment in a suburb seemed a tad disingenuous to me.