REMEMBER: DIKES ARE SAFE AT PRESENT.

YOU WILL BE WARNED IF NECESSARY.

YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO LEAVE.

DON'T GET EXCITED.

—Housing Authority of Portland (present day Home Forward), May 30, 1948 notice to Vanport residents. 

THE STORM

The ground was eroding beneath Portlanders. Yet another rent increase. An eviction notice is on the door. The reasons varied. The outcomes, the same. The stew of bad policy decisions that had been bubbling in the housing market for years were now overflowing. A government and corporate-made monsoon. Homelessness was everywhere. 

The crowd of tenants and housing advocates who convened at Peninsula Park was electric. They were about to put the city on notice—the tipping point was here: A Renters’ State of Emergency was declared. The year was 2015.

A simple slate of demands was unveiled as part of the declaration: rent control, a temporary moratorium on no-cause evictions, and mandatory relocation assistance should someone be evicted due to unreasonable price gouging. 

And yet a decade later, in 2025, Oregon is experiencing the highest eviction levels in its history—so what happened?

While numerous hard-fought victories emerged from this campaign (also known as the Renters’ SoS) over the years, they were only partially enacted by local governments.

Since then—from front porch stoops, to soaring speeches from electeds of all stripes—Oregon’s housing woes continue to be on the tip of all tongues across the state. Many well-intentioned plans have been rolled out in the years since, and with varying outcomes.

But it’s clear today, something’s not working. 

THE BEFORE

To be fair, this is not all Oregon’s fault. 

Visible homelessness in the United States used to be rare. In fact, it was far more of an outlier until the 1980s. While the federal government didn’t begin keeping systemic data and stats on housing until the mid-’80s, academic and scholarly records before then indicate that housing was not nearly the issue it’s become today. Manufactured ghettos, slumlording, and vagrancy laws ran amuck, but the type of corner-to-corner homelessness that’s engulfing cities across America today wasn’t nearly so widespread.

Enter president number 40. 

The years of so-called “Reaganomics” (which were apparently so sweet, every state but Minnesota voted to continue them for a second term) were marked by unprecedented industry deregulation, and increased military spending (see: the War on Drugs). 

During Ronald Reagan’s eight-year tenure, housing programs through HUD were slashed by billions, a whopping 75 percent. The housing program’s budget had dropped from around $32.2 billion in fiscal year 1978 (three years before he took office) to $9.8 billion by the end of Reagan’s last term in 1988.  

Mind you, we are talking billions… with a “B”… like Bezos. 

Simultaneously, the administration’s military spending skyrocketed by 64 percent to the tune of billions more. 

Reaganomics trickled down to states across America, pummeling social services and safety nets, including within Oregon.

That said, the state did find money to pour into urban redevelopment projects, which would say, “reimagine” the Pearl District, or rev-up police “crackdown” operations in Albina after a couple decades of demolishing more than a billion dollars of wealth from the hub of Oregon’s small, but textured Black community with a freeway and feckless eminent domain use. 

By the end of the 1980s, Reagan had apparently fulfilled his campaign promise to “Make America Great Again.” 

Oregon never refilled those funding gaps.

THE ALARM

I was hired by Oregon's only statewide renters’ rights organization to helm their communications about a year into COVID. After bouncing around the city a bit myself, the pandemic made clear I needed to figure out some full-time wage security, as I was closing out the latter end of my 20s. Extra motivation came from courting my current partner, when I realized I’d need job security of some sort if she was going to take me seriously. Along with being meaningful, the job was a serious godsend after years of piecemealed contract work.

When I came aboard, then-Governor Kate Brown had already ordered a statewide eviction moratorium, alongside a host of other critical tenant protections that helped thousands of people stay housed through it all. But 2015 was looming underneath. 

That “emergency” declaration had never been lifted. 

As the pandemic raged on, and tenant protections were set to expire, I was helping lead efforts pressuring Gov. Brown to call a Special Session to preserve the laws. These efforts included calling a press conference alongside staff and members in front of the state capitol to put an exclamation point on the direness of the situation. Shortly thereafter, the Governor did listen and call for a session, and some “Safe Harbor” laws were extended. However, as the pandemic waned in summer 2022, major renter protections faded as well. Normal was back. 

Again, the ground began to shift. 

Evictions in every county across Oregon once again began to skyrocket. More than 2,000 eviction notices were being filed each month. Since 2022, according to Evicted in Oregon, that’s equated to more than 89,000 evictions. And these numbers don’t even include those who “self-evicted,” due to price hikes, unsafe living conditions, or otherwise. 

A study by Portland State University published during COVID provided an even more startling statistic. It estimated that more than 125,000 Oregon households were at risk of eviction as those pandemic-era protections came to an end, costing the state as much as $4.7 billion. Each year continues to bring us closer to these numbers becoming reality. Conversely, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a non-partisan group founded in the 1980s estimates it would cost around just $9.6 billion to house every person staying in shelters across the country right now. 

The repeated talking point of “too many taxes” has been given as the top reason some of Oregon’s highest earners have left the area—but not nearly the same airtime has been given to a more troubling truth: the average Black family can’t afford a two-bedroom apartment today in Portland, the state's biggest city. Black Oregonians are also being evicted at the highest rates in the state right now. (Check the most up-to-date eviction filings in Oregon here, and see if your rent increase notice exceeds state law here.) Now, that is a hell of a full circle moment for a state that once constitutionally banned Black people from living here. 

That said, the so-called “White Utopia” that the state’s founders dreamed of isn’t shaking out too hot either. Today, more than half of Oregonians can’t afford the cost of living. 

Many faces color the growing fragments of Oregon’s housing crisis today.

A third-generation NE Portlander who, after a divorce, saw her income split in half, struggles to keep up with the rent in a house where love once lived. A Salem-based elder, who faithfully paid his bills month-after-month for more than a decade, blindsided by a rent hike of a hundred dollars, squeezing his fixed income in a way never imagined. A mother in Southern Oregon, whose house burned down in the 2020 Alameda Fires, must cross the language barrier to pick up the pieces. A veteran in Bend, in housing for servicemen and women, is forced to find a new home when his complex is sold to a new owner. 

This is Oregon.

The water is rising. 

Yes, certain strides have been made. In Oregon’s three most populous counties, a housing bond was passed by voters in 2018 generating $652 million that’s on track to create about 5,600 affordable homes in the area before the turn of the next decade.

In November 2022, Brown’s successor, Gov. Tina Kotek—who narrowly defeated her Republican challenger, Christine Drazan (and will probably face a 2026 rematch)—put forth an ambitious plan to build on these gains during her campaign, promising to construct 36,000 units of housing every year. That promise marked an increase of about 10,000 more units than Oregon had  previously produced annually.

However, since then, that goal has not been met—with merely 13,000 residential permits being pulled last year, it marks the lowest number of newly produced housing units during her tenure. 

The goal, however, remains noble.

But any good builder knows this basic truth—foundations matter. 

The majority of evictions being served in Oregon are for non-payment. Simply put: they can’t afford to pay their rent. In short, Oregon is evicting more people that can’t afford their rent than its building units to affordably house others feeling the strain of The Market™.

That’s hustling backwards. 

This past legislative session, Gov. Kotek unveiled her Eviction Prevention Package that would have essentially sustained current levels of service across government and community-based partners across the state. The package funded, amongst other services: two community-based renters’ rights hotlines, statewide rent assistance, and know-your-rights trainings for tenants. Despite a supermajority of Democrats in both the House and Senate, the package was gutted by 75 percent.

This practically guarantees that, going into 2026, Oregon will continue to shatter eviction ceilings. 

The water is rising.

On Memorial Day, 1948, residents of what was once Oregon’s second biggest city, Vanport, were sent an early morning notice by the local housing authority. The rain was unrelenting, and the water was rising along the Columbia River that surrounded it. Their message:

“REMEMBER: DIKES ARE SAFE AT PRESENT.

YOU WILL BE WARNED IF NECESSARY.

YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO LEAVE.

DON'T GET EXCITED.” 

By nightfall, the entire town flooded and disappeared, never to be rebuilt again. 

Thousands were displaced, and more than a dozen killed. 

At present, little marks the site where the hastily built war-time city once stood, but today its stories pulse through the few remaining, aging survivors (who were children then). An avoidable disaster. A lesson for today. 

When folks declared a Renters’ State of Emergency in 2015, urgency undergirded a horizon of hope. And despite tireless advocacy, that hope is being sledgehammered daily with every notice on a door, and every person sleeping in a car being told, “you can’t be here.”

The water is rising.

Today, I now own a house with the woman I pursued all those years ago. It’s on a hill. But not on the West Side—rather The Numbers. I do well enough to take trips, and buy my kids unnecessary plastic things. I order more takeout than I should. We still budget. We are now, the mythological middle class, I guess. But, I am the exception, not the rule. 

The least our state could continue to offer in terms of security is fully-funded rental assistance. And, yes, I know the beneficiaries of a number of newly built apartments, and am happy they’re housed. All is not in vain. 

But the ground can carry the weight of a system of incremental care no longer…

The ground is sinking!

The water is rising!

The dikes are broken!

Turn on the sirens. Oregon—wake up—the Renters’ State of Emergency is now!

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ADDENDUM

Oregon is going to have a short legislative session this February. This would be the perfect time to enact policy that gets at the heart of these issues. I’m no policy expert, but here’s a short list of some things we could pass to help stop the bleeding. 

• (Actually) Ban no-cause evictions 
• Lower the limit on annual rent increases to 3 percent or less 
• Abolish AI price-fixing 
• Cap rent application fees (Eugene already has)
• Remove the pre-emption on county rent controls 
• And nobody moving into a building should have to have thousands of dollars saved up for security deposits, just to move in

Seems like a good time to contact your legislators and let them know how you feel—right… about… HERE.

P.S. Even Kamala Harris had discussed enacting a national rent cap of 5 percent in the infancy of her historically short presidential campaign. The above ideas are not exactly revolutionary—but a starting place in which we need to start treating housing as exactly what it is: a right, not a privilege.