Oregon's Housing Crisis is the fault of "Investors" driving up prices, not a shortage of housing:
From the OR Capital Chronicle:
There is no large crisis in the raw amount or supply of housing. The crisis lies in its price.
In this current decade, Oregon’s population increased only slightly, from about 4.2 million at the decade’s start, to about 4.3 million now, and there’s been no mass destruction of housing. . . .
Legislative Republicans this April complained that in the last three years only about 43,000 building permits for residences had been issued in the state, well below the governor’s plan for 108,000. But the state’s number of households rose by about the same amount during that time. The new construction that happened should, in theory, have been enough to keep up with it.
In 2023 (the most recent year available), Oregon had about 1.75 million “households” with the average household comprising 2.4 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That same year, the Census counted in the state 1.88 million “housing units” — over 100,000 more housing units than the number of households — including “a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters.” It doesn’t include some other residential places, such as trailer and mobile home parks.
The upshot is that Oregon, like most states, has more residential units than households.
And there is no crisis for people of sufficient means. Anyone who can afford to plunk down a half-million or so (which includes many existing homeowners, in or out of state) will not have much trouble finding a house. People below that level, a large part of the population, may find that a house (or in some places apartment rentals, too) are simply out of reach.
The problem with Oregon’s housing crisis is affordability. The median house value in Oregon (which reflects purchase prices) as of May was $540,300, according to online real estate market platform Zillow. One home-buying calculator estimates that if a purchaser puts down 18% for the home — the median downpayment of home buyers in the U.S., according to the National Association of Realtors — they would need to have more than $97,000 saved, and earn more than $120,000 per year to afford their mortgage payments. That means fewer than a fifth of Oregon households could afford a median-priced house based on income. (Sales by owners of currently owned houses could expand that number.)
Despite the limited pool of buyers, prices have climbed and stayed high.
Why?
Oregon’s notably strict laws on land use are often mentioned as a cause of the problem. They may contribute to it, but many other states — such as next-door Idaho — have far fewer building restrictions but still have house pricing problems as bad, or worse, as Oregon’s.
High priced homes can be more profitable for builders and developers, so they build more of them.
But the key explanation for why so many more houses are purchased, compared to the number of local residents who can buy, seems to be that relatively wealthy investors — individuals and especially businesses — are buying large numbers of houses and apartments in Oregon, and around the country.
Many national studies have found as much.
Redfin News, which tracks home sales nationally, said last August that investor home buying has been rising steadily in recent years — about 3% annually — and bought one of every six U.S. homes that sold — purchasing $43 billion worth of properties — and one of every four low-priced homes that sold.
Redfin found that during the 2nd quarter of 2024 in Portland, 13% of homes sold (valued at $511,419,529) were bought by investors, an amount rising in recent years. Many homes are then flipped and resold for still higher prices. All of that activity places upward pressure on sales prices of other homes as well.
A variety of buyers have been among the mass purchasers. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley has for several years focused on the role of hedge funds in home buys, and with U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington, introduced in 2023 the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act.
Merkley called hedgefunds, “a contributing factor that has made it more difficult for middle-class Americans to become homeowners and is contributing to America’s twin crises of housing unaffordability and wealth inequality.”
Others have disagreed about how large a role the finance organizations have played. But someone can afford to buy all those houses — in many cases well beyond the asking price — and less-wealthy wage earners cannot compete.
That would be a real and pertinent, albeit sensitive, topic for the new state agency to address. Until someone does, the housing shortage for most Oregonians will go on.
emeritrix
in reply to emeritrix • • •Portland spent $724 million in 2024 on houseless services.
There are about 12,000 houseless people in the Portland Metro area. Round that up to 15,000, and that's over $48,000 per person.
But instead of everyone having a place to live with that ~$50,000 per person, houseless people are being churned through punitive shelters and sweeps and jails and fines, because developers and plutocrats and 'investors' are making money by inflating housing prices and punishing the poor.
(Portland has a history of arresting people for the 'crime' of living outside.)
#Housing #Portland #StopTheSweeps
#HousingForAll
koin.com/news/portland/portlan…
oregonlive.com/politics/2025/0…
streetroots.org/news/2023/06/0…
Homelessness continues to rise in Portland area even as increased services help thousands
Lillian Mongeau Hughes | The Oregonian/OregonLive (oregonlive)Violet Madder
in reply to emeritrix • • •Tormenting people is expensive.
Somebody thinks it's important enough to be worth it.
sport of sacred spherical cows
in reply to Violet Madder • • •This.
That premium paid has a point.
The cruelty is the point.
emeritrix
in reply to sport of sacred spherical cows • • •@beadsland @violetmadder
Expensive for whom, is always a question. The politicians and bureaucrats making these decisions are not playing with their own money.
The cruelty is one point; the payoff of getting to feel superior to those who suffer; of getting to exercise power over someone rather than being the victim of someone else's power.
But there are also economic benefits--for the police and their so-called union (budgets keep getting bigger!), for the corporations paid (with public money) to run so-called shelters, or any of the many jail-adjacent 'services' (like those cards people get after any cash they have is confiscated, the companies that charge extra for phone calls, etc.), for the plutocrats who don't want any challenges to their power to keep extracting wealth.
And the social wage of feeling superior helps with that, too, so the shelter worker doesn't make common cause with the shelter occupant against the plutocrat benefiting from the miseries of both.
Violet Madder
in reply to emeritrix • • •@beadsland
They are, however, playing with their own quality of life when they cultivate social malaise that poisons their community, affecting the disposition and abilities of everyone who is, say, around them in traffic, or working in the services they depend on, or researching the innovations they'll need in all areas of life-- the ripple effects reach everywhere, especially the shit that's wrecking our climate and so on.
Their short term monetary gains are paltry, compared to how they are shooting themselves in the foot at the end of the day.
emeritrix
in reply to Violet Madder • • •@violetmadder @beadsland
agreed. they are short-sighted
emeritrix
in reply to emeritrix • • •#SocialHousing is a way (or a variety of ways) to make housing available, affordable for all.
popularresistance.org/new-soci…
New Social Housing Programs Seek To Make Homes Permanently Affordable
Terrace (PopularResistance.Org)justbob
in reply to emeritrix • • •Then, there is the story in #StreetRoots this week how the state has cut funds keeping people in housing and shifted it to building temporary shelters...
Come on people, you've just MADE more homeless people.
Pete's Mom 🍉 🇺🇦 ☮️
in reply to emeritrix • • •feld
in reply to emeritrix • • •the only way local governments are going to be able to afford to keep operating is to raise property taxes like 200-300% (or possibly more depending on the situation) from where they are today, so at this point it doesn't really matter who we blame. The fact is, prices *must* come down sharply or nobody will even be able to afford their property taxes and insurance premiums even if they can afford the house.
Once we do that and the materials costs plummet as well things will start to come back into balance and we can have a sane economy again
And the best part is that when this happens, all those hedge funds are going to have their investments wiped out. They'll have no choice but to sell at a massive loss because they're gonna get margin called elsewhere and they'll need the liquidity ASAP. So this will just delete money from the economy at a rapid pace and help reverse a bunch of this inflation.
W6KME
in reply to emeritrix • • •Anyone that owns more than one home-including portions of homes through investment vehicles-is a contributor to the housing crisis.
We're still addicted to a medieval notion that some people are meant to be landlords and some are meant to be tenants. People should look up what those words actually mean.