street roots
4
Jan. 21, 2011
Holding up
the roof a t
the House
Affordable housing advocates set out their
agenda for the State Legislature, hoping to
preserve what little Oregon has to preserve
housing and prevent homelessness
BY AMANDA WALDROUPE
STAFF WRITER
^TAhe Housing Alliance is finalizing its
advocacy agenda for the 2011
legislative cycle and preparing the
case it will make to th e state Legislature
regarding why the state should support and,
in some cases, bolster affordable housing
programs.
In a year when the state’s general fund
has a $3.5 billion shortfall and the
Legislature will make massive cuts to state-
funded programs, this is a Sisyphean task
“This is not a good year to be asking the
Legislature for money,” says Beth Kaye, the
Portland Housing Bureau’s legislative affairs
manager.
“There are already proposals circulating
from all sides looking at really devastating
cuts to the network of support,” says Janet
Byrd, the executive director of
Neighborhood Partnerships and chair of the
Housing Alliance, referring to cuts to
welfare programs, mental health, drug
addiction treatm ent programs, and others.
The Housing Alliance is a statewide,
nonprofit collective of local governments,
housing authorities, affordable housing
developers, housing advocates, and advocacy
organizations working to secure funding for
affordable housing. The Alliance celebrated
one of its most important victories in the
2009-2010 legislative cycle when the
document recording fee was passed, which
collects revenue from real estate
transactions. It is, to date, the state’s only
dedicated source of revenue for affordable
housing.
This year, the Housing Alliance’s agenda
includes a call to lawmakers to maintain
support for the fee, and calls for using
lottery-backed bonds to finance the
preservation of existing affordable housing;
increase and expand the rights of tenants
who live in foreclosed properties, and pass a
law that would make violent acts against
homeless people a hate crime.
“It’.s a very strategic set of requests for
this economy,” Kaye says.
Many agenda items ask the Legislature to
simply maintain funding for programs, such
as not diverting part or all of the document
recording fee to other programs, and extend
the sunset of an Oregon statute allowing
affordable housing developers to receive tax
abatements, which provide lenders an
incentive to invest in affordable properties
for their preservation.
. “It’s mostly about maintaining what we’ve
got,” says Cathey Briggs, the executive
-L
director of th e Oregon Opportunity
Network, a coalition of affordable housing
developers. “We don’t want to lose
ground.”
“It’s more critical than ever that we hold
firm,” says Sheila Greenlaw-Fink, the
executive director of Community Partners
for Affordable Housing.
The consequences, sources say, will b'e"
dire. “The need is greater than ever,”
Briggs says.
If the Legislature does not maintain its
support for affordable housing programs
and fund a small number of key programs
that prevent people from becoming
homeless, housing advocates and providers
fear that more people will become less
stable than they already are and possibly
Housing Account, known as the EHA. The
EHA, the Housing Alliance says, “is our
most flexible resource to end and prevent
homelessness.” Created in 1991, the EHA is
used to pay for emergency shelter, motel
vouchers, rental assistance, utility
payments; and other services designed to
The EHA has b e e i^ u n S e ff^ ffiie sa riie ^
level, $5.2 million, since 1991. But its
budget was decreased by slightly in last
year’s budget cuts.
For the past two years, funding from the
federal stimulus bill has supplemented the
EHA efforts. The federal program, called
Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing
(HPRP), gave Oregon $15 million dollars
over th e past two years; $4.5 million was
"When people become destabilized, getting them back on track is really time
consuming and really expensive.... I f we don't have alcohol and drug
recovery programs, if we don't have homeless prevention programs, if we
don't have ways to keep at-risk kids in school, we're going to have bigger,
badder problems in the future."
MARTHA MCLENNAN
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF N O R TH W EST H O U S IN G ALTERNATIVES
become homeless.
“What’s at stake is a lot of human
suffering,” Kaye says.
With no end to the recession and
Oregon’s high unemployment figures in
sight, a low-income person’s instability and
homelessness could last far longer than it
would have in economically better times.
“When people become destabilized,
getting them back on track is really time
consuming and really expensive,” says
M artha McLennan, the executive director of
Northwest Housing Alternatives, an
affordable housing developer in Clackamas •
County.
“If we don’t have alcohol and drug
recovery programs, if we don’t have
homeless prevention programs, if we don’t
have ways to keep at-risk kids in school,
we’re going to have bigger, badder problems
in th e future.”
allocated to the Portland area. Maileen
Hampto, the public information officer for
the Portland Housing Bureau, says all of the
money was .given to the Housing Authority
of Portland and used as short-term rent
assistance.
Other local jurisdictions used the money
in different ways as a stopgap to prevent
people from becoming homeless, and
rapidly rehousing people who had recently
become homeless.
“That acted a lot like the EHA,” Bryd
says.
But 2011 is the last year that federal
stimulus money will be available in the
state. After that, the only money available to
prevent people from becoming homeless
will be the EHA.
With a sudden hole in how the state
provided rent assistance and other funds
preventing people from becoming homeless,
housing advocates are looking to the state
Legislature to increase EHA funding.
Bryd says it s not known at this time how
here is. one program the Housing
Alliance is asking the Legislature to
increase funding for. That is the Emergency
T
SEE THE ROOF, page 5