How to make sure Portland’s new anti-eviction rule has teeth
Unless Portland can also raise its devastatingly low vacancy rates, landlords will be able to wiggle around new rules.
By Michael Andersen | Monday, Feb. 13
Portland tenant advocates secured a major victory this month with the city council’s vote requiring landlords to pay moving costs for tenants whose rents go up more than 10 percent or who receive no-cause evictions.
The rule will continue at least as long as the city’s housing emergency, currently set to expire in October.
The vote was led by the council’s newest members, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly and Mayor Ted Wheeler, after major mobilization by members of Portland Tenants United.
But in an interview after the vote, PTU founder and organizer Margot Black said that though the new rules are likely to deter needless evictions of many families, they also risk an unintended consequence: Fewer landlords might be willing to take a chance on tenants with low incomes, bad credit or eviction or criminal histories.
“We already have this problem,” Black said. “We’re already seeing that landlords aren’t renting to people who they perceive to be risky.”
Under the new rules, Black said, there’s a chance that this could get worse because landlords will feel “stuck with their tenants” and thus get even choosier about who they start renting to.
Black and PTU are hoping to mitigate that by pursuing new systems for helping landlords distinguish more accurately between tenants who are likely to keep up with rent and those who aren’t. And organizations like the Community Alliance of Tenants exist to help people fight housing discrimination, when that can be proven.
But even a perfect system for separating truly “safe” and “risky” tenants wouldn’t help tenants who do in fact fail to make rent in some months. And risky tenants deserve homes too, Black said.
Under the current system, there’s only one way to put pressure on landlords to keep taking chances on genuinely risky tenants: Make landlords afraid that if they don’t, their property will go empty.
In other words, Portland needs more of its housing to be vacant more often.
A short history of Portland rental vacancy rates, with charts
Portland’s rental vacancy rate might be the most important statistic about housing costs that most people don’t talk about. So it’s worth taking a moment to looking closely at the history of Portland’s vacancy rate — because it’s very good at explaining the city’s recent history.
As longtime Portland tenants can testify, the last time it was fairly cheap to be a tenant in Portland was about 10 years ago — in 2004 and the several years that followed.
Why were rents lower then? Because in 2004, one in eight Portland-area rentals was sitting vacant, burning a hole in their owners’ pockets. To keep those units full and generating cash, many landlords had to lower their rents … and they also had to be less choosy about who they rented to. If today’s new rental protections had been in place then, they certainly would have worked: Landlords might have had to charge a bit more to cover the risk of occasional evictions, but they would have generally kept on giving people chances, just to keep their units full.
That’s what a “renter’s market” looks like. Portland hasn’t seen one since.
(As the chart above shows, Portland didn’t have a renter’s market in the 90s, either — low vacancy rates in that decade accelerated the rapid displacement of African-Americans from inner north and northeast Portland.)
So why were so many homes vacant in 2004? As longtime Portland tenants can also testify, it was because in 2004, Portland’s local economy sucked. In the chart below, the yellow line is the national unemployment rate and the blue line is the Portland-area unemployment rate:
This regional recession from 2001–2005 was a strange thing in modern Portland. For most of the last 30 years, our job market has been about the same or a bit stronger than the country’s on average. As you can see at the right side of the chart above, that’s also the case today — local unemployment is lower than national, despite all the people moving to Portland.
But for several years in the early to mid 2000s, Multnomah County was a terrible place to find a job. That’s why, for the first time since 1987, the county’s population actually declined.
The 7,000-person dip in population during 2004 was just a blip in the steady stream of migration to Portland that’s lasted for more than a generation. But it was enough to spike rental vacancy rates — which drove rents down and put pressure on landlords to take more chances on tenants to keep their units filled.
If you were a tenant in Portland in 2005 or so and had a good deal on your housing, this is why.
How to get vacancy rates up when the population is growing
A few years later, the exact opposite thing happened: vacancy rates plummeted. It’s been devastating to the poorest Portlanders.
Here’s how we got where we are today.
Portland had an extra-bad job crash in 2009, but bounced back fast. Since 2010, our region has created jobs at one of the fastest rates in the country. Portland’s population started growing again, fast.
But meanwhile, the national banking crisis was making it almost impossible to get the loans that are usually necessary to build new housing. So as population growth accelerated, housing construction collapsed.
Since 2010, Multnomah County’s population has grown 59 percent faster than the number of homes. Jobs have been growing 82 percent faster than places for workers to live — forcing low-wage workers into longer and longer commutes.
This housing shortage has hit Portland’s poorest 20 percent hardest.
Because there’s nowhere to move close-in, middle-class workers are now willing to live in parts of East Portland where they previously wouldn’t. East Portland landlords, knowing it’ll be easy to fill their units, have taken this chance to hike rents on cheap units, sometimes by as much as 100 percent.
Thousands of low-income households are forced to move each month. Hundreds have been forced into homelessness.
So what’s to be done? This month, the city acted to protect its most vulnerable by reducing needless evictions. The state is considering similar rules.
But that’s not enough, in itself, to solve the problem. Unless landlords have a reason to accept tenants they see as risky, many tenants won’t get a chance to rent in the first place.
So for the eviction rules to work as intended, Portland will need to keep doing what it’s finally been doing again since 2014: building more homes. That’s the only way to get the vacancy rate rising.
And a healthy vacancy rate is a crucial way to give renters more power in the housing market.
“Supply is also the answer,” said Black, the tenants’ organizer. “When you have a much higher vacancy rate, [landlords] want those units filled, so they will take more risks.”
Portland for Everyone supports abundant, diverse, affordable housing. This is a reported blog about how to get more of those things. You can follow it on Twitter and Facebook.
