Housing Oregon Action Fund - A voice for Oregon’s community development sector
Housing Oregon is excited to announce our affiliate organization, the Housing Oregon Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization created to help candidates, policymakers, and voters understand what it takes to make housing more affordable, preserve the homes we already have, and reduce homelessness in communities across Oregon.
Oregon’s housing system is under real strain. Affordable housing providers are facing rising operating costs, preservation risks, insurance pressures, gaps in supportive services, and a shortage of homes affordable to low- and moderate-income Oregonians. At the same time, public investments in affordable housing, homeownership, preservation, homelessness response, and community development are making a real difference.
Housing Oregon Action Fund will be a voice for Oregon’s community development sector to make sure the people closest to this work can have a unified message to educate and convey housing policy solutions to voters and elected officials.
Together as affiliated organizations:
We support pro-housing leaders
We work to build trusted relationships with elected officials, candidates, and public leaders across party lines who understand the importance of community development, affordable housing, and homelessness response.
We educate candidates, policymakers and voters
Affordable housing is complex. We help the public understand housing finance, rental development, preservation, homeownership, shelter operations, resident services, land use, and the real-world conditions facing nonprofit and mission-driven housing providers.
We share the story of community development
We tell the story of what affordable housing investments do for Oregon communities: create stable homes, support seniors and people with disabilities, help families stay rooted, provide pathways out of homelessness, and strengthen local economies.
Oregon needs a strong, practical, pro-community development voice focused on housing finance and production, asset management and preservation, affordable homeownership development and more.
Together, we build thousands of affordable homes a year. We are making an impact. Good work does not speak for itself. It needs a clear public voice, trusted relationships, and the ability to communicate with decision makers and voters.
That is why the Housing Oregon Action Fund exists.
You can join our movement.
To learn more go to - https://housingoregon.org/housing-oregon-action-fund-redirect/
This Is Not One Organization’s Story
A Statement from Affordable Housing Providers in the Portland Region
Signed by 34 organizations in response to an Oregonian story on June 9, 2026. Housing Oregon members are now developing an action plan to stabilize properties and portfolios we’ll share soon. Thanks to the HereTogether Coalition for collaborating on this statement.
CLICK HERE to go to PDF of statement with organizational endorsements
Every person who walks through the door of a nonprofit affordable housing building is trying to do something most of us take for granted: build a stable life. A safe place for their children to sleep. A foundation from which to find work, attend school, stay healthy, plan for the future, and age with dignity. These are not exceptional aspirations. They are the ordinary human hopes that stable housing makes possible.
We are the organizations that provide that housing and support the residents. Together, we serve thousands of families and individuals across the Portland metro region. We are writing because the Oregonian story that ran June 9 about Innovative Housing Inc. is real — and it is not unique.
What is happening at Innovative Housing is happening in varying degrees across our sector. These pressures are not limited to nonprofit providers. Private owners of affordable and workforce housing are facing the same cost increases, and the result is fewer new housing starts across the board. The financial pressures are real. The strain on operations is real. And none of it is the result of mismanagement or organizational failure. What we are seeing is a system under structural stress, surfacing first where the need is greatest.
The people we serve are carrying more.
The residents arriving at our doors today are facing challenges that were far less common a decade ago. Untreated mental illness. Addiction without access to treatment. Compounding healthcare needs coupled with escalating cost for care. Economic crises compounded by years of rising costs and stagnant wages. These are not conditions that stop at the threshold. They come with the residents, into the hallways and common
areas, into the relationships between neighbors, and into the daily work of our staff.
The systems necessary to support our residents were not designed to work together. We are absorbing the unmet demand from the behavioral health, social services, and public safety systems. We do this because our residents need it and because we are committed to them. But we are doing it on operating budgets that were not designed to carry that weight.
The housing wasn’t built for the people who need it most today.
When people ask why affordable housing units sit vacant while people sleep outside, the answer is not that the need has disappeared or a rejection of housing. It is that the housing was not built for the people who need it most.
Most affordable housing is built for households earning around 60 percent of area median income. But the greatest unmet need in this region is among people earning far less, households bringing home 30 percent of the median income or below. These are families working hard to find stability on incomes that don’t come close to the average Portland rent. They are adults living on disability benefits or minimum wage. They are
the people we most need to reach, and the current housing stock was largely not designed to serve them.
Vacant units also reflect the economic reality facing the residents already inside them. When families cannot pay rent because a job was lost, a health crisis hit, or federal benefits were cut, those units stop generating the revenue that keeps the building running, even when they are occupied. That is not a housing management problem. It is a poverty problem, and it requires a poverty response.
The system was built for a different moment.
The affordable housing system was not built with bad intentions. It was built for a different moment, by people doing their best with the resources and understanding they had. What has changed is the scale and complexity of what the system is now asked to carry.
Insurance costs have increased by hundreds of percent in some cases. Security costs have risen sharply. Maintenance and repair costs have grown. The staff time and training required to support residents navigating serious behavioral health and economic challenges is substantially greater than it was. Revenue structures, set years ago, were not designed to keep pace with any of this.
That is not a failure of intention. There is a gap between what we built and what we now need. And closing that gap is within reach, but it requires honest investment and honest policy.
Safety is not a distraction from this work. It is central to it.
We spend significant time, money, and staff capacity on the safety and livability of our buildings. We do it because our residents deserve to feel safe in their own homes, and because our staff deserve safe workplaces. We are not defending unsafe conditions. We are asking for the resources and the policy tools to address them effectively.
That means a serious and collaborative conversation about what thoughtful eligibility reform could look like, one that allows for context and proportionality rather than blunt, inflexible rules. It means behavioral health resources and wraparound services that reach people before crises escalate. It means a police response that actually shows up when providers call. And it means not conflating the need for safety with policies that
would push already vulnerable residents out of housing and into worse circumstances.
What we are asking for.
We recognize that some of our elected leaders are taking this seriously and have taken meaningful first steps. What we need now is a sustained plan, not a series of one-off responses. Local housing budgets are set. The cuts are real. We are not asking elected officials to pretend otherwise. What we are asking is that they refuse to treat those constraints as the end of the conversation.
Waiting for more affordable housing providers to reach the point of failure is not a fiscally responsible strategy. Every building lost means residents displaced, units permanently removed from the affordable stock, and a far more expensive crisis to manage on the other side. The cost of prevention is a fraction of the cost of collapse.
We are calling on our city, county, and state leaders to bring every available tool to bear on this problem. The solutions include regulatory relief, preservation financing, and acquisition strategies that have worked before in this region. What is needed is flexible funding, creative financing, intergovernmental coordination, and a genuine partnership with the providers who are closest to the work. We also need the political will to pursue them before the next organization sends the next letter.
The solutions exist. A generation ago, this region came together to preserve affordable housing when federal use restrictions expired. Fifteen years ago we found creative strategies to weather the Great Recession. The difference today is that we cannot count on the federal government as a partner. That means the leadership has to come from here. What is needed now is the political will to act before the next organization sends the next letter.
The family trying to get their kids to school on time, the older adult on a fixed income who finally has a stable place to land, the person who just got out of treatment and needs a front door that stays open: none of them can wait for this to sort itself out. The providers who serve them cannot either.