Legislative Days 2026: Strong Conversations, Real Opportunities Ahead
Housing Oregon wrapped up another successful Legislative Days with three full days of meetings at the Capitol - June 15-17, 2026. Board members, policy council leaders, and staff met with 24 legislators from across Oregon to discuss the challenges facing affordable housing providers and the policy opportunities ahead of the 2027 legislative session.
Housing remains a priority
Many conversations centered on the impact of potential federal cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other safety-net programs. Legislators expressed concern that affordable housing providers will increasingly become the last line of defense for many Oregonians if those cuts move forward.
Despite those concerns, legislative leaders indicated that affordable housing investments remain on the table. Housing Oregon heard encouraging signals that the Legislature intends to continue making significant investments through the state's bonding capacity, including resources for affordable housing production and preservation.
While the Emergency Board is expected to be cautious this summer because of anticipated wildfire costs, lawmakers suggested they continue to view housing bonds differently from ongoing General Fund obligations, leaving room for meaningful investments in 2027.
Preservation continues to gain momentum
Preservation remains one of Housing Oregon's top priorities, and Legislative Days reinforced that message.
Housing Oregon shared the growing need for portfolio stabilization and preservation resources, and lawmakers showed continued interest in technical improvements to existing preservation tools. Conversations also pointed toward possible committee legislation to make technical fixes to the Oregon Affordable Housing Tax Credit.
OHCS also provided an excellent presentation during Legislative Days outlining the current preservation landscape, financial pressures facing affordable housing properties, and ongoing preservation efforts across Oregon.
Insurance is quickly becoming a top legislative issue
One topic came up in meeting after meeting: insurance.
Legislators from both parties recognize that rapidly rising property and liability insurance costs are threatening affordable housing operations across Oregon. There was broad interest in working with providers to identify solutions before more properties fall into financial distress.
Housing Oregon will continue working with Insurance Commissioner TK Keen, DCBS, legislators, and industry partners to evaluate options such as:
- Risk mitigation incentives
- Greater underwriting transparency
- Premium assistance
- Insurance captives and pooled purchasing models
- Other state policy tools that could help stabilize insurance costs
This will remain one of Housing Oregon's major policy priorities heading into 2027.
Housing Oregon would like to thank every member who participated in Legislative Days. Your stories, expertise, and willingness to meet directly with policymakers continue to strengthen our advocacy. As we begin preparing for the 2027 legislative session, we will continue refining these policy ideas through our Policy Councils and member workgroups. We look forward to working alongside you to build on the momentum from Legislative Days.
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/
The ROAD to Housing Act Becomes Law
For the first time in more than three decades, Congress has enacted a major bipartisan housing package. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11 after passing the Senate 85–5 and the House 358–32. At a time when national politics can feel incapable of addressing the basic needs of working people, this overwhelming vote sends a clear message: the housing crisis is real, it is national, and communities need the federal government back at the table.
The law updates dozens of federal housing and community development programs. It includes new tools to build and preserve affordable housing, repair aging homes, stabilize manufactured home communities, improve disaster recovery, support modular construction, and reduce barriers that delay development. It also reforms rural housing programs, including changes intended to preserve affordable rental housing for approximately 400,000 rural families nationwide.
“This is a historic step forward for everyone working to ensure that people have a safe and affordable place to call home,” said Housing Oregon Executive Director Brian Hoop. “Congress has recognized that solving the housing crisis requires more than one program or one level of government. We need to build more homes, preserve the housing we already have, and support the community-based organizations that were built on meeting local needs and remain dedicated to the mission.”
One of the law’s most important accomplishments is the first reauthorization of the HOME Investment Partnerships Program since 1992. The law preserves the set-aside for Community Housing Development Organizations, affirming the central role nonprofit and community-based developers play in creating affordable homes and stronger neighborhoods. It also authorizes the PRICE program for seven years to preserve manufactured homes and parks, expands eligible uses of Community Development Block Grant funding, and supports improvements intended to help households with vouchers move into homes more quickly.
Read the full section by section summary here.
Thanks to Oregon's congressional delegation for their support and the many Housing Oregon members who responded to our action alerts and contacted their congress members urging them to support the bill.
This landmark legislation is not the end of the work. It does not resolve high construction costs, rising insurance premiums, elevated interest rates, workforce shortages, or the need for greater investments in rental assistance and deeply affordable housing. Many provisions will depend on federal rulemaking, agency guidance, and future funding from Congress. Housing Oregon will work with our members and national partners to ensure implementation serves Oregonians with the greatest housing needs. For now, this passage deserves celebration: sustained advocacy and bipartisan cooperation have produced the most substantial federal housing law in decades.
Full Text of the Road to Housing Act
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.
This is the moment to act.
Additional $15 million in Portland Clean Energy Funds Secured for Affordable Housing
Housing Oregon’s advocacy helped secure an additional $15 million for carbon-reducing measures in affordable housing as part of the City of Portland’s Clean Energy Community Benefit Fund (PCEF) Climate Investment Plan approved by City Council at their March 11, 2026 meeting.
This increased PCEF funding for affordable housing to $78,7000,000 over the next five years and will support an estimated 580 additional high performance housing units. The goal is to ensure buildings are built and operated in a way that reduces carbon emissions, reduces operating costs, and improves resilience and health for tenants particularly for low-income residents and BIPOC households who are disproportionately impacted by climate change.
Housing Oregon has been advocating to support this proposal since November 2025 when the PCEF Committee first recommended an amendment to the Plan to increase funding for affordable housing. We also urged members to testify as Council’s Climate, Resilience and Land Use committee considered the proposal in January 2026.
At that time, the committee’s two co-chairs, Councilor’s Steve Novick and Angelita Morillo, had advocated to reject the PCEF Committee’s amendment and instead shift the $15 million to transportation projects. Housing Oregon again testified at the February 25, 2026 City Council meeting to include the full $15M for housing.
When layered with federal, state, and local housing funds, PCEF dollars expand project scope and unlock climate-forward building strategies that would otherwise be unattainable. Without these PCEF funds, many of these projects may not achieve full financing and could be built only to minimum code standards, resulting in higher utility costs.