Portland Tenants Union

A law nobody enforces isn't a policy. It's a suggestion. Portland has had a rent control ordinance on the books for years, and in the five years since the city raised the fee-in-lieu on inclusionary zoning, zero projects have paid into the Housing Trust Fund. That's not a rule quietly being followed. That's an enforcement gap, and it's the same gap I'd expect to find anywhere the city writes a rule without funding the staff and systems to check whether anyone's actually following it.

Strongly supporting this means something concrete to me: real staff, real data, and a registry the city can actually audit against, not just an ordinance sitting on the books unenforced. I'd rather have fewer rules, enforced completely, than a long list of protections that exist on paper and nowhere else.

This is the same thinking behind ending no-fault evictions on their Tenants Agenda, just aimed one step earlier: non-renewal with no reason given. Right now there's no cost to simply declining to renew a lease for no stated reason, even when the real reason is turnover, a rent reset, or retaliation dressed up as nothing in particular. A fee changes that calculus.

What I'd want built into it: the fee should fall on a pattern, not on a landlord's one legitimate, well-documented reason for not renewing. A landlord selling their only rental unit, or genuinely moving a family member in, isn't the target here. A landlord who does this every year to reset rents past what the increase cap allows, is.

I support it: a landlord selling a single-family home has to offer it to the current tenant first, before putting it on the open market. That's the part that matters. The obligation sits on the seller, not the tenant. Nobody is forced to buy.

I've met people who wanted to buy the place they'd lived in for years and never got the chance, the home went to the highest bidder instead. That's a real loss, not just of housing but of the roots someone's already put down in this city.

What I don't want is a mandate that exists on paper but means nothing in practice, because the tenant still can't come up with a down payment. So I'd want this paired with real tools: state or city support for a down payment, or a first-time homebuyer program, so the right is something a tenant can actually use, not just a symbolic gesture.

I get why some landlords would feel uneasy here. My answer to that: this isn't about taking a property away from someone. It's about making sure the person who already lives there and wants to stay gets the first conversation, not the last one.

This one is straightforward to me. It's not a penalty, it's a check. Before the city grants an exemption or a voluntary-departure rent increase, it should be able to confirm the claim behind it is real.

My standard throughout this questionnaire is conduct, not status. An honest landlord loses nothing by proving a claim is true. A landlord gaming the system loses the ability to keep doing it quietly. Verification protects the first group and stops the second.

I'm genuinely curious here, not settled. There's no real precedent for this, a labor union negotiates wages and conditions because the NLRA defines what's on the table. Nothing like that framework exists yet for landlords and tenant unions, so a flat yes or no would be pretending to a certainty I don't have.

I support tenants having a real, organized voice. What I want to understand before I commit further is the scope: negotiate over what, exactly, and what happens when landlord and tenant union disagree? I don't want a model that leaves a small landlord afraid of their own tenants rather than working alongside them. If nobody wants to rent because the relationship feels adversarial by default, that hurts the next tenant looking for a home as much as it hurts the landlord.

My instinct leans toward something closer to structured arbitration or a dialogue requirement, a real seat at the table, rather than binding negotiation with no defined boundaries. I'd want the Portland Tenants Union to walk me through what they actually have in mind before I'd take a firmer position.

Portland has the legal tools and the need for this. What's been missing is capital at the scale the crisis actually requires. A bond raises real money up front instead of funding social housing a few units at a time, year to year, hoping the next budget cycle finds room for it.

I've already proposed routing the vacant, tax-delinquent homes the city has a legal claim on into housing through Other Doors, using the Jill C. Duson Housing Trust Fund. A bond and a fund like that aren't competing ideas. They're the same commitment run at two different speeds: the Trust Fund handles what the city already has a claim on, a bond buys and builds at a scale neither existing tool reaches alone.

P-STEP is the Portland Senior Tax Equity Program, currently open to residents 62 and older, covering both property owners and renters. I want to protect that focus, not dilute it.

Seniors are often on a fixed income they have no real way to grow. If costs rise, there's no second job or extra shift to pick up. I'd extend that same protection to residents with disabilities, for the same reason, a fixed income with no lever to pull. That's a different situation from an able-bodied, working-age renter who has more options available, even when every one of them is hard.

My bigger concern is funding. This program draws from a specific, limited pot. Opening eligibility to everyone without a real funding answer does one of two things: it thins the benefit for the people who need it most, or it pushes the city toward raising property taxes to cover the gap, which lands on the same fixed-income households the program exists to protect in the first place.

I have real compassion for anyone struggling to make rent. Some years, that's been me and Ruth too, paying well past 40 percent of our income in costs with no program to turn to. But a good idea without a funding source attached isn't relief. It's a promise the city can't keep.

I don't support expanding the current 25% set-aside down to smaller developments. My concern isn't the goal, it's the mechanism.

A flat percentage works differently at different scales. The same requirement a large project can absorb can be the difference between a small project happening and not happening at all. A mandate that keeps a developer from building produces zero affordable units, not some.

I'd rather see a variable inclusionary zoning model: a developer picks a higher-affordability, fewer-units path or a lower-affordability, more-units path, and the city stacks its own specific needs on top, mixed use, deeper affordability where it's needed most, housing for the teachers, nurses, and artists this city needs to keep. I'd even want to try IZ-free zones in some areas, as a real experiment, to see what actually brings developers to the table and what gets built when the lever isn't a fixed mandate.

I want policy that learns from the market's response, not one that assumes a single number works the same everywhere.

I like the direction here. Escrow is a different animal than the automatic fines and three-strikes license revocation I oppose elsewhere on this questionnaire. Money held in trust until a violation is actually fixed is remedial, not punitive, and it comes back to the landlord the moment the problem is corrected.

What keeps me at a 4 instead of higher: the question doesn't say who decides what counts as "repeated," or how fast a landlord gets the money back once they've fixed it. I want this to be a Rent Board determination with a real hearing, not an automatic trigger, for exactly the same reason I rejected automatic fines and three-strikes revocation: discretion is what keeps enforcement from being blind. I support the idea. I'm not signing onto a blank check for how it gets built.

I voted yes on restricting Airbnbs in 2020, and this is the next step in the same direction. A unit owned by an investor and run full-time as a short-term rental is a long-term housing unit that's been pulled out of the market entirely, not a homeowner sharing a spare room.

What I want protected in how this gets written: a resident renting out a room in their own home, or their own unit while they're away, isn't the problem this is aimed at, and shouldn't get caught in the same net as an investor running a unit as a hotel room year-round. The units we're actually losing to this are the ones that should be someone's home.