"Banks would not lend to me because I was self-employed and needed two years of income history from the new practice."
You were self-employed as a _dentist_. You should have been a great credit risk and yet you still couldn't get a mortgage. Something is very wrong with this state of affairs. Now that you've read Homelessness is a Housing Problem, may I recommend Shut Out and Building From the Ground Up by Kevin Erdmann over at https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/ ?
His well-researched thesis is that we made a fateful and terrible policy mistake in the wake of the GFC by denying mortgages to families with modest credit scores, mortgages that we had been making without problems for decades. This crushed the starter home market and drove up rents (because people who formerly would have bought a starter home were forced into the rental market). Combine that with the housing shortage and you get the terrible situation we find ourselves in.
There have been state-level efforts to create a revolving financing mechanism to make up for the current broken federal policy around mortgage access. I hope you champion these ideas next cycle!
You might wanna look into Oregon’s regulations regarding housing. It’s legal to have dormitory’s on a college campus. Why won’t they allow dormitory style housing for the general public? Just another of many Oregon regulations that create a more expensive housing market
Boarding houses/SRO (single room occupancy) used to be a mainstay of American housing; communal kitchen and/or meals provided communally. This helps the variety of people unable or unwilling to cook and/or maintain a bigger apartment. I believe we still have former boarding houses in Astoria, now serving as private single family homes.
Thank you for your insightful, informed article, Rep. Javadi. Building more housing requires more political will than seems to exist these days among elected leaders and everyday residents. Portland seems willing to pay for an updated sports stadium, but can't find the money for more housing. Yes, different buckets for different purposes, but budgets show priorities - in government and in households.
What do we value here on the coast? What are we willing to spend and for whom? Who has the resources, imagination, authority, and will to build more housing? How can communities outlaw camping if they're preventing more housing from being built? What will our "neighborhood character" be if we don't come up with solutions? How can we build more housing and truly honor values of treating people with dignity, courtesy, and respect?
Just think how much housing would be opened up if we deported every single illegal alien! Dem have been in charge in Oregon for decades and the more money we spend the bigger the problem has grown.
Thanks so much for reiterating this for us - we need to hear about the urgency of this more often. I keep thinking there’s something more here we need to do - and to take wealthy developers entirely out of the equation. What if we supported our local community colleges so they could offer free classes in building trades and in return students would give a year of onsite construction labor in order to build affordable housing in their communities as payback for their degree? The resulting homes would be owned by a nonprofit cooperative that would recycle any profit back into the program at the community college. Local vendors of needed supplies could use donations and reduced costs for materials as a tax write off. A local bank/credit union would be needed to initiate start up loans. Just seems like there has to be a way to remedy this.
While Donald Trump wants $1 billion to build a ballroom from taxpayer money,Boulder, Colorado created “BoulderMOD,” a city-supported modular housing program that builds affordable, energy-efficient homes in a factory setting to lower costs and speed up construction. It combines public funding, workforce training, and modern prefab building methods — a bit like a 21st century version of the post-WWII housing boom.
While government regulation is the most common impediment to building more housing, there are other limitations. Especially on the Oregon coast, the very landscape is often the largest impediment. Take a city like Astoria, where I live. Not only does the steep terrain and risk of landslide make development hard, the old established nature of the city does as well. We have an entrenched perspective on "historical character" that hinders development, as well as the other elements of NIMBYism. At the same time, how many more housing units do you think we could ever build in Astoria? Ten percent more is probably the ceiling.
A huge part of the problem here is the open market for residential real estate. What are you going to do about that? People want cheap houses until they buy one, then they want the value to rise as quickly as possible.
I sympathize with your argument here, but mobility has to be a part of the solution. I can barely live in Astoria because of the cost of living, and as soon as the strain gets too great (a lost job, a medical emergency, etc.), I will move somewhere cheaper that's closer to family.
You're in state government: by all means, find some ways to reduce the cost of living in Oregon. Most of us are begging you.
Fantastic article! This is an amazing statement:
"Banks would not lend to me because I was self-employed and needed two years of income history from the new practice."
You were self-employed as a _dentist_. You should have been a great credit risk and yet you still couldn't get a mortgage. Something is very wrong with this state of affairs. Now that you've read Homelessness is a Housing Problem, may I recommend Shut Out and Building From the Ground Up by Kevin Erdmann over at https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/ ?
His well-researched thesis is that we made a fateful and terrible policy mistake in the wake of the GFC by denying mortgages to families with modest credit scores, mortgages that we had been making without problems for decades. This crushed the starter home market and drove up rents (because people who formerly would have bought a starter home were forced into the rental market). Combine that with the housing shortage and you get the terrible situation we find ourselves in.
There have been state-level efforts to create a revolving financing mechanism to make up for the current broken federal policy around mortgage access. I hope you champion these ideas next cycle!
You might wanna look into Oregon’s regulations regarding housing. It’s legal to have dormitory’s on a college campus. Why won’t they allow dormitory style housing for the general public? Just another of many Oregon regulations that create a more expensive housing market
Boarding houses/SRO (single room occupancy) used to be a mainstay of American housing; communal kitchen and/or meals provided communally. This helps the variety of people unable or unwilling to cook and/or maintain a bigger apartment. I believe we still have former boarding houses in Astoria, now serving as private single family homes.
Thank you for your insightful, informed article, Rep. Javadi. Building more housing requires more political will than seems to exist these days among elected leaders and everyday residents. Portland seems willing to pay for an updated sports stadium, but can't find the money for more housing. Yes, different buckets for different purposes, but budgets show priorities - in government and in households.
What do we value here on the coast? What are we willing to spend and for whom? Who has the resources, imagination, authority, and will to build more housing? How can communities outlaw camping if they're preventing more housing from being built? What will our "neighborhood character" be if we don't come up with solutions? How can we build more housing and truly honor values of treating people with dignity, courtesy, and respect?
Just think how much housing would be opened up if we deported every single illegal alien! Dem have been in charge in Oregon for decades and the more money we spend the bigger the problem has grown.
Thanks so much for reiterating this for us - we need to hear about the urgency of this more often. I keep thinking there’s something more here we need to do - and to take wealthy developers entirely out of the equation. What if we supported our local community colleges so they could offer free classes in building trades and in return students would give a year of onsite construction labor in order to build affordable housing in their communities as payback for their degree? The resulting homes would be owned by a nonprofit cooperative that would recycle any profit back into the program at the community college. Local vendors of needed supplies could use donations and reduced costs for materials as a tax write off. A local bank/credit union would be needed to initiate start up loans. Just seems like there has to be a way to remedy this.
While Donald Trump wants $1 billion to build a ballroom from taxpayer money,Boulder, Colorado created “BoulderMOD,” a city-supported modular housing program that builds affordable, energy-efficient homes in a factory setting to lower costs and speed up construction. It combines public funding, workforce training, and modern prefab building methods — a bit like a 21st century version of the post-WWII housing boom.
While government regulation is the most common impediment to building more housing, there are other limitations. Especially on the Oregon coast, the very landscape is often the largest impediment. Take a city like Astoria, where I live. Not only does the steep terrain and risk of landslide make development hard, the old established nature of the city does as well. We have an entrenched perspective on "historical character" that hinders development, as well as the other elements of NIMBYism. At the same time, how many more housing units do you think we could ever build in Astoria? Ten percent more is probably the ceiling.
A huge part of the problem here is the open market for residential real estate. What are you going to do about that? People want cheap houses until they buy one, then they want the value to rise as quickly as possible.
I sympathize with your argument here, but mobility has to be a part of the solution. I can barely live in Astoria because of the cost of living, and as soon as the strain gets too great (a lost job, a medical emergency, etc.), I will move somewhere cheaper that's closer to family.
You're in state government: by all means, find some ways to reduce the cost of living in Oregon. Most of us are begging you.