The state has done it before—with more apartments and even a smaller construction workforce.
To dig out of Oregon’s housing shortages, build 36,000 homes a year for the next decade. It’s that simple.
Okay, maybe not that simple. That is, after all, a lot of homes, and land, and materials, and carpenters, and architects, and plumbers, and city permit review staff. It’s a lot more homes than the state’s been building the last few decades.
But that’s part of the problem that Oregon’s new governor, Tina Kotek, wants to address. The state hasn’t been building enough new homes to keep up with population growth over the last few decades. State analysts calculate that Oregon is 140,000 homes short of having enough for families, working people, seniors, and everybody else to find a place to live that meets their needs. And that's not even counting the 220,000 homes needed just to keep up with future population growth and demand over the next decade.
It’s a big problem. To have a prayer of getting there, policymakers would need to swing for the fences.
So how does Oregon get there? A lot of people making small decisions, and a smaller number of people making some big decisions.
One of those big decisions could be House Bill 2889, an overhaul of state housing rules that would do two main things. First, it would set targets for housing production that are based on actual need, not just carrying forward recent patterns of homebuilding. These targets would consider price, location, and equitable outcomes, in addition to just the number of homes needed. Second, it would identify the barriers to homebuilding that state and local government can alleviate directly---everything from apartment bans to parking mandates to slow permit processing to roadway standards to environmental reviews.
Here’s the trouble: every one of those barriers exists for a reason, often a good reason. The point of HB 2889 isn’t to sweep them all away, even if that were possible. The point is to force government, at every level, to weigh the benefits of each barrier against its costs.
And what if Oregon did take on that huge task? Would it even be possible to build as many homes as Oregonians need?
It turns out that it would.
Back in the 1970s, a much smaller workforce built this many homes
The year is 1977. Bell bottoms reign, disco fever is high, the Blazers just won the NBA championship, and Oregon’s estimated 7,652 residential construction workers are building 33,000 new homes.
This is a big number. Oregon added almost 330,000 new homes during the 1970s, almost three times as many as it built during the 1960s or 1980s. That’s not far off from the 348,000 homes that Governor Kotek wants the state to add by 2030.
And in the 2020s, Oregon will have some new advantages. For one, Oregon now has a private residential construction workforce almost three times the size of 1977’s: 20,227, as of 2021. Oregon’s total population is 4.2 million, more than double the 2.1 million residents the state had fifty years ago. It’s true that a lot of work needs to be done. But if Oregon could bring the barriers to housing back down to the level of the 1970s, its current and future workforce could find the time to do the job.
Oregon also has way more homes already in place, so 348,000 new ones by 2030 would be much less of a change to the existing landscape than it was in the 1970s. Those 330,000 additional homes in the 1970s were a 44 percent increase to the 745,000 homes that already existed in 1970. But now that the state has 1.8 million homes, adding 348,000 would mean less than 20 percent growth---pretty close to the growth rate of the 1950s, 1960s, or 1990s. If you live on a block with 20 homes, that might look like your neighbor on the corner converting their garage into a granny flat and a small apartment building going up two blocks over.
Why does it take a much larger workforce today to build a smaller number of homes? Whatever the reason, it’s not unique to Oregon. Last Sunda...