What will Raz Mason do to add to housing stocks in rural Oregon, with an eye toward affordable housing for service workers?
People who work full-time should be able to afford a place to live. Government can offer incentives and make it easier for builders and landlords to meet regulations (ex. easy-to-use online dashboards; smoother permitting), while still protecting the environment.
Here are some other ways to boost housing stock:
- Expand “medium zoning” housing (duplexes, triplexes); add more boarding houses and “mother-in-law” apartments.
- Promote home-shares (HomeshareOregon.org) and allow on-driveway RV rentals that expand affordable housing and increase owners’ income.
- Increase taxes on short-term rentals and limit out-of-town owners; tax empty houses.
- Develop more public-private partnerships to build affordable apartments.
- Increase and provide wrap-around services for shelters and transitional housing.
- Facilitate co-housing and tiny home developments, as well as RV and mobile home parks.
- Increase mixed-use density in our small-town downtowns (stores below, apartments above).
- Incentivize next-generation building techniques, like low-carbon 3D printed homes, straw bale construction, and mass timber construction.
Overall, we need a fairer match between any rent increases and increases to people’s salaries. If salaries had kept up with increases in productivity over the past 40 years, the average worker would be making much more per hour. In that time, worker productivity has grown 3.5 times faster than pay. Where did the excess money go, if not to workers? To executive salaries and shareholder payouts (www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap). So, in addition to having more housing choices, we need many types of wages to go up.
Adapted from Columbia Community Connection’s “Meet the Candidates“
Background
Raz Mason understands housing insecurity from personal experience. As someone who has focused on low-paying community service work, with extended schooling and/or post-graduate training required for teaching and hospital chaplaincy, Raz has needed to move many times. This has prevented her from building up equity in a home she owns. Instead, Raz has couch-surfed and stayed with friends during periods of housing insecurity, and has experienced first-hand the recent extreme jump in apartment rental and storage costs.
From working many years in the domestic abuse field, Raz is aware of how limited the stock of transitional housing is for people moving out of houselessness and/or escaping domestic violence.
Resources
- Home Share Oregon
- Housing Oregon
- Policy recommendations suited to the Pacific Northwest from the Sightline Institute
- Unlocking Home, a short (73 page) book by Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute