'Waste of time and resources': Lake Oswego mayor on Kotek's housing office
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Amid Oregon's affordable housing crisis, Lake Oswego Mayor Joe Buck says Gov. Tina Kotek's housing production plan is meeting bureaucracy with more red tape.
“We’re all aware that the lack of housing, in general, affordable housing and market rate housing is making our communities unaffordable for so many Oregonians and its locking people out of communities like Lake Oswego, leading to high rates of homelessness statewide," Mayor Buck said.
“Oregon estimates that we have 140,000 units short of homes and that’s not taking into account the additional housing we’re going to need for people moving into the state. So, the governor’s rightly set an ambitious goal of 36,000 homes per year," Buck added.
On her first full day in office in January, Gov. Kotek signed three executive orders declaring a state of emergency for the housing and homelessness crises.
The first executive order established a statewide goal of building 36,000 housing units per year and created the Housing Production Advisory Council. Kotek said the council will be tasked with creating a budget and policy recommendations to reach that goal.
The governor added that the 36,000-unit goal will be an 80% increase over recent construction trends. She said meeting this goal will require collaboration between local, state and federal partners.
Buck argues that the governor's plan is meeting bureaucracy with more bureaucracy.
“One thing that Lake Oswego and other cities in the metro area are concerned about is that we’re coming out of the legislature and policies coming from the governor’s Housing Production Advisory Council, they’re centered around the notion that this lack of housing is due to onerous local building codes and cities that are standing in the way. And the proposed solution is more bureaucracy in the form of a housing accountability office," Buck said.
He continued, “so, confronting the claim that bureaucracy is slowing down housing production with yet more bureaucracy and assuming that cities are bad actors is really a waste of time and resources. I do not know a single mayor in the metro area who’s not working to ensure needed housing for residents, to ensure people who work within their towns can afford to live there and to ensure accessible and affordable housing for seniors and low-income residents and for those whom housing security has been a real issue.”
The mayor stated despite Lake Oswego being "already built out," the city added 1,000 new housing units over the last five years and has over 150 affordable housing units in the pipeline along with hundreds of market rate units under construction.
“The work is happening," Buck said. "The barriers though to the housing we really need relate a lot to land readiness so, infrastructure that’s needed to ensure buildable land can be developed; debt financing -- right now, projects that require debt financing are having a really tough time getting funded. Banks are really reticent to lend. And then the workforce, Oregon’s trade unions have not increased their training capacity despite an overwhelming need over many years, which is rather perplexing.”
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