Yuyun Lusiyani
Oregon’s ambitious efforts to combat its escalating housing crisis have seen an unprecedented surge in public investment over the last five years, with the state committing approximately $1.4 billion to developers for low-income housing projects. This substantial outlay is set to grow further with an additional $850 million in future state funding and significant federal tax credits managed by the state. Yet, despite this massive financial commitment, the cost of developing each apartment has nearly doubled, now averaging a staggering $540,000. Compounding this fiscal paradox is a unique legal exemption that shields the financial intricacies of these subsidized housing projects from public view, making Oregon one of the few states where such detailed spending remains largely undisclosed. This lack of transparency has ignited concerns among researchers, journalists, and former state officials who argue that without clear oversight, the state risks deepening its housing crisis rather than resolving it, even as its homeless population continues to swell.
Background and the Escalating Crisis
The Pacific Northwest, and Oregon in particular, has been grappling with a severe and worsening affordable housing shortage, a crisis directly linked by regional leaders to a dire homelessness epidemic. The state’s commitment to increasing its low-income housing stock is a direct and urgent response to this pressing need, aiming to provide stable shelter for its most vulnerable residents. Over the past five years, the state’s spending on these crucial initiatives has exploded, reflecting the perceived gravity and scale of the problem. However, the efficacy and value for money of this significant public investment are now under intense questioning. The average cost per apartment climbing to $540,000—a figure that has nearly doubled within half a decade—raises fundamental questions about project efficiency, cost control mechanisms, and the ultimate impact on housing availability for those who need it most. As Margaret Van Vliet, a former director of Oregon’s state housing agency, starkly put it to ProPublica, “For all the public money, we seem to be digging a deeper hole,” lamenting that despite the monumental investment, Oregon’s homeless population continues to grow. This observation underscores a critical disconnect between substantial financial input and the desired societal outcomes of reducing homelessness and increasing affordable housing stock.
Oregon’s Veil of Secrecy: A Public Records Carve-Out
At the heart of the controversy is a specific and unusual carve-out in Oregon’s public records law, which uniquely prevents the disclosure of detailed financial information pertaining to state-subsidized housing projects. This exemption stands in stark contrast to the practices in most other states across the nation. Researchers and journalists attempting to investigate the soaring costs and operational efficiencies of these publicly funded projects have consistently encountered a wall of heavily redacted documents and outright denied requests for transparency. The state’s housing finance agency, Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS), provides only a high-level overview of project costs, systematically redacting crucial itemized expenses. These withheld details include the actual costs of construction materials, the profits reaped by contractors, and the various fees paid to lawyers, brokers, loan agents, developers, and even to OHCS itself. While the agency maintains that it possesses granular data on costs per unit, per square foot, and per bedroom for each subsidized development, it firmly asserts that this specific information is not subject to public disclosure. This effectively obscures critical insights into which projects might be the most expensive or inefficient, preventing meaningful public scrutiny.
This legislative exemption dates back to 1997, a period when Oregon’s state housing agency operated with a significantly smaller staff and budget—roughly one-fifth of its current operational capacity. During the legislative deliberations that led to its approval, Lynn Schoessler, then-Deputy Director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, articulated the primary concern that drove the exemption. She suggested that while there was no inherent worry about wrongdoing or mismanagement, disclosing detailed financial information could make corporations "ripe for takeover or a buyout," citing "corporate level" concerns. Lawmakers, almost unanimously, agreed to this exemption, effectively prioritizing the perceived commercial interests and competitive advantages of private developers over the public’s right to know how vast sums of taxpayer funds are being utilized. This historical context reveals a foundational decision that continues to shape the state’s approach to housing transparency today, even as the scale of investment and the urgency of the housing crisis have dramatically intensified.
The Economic Impact of Opacity: Lessons from Other States
The inability to scrutinize the financial underpinnings of Oregon’s subsidized housing projects is particularly problematic given the illuminating experiences of other states, where transparency has led to critical insights and, in some cases, significant reforms. In California, for instance, where financial records of housing projects are publicly accessible, investigations have revealed troubling trends in spiraling costs and inefficiencies.
A landmark 2020 investigation by reporters at the Los Angeles Times uncovered that the cost of some low-income housing units in California had surged to over $1 million each. Their exhaustive analysis attributed these exorbitant prices, in part, to complex government regulations and bureaucratic hurdles that inadvertently drove up construction expenses. The Times’ findings were stark: had costs been comparable to those in other regions, an estimated 12,000 more low-income families could have been housed between 2011 and 2015 with the same level of investment. This data powerfully highlights the direct correlation between construction costs and the sheer volume of housing that can be delivered to those in need.
Further underscoring the issue, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, published a study earlier this year demonstrating that California was spending approximately $300 million annually solely on development fees for subsidized housing. This staggering sum, they calculated, could have financed an additional 1,250 apartments each year. Recognizing the gravity of these findings and the lost opportunities, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation in July aimed at significantly reducing such fees, showcasing how transparency and data-driven analysis can directly inform crucial policy changes designed to improve efficiency and substantially increase housing supply.
Moreover, a comprehensive study released last year, co-authored by Jason Ward, an economist who directs the nonpartisan Rand Corporation’s Housing Center, conducted a comparative analysis of the costs of constructing subsidized housing across California, Texas, and Colorado. The study concluded that California’s nationally highest prices were largely driven by specific mandates, including requirements for "substantially above-market wages and unusually large architectural and engineering fees." The implications of this research were profound: if California could achieve production costs similar to Colorado’s, it could potentially build four times as many rent-subsidized apartments with the exact same budget. These extensive, data-driven analyses, which have proven instrumental in other states for identifying specific cost drivers, pinpointing inefficiencies, and advocating for targeted reforms, are simply "impossible to perform in Oregon" due to the state’s stringent and unique public records exemption. This critical information gap prevents Oregon from learning from its own projects and from best practices elsewhere, potentially perpetuating costly inefficiencies.
Beyond Finances: The Scope of Secrecy
Oregon’s secrecy mandate extends far beyond just financial figures, encompassing other crucial operational details that could inform public understanding and accountability. ProPublica’s attempts to obtain records for three apartment projects in the Portland area revealed the surprisingly broad reach of these redactions. The state agency systematically withheld a list of languages spoken by the tenants a developer aimed to attract, as well as the detailed plan for translating tenant outreach brochures from English into other languages. Furthermore, explanations of potential financial risks a project might encounter, alongside the developer’s strategies for covering cost overruns, were also blacked out from the public record.
In a particularly telling incident, when ProPublica requested these records for a project developed by Home Forward, the Portland housing authority, the state agency (OHCS) provided a heavily redacted document. However, Home Forward, operating as a public housing authority itself, subsequently released its application materials to ProPublica without any redactions. This act of transparency from the local entity revealed the "secret" information to be mundane yet important operational details, such as the project’s financial risks including "market volatility, site-specific challenges, and unforeseen design modifications. Economic factors such as inflation, material price fluctuations, and labor shortages could impact overall construction costs."
A spokesperson for OHCS justified these extensive redactions by stating that the public records exemption broadly shields "market studies and analyses" as well as pro forma statements, which project a development’s anticipated cash flows. This broad interpretation allows the agency to obscure a wide range of information that, if made public, could offer valuable insights into project planning, risk management, community engagement strategies, and the overall feasibility and resilience of publicly funded housing initiatives. Such information is vital for policymakers, community advocates, and taxpayers to fully understand the complexities and potential vulnerabilities of these critical projects.
Calls for Accountability and Expert Opinions
The growing concerns over Oregon’s escalating housing spending and the pervasive secrecy have prompted increasingly vocal calls for a comprehensive reevaluation of the public records exemption. Jason Ward, the Rand Corp. economist, expressed strong criticism of Oregon’s stance on transparency, noting that cost information about subsidized housing is typically public in nearly all states he has researched. He stated, with an emphasis on democratic principles, "When you’re just looking at how public funds are used, there should be an incredibly strong bias towards transparency. And when you see costs going up and up and up and the outcomes aren’t good, there’s an almost unqualified public case that these things should be open to scrutiny by taxpayers, policymakers, the media, whomever.” Ward further underscored Oregon’s unusual position by revealing that he has successfully obtained such data from 17 states and was only denied in New Jersey, making Oregon an outlier in its restrictive approach.
Margaret Van Vliet, drawing on her extensive experience as a former director of Oregon’s state housing agency, unequivocally told ProPublica that lawmakers should revisit the exemption immediately. Her pointed statement, "For all the public money, we seem to be digging a deeper hole," serves as a poignant and damning critique of the current approach, underscoring the urgency of addressing the transparency issue before further public funds are expended without adequate oversight.
Adding to the chorus of concern, Charlie Fisher, co-chair of Oregon’s Sunshine Committee—a governmental body specifically tasked with reviewing public records exemptions and identifying those that should be repealed or modified—affirmed the fundamental importance of public access to such information. Fisher stated, “Verifying how public dollars are being spent, especially at this scale, is one of the fundamental reasons why people should have access to public records. Given the amount of money we’re talking about, the case is even stronger.” His committee’s potential examination of the low-income housing carve-out offers a significant, albeit distant, glimmer of hope for future legislative reform that could usher in a new era of accountability.
Official Responses and the Irony of "Public Resources"
Andrea Bell, the current director of the state housing agency (OHCS), issued an emailed statement asserting her commitment to transparency and her expectation for the agency to be open, accessible, and accountable to the public. However, she simultaneously emphasized the agency’s strict responsibility to comply with the existing exemption embedded within Oregon records law concerning housing financials. When directly pressed on whether she personally supported the exemption or deemed it necessary for the functioning of the agency or the housing market, Bell offered a non-committal response: “The cost of construction is a topic of growing interest. We will take your request under consideration as we assess ways to proactively share construction costs so that they are more readily available to the public.” This response, while acknowledging public interest, does not signal an immediate shift in policy, nor does it indicate a willingness to challenge the legislative carve-out that her agency currently enforces.
Further illustrating the agency’s current stance and the practical implications of its interpretation of the law, OHCS charged ProPublica $130 for the collection and redaction of the requested documents. The agency subsequently denied ProPublica’s request to waive these fees, justifying its decision by stating that "the interest of the general public would be better served by preserving public resources." This justification strikes many as deeply ironic and contradictory, given that the fees were levied for the very act of withholding information about how vast sums of public resources—taxpayer money—are being spent. By impeding public oversight, the agency’s actions arguably run counter to the broader public interest it claims to serve, creating a barrier to the very accountability that could ensure public resources are used most effectively.
The Path Forward: Embracing Transparency
The experiences of neighboring West Coast states provide compelling evidence that greater transparency in the financial details of affordable housing projects does not hinder development but rather can enhance accountability and efficiency. In California, despite public access to detailed financial information for housing projects, funding remains highly competitive, with more than half of shovel-ready applications being turned away due annually due to demand significantly exceeding available funding. A spokesperson for the California state treasurer’s office explicitly confirmed, “We have not encountered any difficulty in developing affordable housing because those documents are public.” This directly refutes the historical justification for Oregon’s exemption, which cited corporate sensitivity and potential competitive disadvantages as reasons for secrecy.
Similarly, in Washington state, housing officials have consistently released comprehensive financial information about funded housing projects to developers, researchers, media, and the general public without encountering any significant issues or slowdowns in development. A Washington housing official noted that developers are fully aware that this information is publicly accessible, and it has not posed any detrimental issues for project development or attracting investment. ProPublica’s own experience mirrored this: a request to Washington’s counterpart of Oregon Housing and Community Services for financial documents for three Seattle-area projects resulted in unredacted documents being provided promptly and, notably, free of charge. This direct comparison highlights the stark difference in transparency philosophies and practices between Oregon and its regional peers.
These examples from states with similar housing challenges and robust development programs provide compelling evidence that greater transparency in Oregon would not impede housing construction but could, in fact, foster greater efficiency, accountability, and ultimately, a more effective and equitable response to the state’s urgent affordable housing and homelessness crises. The current situation in Oregon presents a critical juncture for lawmakers to revisit a decades-old exemption that now appears to be an impediment to effective governance and public trust, rather than a safeguard. The future of Oregon’s affordable housing initiatives, and by extension, the well-being of its most vulnerable citizens, may well depend on lifting this unnecessary veil of secrecy and embracing a standard of transparency already adopted by most other states.
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