Last Sunday’s all-church gathering resulted in many positives. The largest attendance of the four meetings gave everyone the opportunity to voice our opinions. Many of us were given the opportunity to think more critically, for the first time, about the various parts of our building and their need in our future. One of the results of the concurrent tabulation of our opinions was to see the wide diversity that resulted. Your Housing Team, with NHA+, will use these results as guidance for our plans ahead. Due to several factors, your copy of those results will be coming in next weeks newsletter.
Reading on, you will see excerpts of an email from Anna Hoesly with some surprising details on the need for affordable housing in Oregon.
This is an OPB article about Oregon’s first Statewide Housing Report (<-click to see report:
“Oregon ranks first in the nation for the most families with children who are living without shelter. The number of children experiencing unsheltered homelessness in the state (is) 14 times higher than the national average and nearly three times higher than Hawaii, the second-highest state,” the report released Thursday states.
And despite how unaffordable housing is now, the report notes, “buying a home for a white household today is still more affordable than it was for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) households back in 2018.” Communities of color’s homeownership rate is 49% compared to 66% for white Oregonians, according to the report”.
This echoes what I (Anna Hoesly) am hearing at the local level as well – in a meeting I just had today in fact with a housing professional, we talked about how there is no general family shelter in Clackamas County and there is a dearth of county resources/attention/strategy toward family homelessness in particular (our markers of where we put our resources favor the way single white folks experience homelessness, because that is what is most visible).
Meanwhile, families are falling through the cracks in our systems. Just this month, Storyline has received multiple emails from Wichita Center asking for help to support families, for whom there are no county resources. We are currently working on helping a single mom living out of her car with two small kiddos, who has found a job but has no place to stay while she gets on her feet.
The article cites lack of affordable housing supply as one of the most significant factors in this crisis (the state is approximately 128,00 units short right now for people who are considered extremely low-income or very low-income).