Wyden pushes housing affordability bills after Grants Pass Supreme Court decision

The first bill, called the Decent, Affordable, Safe Housing for All (DASH) Act, was reintroduced in March 2023. It focuses on addressing housing affordability using solutions like vouchers and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.

The other bill, called the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024, was introduced in January. It would give states more tax credits for affordable housing projects, among other things.

“I’ve been following what everybody’s been going through. You want to get more housing, it starts with a bedrock principle that I think you’ve got to accept given the challenge in America. And it’s: we’ve got to increase housing supply,” he said Thursday.

At the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Grants Pass’s ban on homeless people camping in public spaces.

Wyden now says these bills will help the city move forward and create more affordable housing.

“I saw the court decision. I wanted to say, let’s have a blueprint for the future and bring people together,” he said.

Jane Vaughan/JPRGrants Pass Housing and Neighborhood Specialist Amber Neeck speaks at a press conference in the city on July 18, 2024. From left to right, Doug Walker, residential developer and chair of the city’s Housing Advisory Committee, and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden.

However, local officials suggested other solutions to the senator as well.

For example, the DASH Act mentions issuing more Housing Choice Vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But Amber Neeck, the city’s housing and neighborhood specialist, said even people who have vouchers only have a 34% chance of actually renting housing, due to a shortage of housing and because the amount of money HUD gives often is not enough for rental prices in Grants Pass.

“Looking maybe at how those amounts are assessed compared to our local market rate could be very helpful in the short term,” she told Senator Wyden, who said he would work with HUD on that.

Meanwhile, city officials are working in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to address both the affordable housing crisis and the homeless crisis.

Neeck said they’re trying to encourage developers to build smaller scale apartments.

“When I get developers calling me for apartments, they’re often asking, ‘Where are your 10-acre lots?’ And I can say, ‘Well, we have a really sweet 3.5 on the south end of town.’ But we don’t really have these large lots that are zoned for housing or zoned for high density housing,” she said.

Neeck said the city is also working on rezoning land and increasing building density to create opportunities for more affordable housing, among other things.

Jane Vaughan/JPRTents in Fruitdale Park in Grants Pass in May 2024.

City Councilor Vanessa Ogier said Thursday that city officials have been taking time to digest the Supreme Court’s ruling and make sense of it.

In the midst of the ongoing court case, Oregon passed a law in 2021 stating that rules regulating where homeless people can rest or sleep on public property must be “objectively reasonable” as they dictate where, when and how people can do so, though that term is not clearly defined. So the city now has to figure out what restrictions it can have while still following state law.

“What we’ve been doing is having informal discussions among each other about what that might look like for our community,” Ogier said. “The next step for us is codifying what that would look like for our community, and I anticipate that being in the next few weeks or so.”