(Left to right) Portland City Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney listens as Gov. Tina Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson speak at a press conference on housing construction in Portland City Hall, March 6, 2025. Portland City Councilors Candace Avalos and Jamie Dunphy also attended.
Alex Zielinski / OPB
Portland leaders and the Oregon governor’s office have teamed up with the private sector to tackle the city’s housing crisis. Mayor Keith Wilson and Gov. Tina Kotek convened a meeting Thursday with housing developers, construction firms and other city officials to float solutions to the city’s slow pace of housing development.
“We’re struggling here in Portland,” Wilson said at a press conference following the meeting. “Our younger residents, our retirees, our low-income folks are being hit hard by inflation and housing costs, and I think that if we increase housing supply, we increase housing affordability.”
The group is focused specifically on market-rate apartment construction. According to Wilson and Kotek, their work will target changes to permitting and zoning policies that would speed up construction.
“It is about efficient permitting, efficient time to construction,” Kotek said. “Clarity and consistency is good for developers because time is money.”
Both emphasized the importance of attracting investors to Portland. High interest rates, the city’s drawn out permitting process and general disinterest in the city have led to a dip in investors. Out of 81 US cities, Portland ranks 80th in the Urban Land Institute’s “Top Markets 2025 for Overall Real Estate Prospects.” A recent report from the Portland Metro Chamber found that lack of investment and job growth in the Portland area could trigger a decline in tax revenue, thus impacting government budgets – which they dubbed an “urban doom loop.” Increased investments in housing could help get the city back on track, Kotek said.
“We want to know specifically what we can do better to make Portland a place where people want to invest,” she said. “My message today is: the city of Portland is open for business. We are going to grow.”
Portland has a goal of building more than 120,000 new homes by 2045, to meet the state’s own housing production requirements for cities. But the COVID-19’s economic toll on the construction industry has made it hard to stay on target. Recent projections have shown the pace of permitting for new apartments falling to lows not seen since the global financial crisis in 2009.
On Thursday, Kotek pointed to another hurdle to housing construction: the White House. She acknowledged concerns about cuts to federal housing funds and said increased tariffs could make building more expensive.
“What I would like to see from the Trump administration is consistency about what they talked about on the campaign trail, which was we want to help get more housing constructed across the country and make it more affordable,” Kotek said. “I would argue the tariffs will not help in that regard. Cuts to the Housing and Urban Development department will not help.”
This isn’t the first time the governor has stepped in to help Portland’s economic problems. In 2023, Kotek formed a task force made up of business and government leaders to address the city’s lagging post-pandemic economy. That group produced recommendations that led to the declaration of a fentanyl emergency in downtown Portland and a ban on new taxes, among other things.
The new task force will focus specifically on market-rate housing, not housing subsidized to be affordable for lower-income renters. The region has seen an increase in affordable housing in recent years, with the rollout of two affordable housing bonds. Yet, with both the Metro and Portland housing bonds winding down, there’s no clear future source of funding for affordable rentals.
“At some point in time the region needs to come back and talk about local money to help build affordable housing,” Kotek said, “but we’re focused primarily on private sector development today.”
Wilson said the new construction task force, while focused on market-rate housing, pairs nicely with his administration’s own goal to boost homeless shelter production in Portland. The mayor has received criticism from some local elected officials that his plan ignores that people in shelter may have no place to go next without an investment in more housing.
“It’s about making sure that everyone at every income level has a safe, decent place to sleep every single night in Portland,” he said.
Kotek and Wilson are joined on the committee by three Portland City Council members, the directors of several city and state agencies that relate to housing development, developer advocacy groups and a number of construction and development companies.
