Eugene mayor shares good news, bad news on housing

Presenter: From the city of Eugene, regularly among the highest homeless populations per capita, there’s good news and bad news. On June 22, Mayor Kaarin Knudson: 

Mayor Kaarin Knudson: I have just a few items that I want to raise from a couple of conversations, two of them related to our recent (Lane County) Poverty and Homelessness Board meetings—I sit as a part of that board and also have joined two subcommittees, one on cross-sector collaboration, and also another on advocacy—and wanted to highlight a recent update that our City of Eugene staff gave to the Poverty and Homelessness Board—a tally, sort of current tracking and metrics that are our current city of Eugene affordable housing pipeline. 

There are currently 873—almost 900 units—from 14 different developments funded with a mix of local system development charge exemptions, city fee assistance, local affordable housing trust fund contributions, federal entitlement home funds, and city of Eugene land banking sites. Almost 900 units of affordable housing.

I wanted to highlight this because presently this year and looking into next year, we are accomplishing something that has been a goal for a long time, which is significantly increasing the number of affordable housing units that we are constructing in our community.

There are 493 affordable housing units that are currently under construction across six developments, and 329 affordable housing units that are seeking financing to begin construction across seven other proposals. 

This is really good news for a community that is doing everything that we can with the resources we have available and some really excellent staff alignment with the state resources that we’re able to access to deliver housing for our community that is affordable across a whole variety of different projects. 

And I just want to be sure to highlight and thank the staff working on affordable housing, our grants management team, our team leading the affordable housing trust fund, but also our community development and planning team because they’re doing a lot of work.

And it is great when we can update our Poverty and Homelessness Board on the ways in which we are building housing that is in fact the solution to the experience of homelessness. 

In our more recent Poverty and Homelessness Board meeting, we unfortunately received another, I’ll call it sort of salvo or wave of challenging information that relates to the changes in how our federal government is positioning itself both through Housing and Urban Development—through HUD—and through Health and Human Services.

And the two shifts that are similar but through different agencies are shifts towards work requirements and time, volunteer time or work requirements to qualify for certain types of housing and also work requirements to qualify for Medicaid. 

So one of those sets of requirements is through HUD. The other is through Health and Human Services, two different federal agencies, but both operating, it appears, with not a lot of information, or certainly with not a lot of concern for consequences when establishing 40 hours of new work requirements related to certain types of housing where that seems quite unlikely to be attainable.

It does present a particular type of challenge to our community, and I just wanted to flag it because this is important work that we are doing across jurisdictions, among jurisdictions to try to mitigate these newly-created harms in our community.

Presenter: Mayor Kaarin Knudson with the latest good news and bad news on housing, as two federal agencies are preparing work requirements for some types of housing and Medicaid.