Senate adopts statewide homeownership targets and dashboard to track progress

The Oregon Senate on Monday approved House Bill 26 98, a bill that sets statewide homeownership goals and requires Oregon Housing and Community Services to publish a public dashboard tracking progress by race and ethnicity and other disaggregations.

Senator Patterson, who presented the bill, said Oregon is 40th in the nation on homeownership and that the measure sets a goal of 65.05% homeownership by 2030, increasing by 1.65 percentage points every five years until 2045. "We surely can do better," Patterson said, pointing to racial disparities in homeownership rates and county-level differences such as a 75.6% rate in Clackamas County compared with 59.8% in Multnomah County, which she cited from U.S. Census data.

On the floor, Senators expressed differing views about the utility of a goals-and-dashboard approach. Senator McLean supported the bill but emphasized supply constraints as a core problem: "When we look at the rates of homeownership, the fact is we don't have a supply where we need it," McLean said. Senator Robinson said she would vote no, describing targets without policy changes as limited: "I think we need to change our policies to make it possible. I don't think we do anything by just saying we're going to have these targets over a period of time."

Senator Patterson responded that the bill is a modest step to establish accountability and to implement recommendations from earlier task forces on racial disparities in homeownership.

The clerk announced the bill had received the constitutional majority and the measure was declared passed; the clerk later announced 23 ayes on the roll call as the bill was declared passed on third reading.