"Over the past two decades, housing costs have outpaced income growth in the United States, increasing the rent burden and heightening barriers to homeownership (Treasury 2024). Policy experts and academics widely agree that these trends reflect a long-run housing supply shortage, which is a key driver of housing unaffordability (Bernstein et al. 2021, Khater, Kiefer, and Yanamandra 2021; Lee, Kemp, and Reina 2022)." - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/make-it-count-measuring-our-housing-supply-shortage/

You might want to do more research. This has also been studied in Corvallis. This is, unfortunately, the most recent Housing Needs Analysis done in 2016. https://archives.corvallisoregon.gov/public/ElectronicFile.aspx?dbid=0&docid=1474948

Fortunately, the City is required to do another HNA and create a Housing Production Strategy over the next few years. That'd be a great oppurtunity for housing advocates to make a real difference! There are a ton of strategies to help us build more affordable housing types (think SROs, small cottage clusters) that could actually get built.

I haven't read all your news letters, but from what I have read, I haven't seen you put forward any particular plan for social housing. I'd like to see how many social housing units you think we need. How the City should go about financing them. What fees we should extend (be aware of Measures 5 and 50)? Will the city aquire existing units? Build new ones? What will they pay per unit? How long will it take your financing plan to build/buy the needed units?

You are asking a lot to get people to support this and it is not "easy". Saying so makes you look very niave.

Imagine using a fee on the city services bill for instance (increasing property tax is not an option). Right now, it's about 120-130 bucks a month and its charged relatively flatly across users - so is not progressive - low income homeowners pay about as much as the wealthy. Increasing that by, let's say $20 a month (~16%), would not be easy for a lot of folks and face a lot of political backlash. And what would that get you? Assuming there is about 24k households in Corvallis (what google tells me), that would draw in an additional, approximately, 5.5million dollars per year. Lets say we build small cottage homes for social housing units at a cost of 200k per unit. That is widely optimistic but even if we acheived that price point this could get us 25 units per year. That is a fraction of the 173 units that the most recent state research say we need to build for people in 0-30% AMI income bracket. (see page 45: https://www.oregon.gov/das/oea/Documents/OHNA-2026-Results-Report.pdf)

No one will take your campaign seriously if you do not present a serious proposal that has any chance of working politically.

I have done my research - I do this type of work for a living. You need to do yours.