Portland’s housing crisis continues, and the body count associated to it continues to escalate.

Portland Tenants United has been calling for a rent freeze and an end to no-cause evictions. In the midst of this housing crisis it’s impossible to ignore the harm being done by short term rentals, though especially AirBnB.

In Portland more than a thousand units currently been taken off the housing market in order to supply short term vacation rentals. The permanent allocation of residential housing to vacation rentals is obscene and needs to end.

This is one of the more blatant ways in which Portland’s housing crisis is a legitimate “man made disaster” resulting in a “material elimination of rental housing”, a designation sufficient for City Hall to implement emergency controls on rents, per ORS 91.225(5).

Portland has a long history of allowing our housing supply to be driven solely by the profit motive, creating the perfect environment for illegal AirBnB vacation rentals to flourish.

It’s not a given that our housing needs to exist first to serve corporate interests. The antagonists in this system aren’t the tenants and homeowners renting out rooms for extra income, but the corporations systematizing this practice, creating incentives for large-scale abuse, such as the luxury high-rise that city hall recently intervened to stop their chronic use of illegal short term rentals.

In the current profit-driven housing paradigm, it’s difficult to claim that there’s some ethical solution for working families in these situations, or to moralistically ask them to stop renting their spare rooms. Our critiques must be focused on the corporations, starting with AirBnB and other short term rental platforms, the big landlords siphoning entire units full time into the short term rental market, and on the governmental bodies committed to enabling them.

We can’t keep acting like this crisis is an accident while ignoring the decadent obsession with profit that has transformed housing, from a ‘home’ into an ‘investment’. When a home is instead viewed as a rental investment, the family and broader community are secondary considerations; the priority is cash.

Every short term rental offered year round as an “entire place” is one prospective long term rental unit that is off the market. Even if a unit is only rented to vacationeers half the time, it’s yanked from the long term housing market full-time. This decreases the supply of housing and further mutilates the “market” that landlords love to cite when raising rents.

It’s obvious why short term vacation rentals are so attractive to housing speculators and landlords: even $60/night means revenue of $1800/month, more than average rent for a 3 bedroom in Portland. This leads to bidding wars for home-buyers, which of course drives up the prices, and an increase in rents justified by landlords who state that they “could be” getting so much more by putting it on AirBnB.

Landlords can now make more money by leaving units vacant for half the year! And they don’t have to deal with those pesky tenants who are always asking for the leaky pipes to be fixed. (A tourist won’t notice or care. They’ll be gone before maintenance ever arrives.) The “efficient” market at work. When renters and tourists are essentially competing for the same units, with very different buying power and concept of value ($100/night is reasonable for a hotel, not so reasonable for a long term rental), the idea of “market value” is violently distorted.

The distortion is felt in particular in “trendy”, close in neighborhoods. This concentrates the effects of the problem, amounting to a tax on the working people in these neighborhoods who now have to commute to areas they can’t afford to live in anymore.

The conversion of housing to vacation rentals is driving displacement and gentrification, and beginning to turn formally residential neighborhoods into blocks of hotels. For the few residents who still occupy the block, they don’t have the security, quality of life, or community of a residential neighborhood. They have to endure a constant stream of strangers, sometimes knocking at their door late at night with the wrong house number, parties at all hours of the night, and no idea who is coming and going in the house next door to them. And no one to hold accountable because the short term tenants will be gone by the next day anyway. Neighborhoods where this is a particular issue are seeing their commercial districts lose businesses that provide services to residents, like laundromats, barber shops, and corner grocers, replaced by high end shops and restaurants that would primarily appeal to tourists, making the neighborhood less livable and affordable.

The effect of all this is particularly galling considering that many of the neighborhoods that have been hardest hit are historically Black. Not only is this contributing to the violence of gentrification, but research shows that short term rental platforms systematically discriminate against people of color. People are being kicked out of their neighborhood, flung to exurbs (where the rent is still too high) and then can’t even rent an AirBnB back in their own neighborhood.

There’s clear evidence that even what limited regulations we have are being broken left and right. AirBnB seems to be prone to betting on the sluggishness of any response to their flagrant violation of the rules. As far as anyone can tell that’s a good bet. When regulations begin to threaten their interests, they’ve also proven adept at flooding cash in to correct the situation in their favor . AirBnB seems pathologically committed to flaunting even basic social norms. That this company is given any benefit of the doubt, anywhere, is astonishing. These violations make Portland’s housing market even more precarious for its residents.

Even when some token effort is made to add affordable housing, property owners are using entire floors of short term rentals to make sure their all-important profits aren’t disrupted.

Keep Portland Housed, and let our houses be houses

There are equitable solutions that would allow Portland’s many visitors to find affordable places to stay while not endangering the lives of Portland’s residents. It’s not clear that these solutions are possible as long as our cities continue to prioritize the right of landlords to maximize their profits at the expense of the 50% of the city that are renters.

Nationally, there are many vacant homes for every houseless person. This ratio is somewhat lower in Portland, but the vacancy rate in new luxury units is higher than average. This is particularly obscene in light of this winter’s storms, which have a growing body count driven by the housing crisis. Portland tenants who’ve been evicted are dying on the streets while luxury units sit empty. What forces are driving the continued focus on building luxury units?

The process of correcting the housing situation in Portland should begin with strong tenant protections, like the reforms PTU has been calling for, combined with long-term controls on the cost of renting.

This alone won’t suffice, as Portland is likely to continue to attract more residents in the coming years, particularly in light of the attacks on public services expected across the country, and the environmental crisis that will continue to drive people north. Portland doesn’t have enough housing, and we need a massive investment in building affordable housing to fix this. It’s increasingly clear that the profit-driven developer circus will be unable or unwilling to meet this demand. New solutions should be brought to the table and discussed.

How do we address the argument that short-term rentals are needed to supplement working-class people’s incomes? We join our friends in the labor movement in calling for an increased minimum wage, union rights, and strengthened worker protections. The real value of wages is depressed by the rampant inflation in rents (tenant’s largest and least negotiable expense), and rent controls and tenant protections will begin to correct this. The specter of people being forced to rent their homes out to strangers to meet their own basic needs is nothing short of dystopic: working class Portlanders should be able to survive without sacrificing their privacy.

How horrific that a city will prioritize the right to corporate profit over the needs of its residents! That citizens of a city who democratically act to protect their own homes can be crushed by millions of dollars of money para-dropped in to sabotage their neighborhoods? Who is this rogue band of tin-pot Nero’s fiddling with their phones while Portland’s future is set on fire, and its residents freeze to death?

Portland tenants, in solidarity with the labor movement, are mobilizing to address the housing crisis. Any politicians trying to make hay by pandering to these demands will be proven a liar if they don’t address the role of short-term rentals in this man-made disaster. The practice of siphoning off entire homes from Portland’s housing market for the enrichment of a few must end. The number of permanent, whole-unit homes on the Portland short-term-rental market should be zero. PTU applauds any meaningful reforms toward this end.