S5. Heating, maintenance and monthly housing costs will consume a larger share of household budgets and push people toward lower-quality housing choices.
The housing options available to people form a hierarchy: 1) homeownership; 2) rental; 3) assisted housing (including public, subsidized and transitional housing); and 4) homeless shelters. It is in the community’s best interest to keep people as high on this hierarchy as possible. In Portland, it is becoming steadily more difficult to keep people adequately housed. This situation has been aggravated by the recent rise in home prices in the Portland metro market. Increasingly risky mortgage instruments (e.g., interest-only, 50-year, minimal down payment) have been used to make housing “affordable.” These mortgages pose potential financial concerns to homeowners in a severe economic decline, threatening to push people lower on the housing hierarchy.
Housing costs will continue to consume a larger share of household budgets due to higher heating cost and general economic pressures such as unemployment, wage loss and inflation. This would exacerbate an already over-leveraged housing market and increase foreclosures. There will be downward pressure on the hierarchy of housing options as more people slide toward shared housing, assisted housing or homelessness. Eventually, lower incomes may force housing prices and rents down, but not soon enough to avoid crisis situations for many households. As incomes are stretched, home and facility maintenance may suffer, causing the city’s housing stock to deteriorate. This would affect people’s comfort, and eventually safety or sanitation. The price of housing located near jobs, services, and accessible transportation may increase, forcing low-income and vulnerable populations to move to areas without these attributes, making it more difficult and expensive for them to get to services and jobs.
As the cost of heating a home increases, existing federal and utility bill-reduction programs will struggle to meet the increasing demand for their services. While Portland’s relatively mild climate may not place people living in unheated homes at direct risk of dying from the cold, both the frequency and severity of illness are likely to increase substantially.