Housing determines so much more than giving people a place to live.

It can drive a family’s budget to a good place or a bad place. The location determines how far a family has to drive or if they have to drive. It sets the neighborhood for lives and schools for kids. It creates a home.

And though there are many problems with housing in Oregon, the biggest is likely there just is not enough. The state has underbuilt housing for dozens of years. One estimate said Oregon needs 443,566 homes in the next 20 years and that was a few years ago. Much of the underproduction was in housing for people making less than average median income.

What if Oregon just stays housing as usual?

Gov. Tina Kotek is trying to set a new normal and it’s not been easy.

She set a new goal for housing in the state on her first day as governor in 2023. She wanted the state to build 36,000 homes a year for the next 10 years.

Oregon didn’t seem to meet the goal in 2023, as The Oregonian reported. Only 17,577 permits for new housing were issued in 2023.

If you look back at the permits for new housing over the past 10 years, it has varied from a high of 21,425 in 2022 to a low of 14,862 in 2013. This year doesn’t look like the state is on track to hit 30,000, either.

You would have to go back to the early 2000s to find when Oregon was permitting more than 20,000 homes year after year. And there is only one year, 2005, when Oregon did hit above 30,000 homes.

This is data from the Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey, which collects up all the permitting for residential construction year after year. Of course, permitting is not the same thing as a home being built. A home may never be built even if it is permitted and it may not be completed in the same year the permit was issued. But we do need some measure. When we find out about a better one, we will happily tell you about it.

Kotek has done all kinds of things to remove barriers to housing and to incentive it. And they will take time to percolate through the state. She helped lead the way on removing zoning restrictions for multiplexes. Housing can now be built outside of a city’s urban growth boundary, if the proposal meets certain qualifiers. Oregon has focused more state attention on housing production with a regular needs analysis. In 2023, there was a $200 million package of bills to help incentivize housing. In 2023, the package was even more, $376 million.

All those things have helped but there are other factors at work, too. Interest rates are higher than they were just a few years ago, which can make it hard to even afford a home that is already hard to find. Nationally, there is a shortage of millions of units.

So yes, when the Bend City Council talks housing incentives this week, they will be on the right topic. And yes, when Gov. Kotek comes out with her new budget plan, and if there is even more effort on housing, yes that will be right, too.