The Oregon Legislature’s proposed 2025-2027 state budget slashes emergency rent assistance and homelessness prevention services. By cutting 80% of the funding that is needed to maintain existing statewide services, legislators are opening the floodgate for families who will be evicted into homelessness. The Oregon Housing Alliance and its 110+ member organizations call on lawmakers to immediately restore funding for these vital, proven, cost-effective services.
TAKE ACTION HERE to demand that legislators restore funding to prevent mass evictions and homelessness
Rent assistance, legal aid and homelessness prevention services stabilize families who are one emergency expense away from losing their homes. Eviction cases are at a record high, but thanks to investments made by the legislature in the previous budget, approximately 70% of people in eviction court currently receive rent assistance and services in order to keep their homes.
That will all change if the budget proposed by legislators for 2025-2027 is adopted: rent assistance and homelessness prevention funding will be gutted, from the $173.2M needed to continue existing services down to $33.6M. As a result, programs that have prevented 27,713 households from losing their homes over the last two years will serve just 4,331 households in the next two years – leaving over 23,000 households without protection from eviction when facing financial challenges such as losing a job or getting sick. Thousands of those families – children, elders, and people with disabilities included – will face the threat of homelessness.
In addition to avoiding needless suffering for thousands of people, eviction prevention is cost-effective in the long run. A Portland State study found evictions could cost Oregon $720 million to $4.7 billion annually in downstream expenses for shelters, medical care, foster care, and juvenile justice. Lawmakers must maintain critical homelessness prevention services now, to avoid a massive price tag for more costly services later.
Oregon has nearly $2 billion in ‘rainy day’ funds set aside for emergencies, and the legislature is planning to add hundreds of millions more to those emergency reserves this year. But the emergency is here now. We can afford to prevent the traumatic and destabilizing experience of eviction and homelessness for tens of thousands of our neighbors. The need to act now could not be more clear.
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Media coverage of cuts to the homelessness prevention budget:
- KATU: OHCS budget falls short of Kotek’s requests (June 11, 2025)
- OPB: Oregon housing budget would fund shelters, slash eviction prevention (June 11, 2025)
- Willamette Week: Evictions soar, rent assistance slashed (June 12, 2025)
- KOIN: Housing advocates push Oregon lawmakers to fund eviction prevention package (June 16, 2025)
- Willamette Week: Housing Advocates Decry Potential Cuts to Eviction Protection (June 17, 2025)
- The Oregonian: Oregon lawmakers to slash homelessness prevention funding; Gov. Kotek calls on them to reconsider (June 18, 2025)
- The Bend Bulletin: Providers worried about state cuts to homelessness programs (June 19, 2025)
- The Skanner: During Record Eviction Rates, Advocates Decry Possible Slashes to Eviction Prevention (June 19, 2025)