Oregon’s Housing Crisis: How Public Funds, Corporate Ties, and Policy Capture Undermine Equitable Development
Original framing: “Her Agency Distributes Billions for Housing Projects. Her Husband’s Company Helped Develop Some of Them.” — ProPublica
Oregon’s housing crisis is not isolated; it echoes patterns from the 19th-century land grabs that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and the post-WWII suburban expansion that excluded Black families through redlining. The current scandal mirrors the *Teague-Gainer Act* of 1959, which enabled corporate land banking in Oregon, allowing developers to hoard land and inflate prices. Additionally, the erosion of anti-nepotism laws in the 1980s—part of broader deregulatory trends—created the conditions for today’s conflicts of interest. Understanding these historical parallels reveals how today’s housing policies are not just failures of ethics but continuations of extractive governance.