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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. Oregon has long been known as a progressive state that greatly cherishes freedom of speech and openness in society. So how come Oregon is one of the most opaque and secretive states in America when it comes to public records? Other states, like Washington and California, are accommodating when it comes to requests from media and other organizations. Oregon is very tight-lipped, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in how much and where the state spends money on low-income public housing. Today on the show, you'll hear from an Oregon-based ProPublica reporter who has discovered that a decades-old state law allows the state to hide any and all money associated with public housing, and how this lack of transparency could hurt Oregon's efforts to build more of the type of housing it desperately needs.
Michael Dunne: Rob Davis, an investigative reporter with ProPublica based in Oregon, covers issues in the Pacific Northwest. Rob, it's great to talk to you again. Thanks so much for coming on.
Rob Davis: Hey, thank you for having me.
Dunne: Yeah, I enjoyed your article, titled “Oregon Is Spending More Than Ever on Low-Income Housing. A State Law Keeps the Details Secret.” Let's start with this: Give us an idea of how much Oregon spends on low-income housing.
Davis: Well, it's a lot. We're really in a new paradigm here in Oregon under Gov. Tina Kotek, who has made building housing one of her top priorities. A decade ago, the Legislature gave $60 million to subsidize housing. It was called unprecedented. In the current two-year budget cycle, that's grown to more than $600 million. In the last five years, just state money totals about $1.4 billion. Add in federal tax credits, and it's even more.
Dunne: Yeah. So we have those numbers, but let's get to the crux of your story: Why can't we, the media, and the public, learn more about how much the state spends on low-income housing and other details?
Davis: Yeah. We started out doing what investigative reporters do, which is trying to get data and records from the government. In this case, it's Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state agency that oversees the awarding of this money, which is used to make projects more affordable to develop and lower rents so they're affordable to people. We started with this idea: We've seen that project costs are climbing. In the last five years, the cost of building an affordable apartment in Oregon has nearly doubled, and in Portland, they're sitting with a high vacancy rate because the rents are competing with market-rate apartments, and the homeless population is climbing. So let's look at these, let's get into it, let's see what it costs. I sent a public records request to OHCS and asked, 'Can I see the pro formas, the costs, the change orders, all of the documentation around what a handful of the higher-cost projects cost?' I sent the same request to two agencies in Washington. Those agencies said, 'Here you go,' one of them within three days. They sent me a lot of records. In Oregon, they charged us $130 for three documents that were heavily redacted, and you can't see at a detailed level where all of this money is going.
Dunne: Okay. Why did they redact? Why is Oregon different than Washington?
Davis: That's a great question, and one I've spent most of my career trying to answer, going on 15 years as an investigative reporter in Oregon. In this specific case, a bill was passed in 1997 at the request of the state agency that's awarding all this money, Oregon Housing and Community Services. Its deputy director testified at the legislative hearing that they didn't want to, quote, give somebody an indication of whether this corporation, meaning an affordable housing developer, was ripe for a takeover or a buyout. So they exempted all of these cost details from public scrutiny. At the time, that wasn't a lot of money being put behind that barrier. Since that bill passed, the agency's budget has quintupled, and its staff has grown similarly. It's five times larger than it was then.
Dunne: Wow. So I know you compared Oregon with Washington. How unique is Oregon nationally in this? Are we one of the very few states that has this law shielding this information from reporters like you?
Davis: We're not completely unique. New Jersey has a similar law, but it has strict cost controls and is trying to afford developers some confidentiality around that. On the West Coast, and among many states, there is clear transparency around this because it's the public's money that's being spent. In Washington and California, these things are just a request away, if not online to begin with.
Dunne: Okay, so what has the state told you about the reasoning for this? They charged you for a document that was heavily redacted. What are they saying, from their perspective, about the need for it?
Davis: They didn't say a lot in terms of defending the need for the law. The current director wasn't there in 1997. Most legislators, if not all, who voted for this, and it passed almost unanimously, are all long gone. What they told me was, 'We're following the law.' They could choose not to exempt the documents, but they chose to exempt them, and they could have given me the documents for free. In fact, we asked why they were charging us money for these. These are public records. I firmly believe the public shouldn't be charged money that it already paid to create. That's a foundational thing for me as a reporter, and it's a fight I've had in Oregon, again and again, over the last 15 years, with agencies trying to charge me thousands of dollars for public records I'm requesting in the public interest.
Dunne: Yeah. And for the few people who may not be familiar with ProPublica, that's your stock in trade: getting those types of documents from public agencies is critical. Speaking of critical, I wanted to get your perspective on how this lack of disclosure is a hindrance to the public here in Oregon.
Davis: These documents get into the cost details of the hundreds of millions of dollars we're spending to build affordable housing. We're talking about incredibly useful documents for journalists like me and for researchers. A few examples: The Los Angeles Times used these types of reports and documents to show that the cost per unit for subsidized housing there had grown to more than $1 million apiece, and to look at the reasons why. Researchers with Rand Corp. used them to compare costs between states and found that California could build four times as many subsidized apartments if it had Colorado's development costs. Researchers at UC Berkeley used cost-detail documents to show California was spending $300 million a year just on fees for developing subsidized housing, enough to finance 12,150 apartments a year, and the governor there just signed legislation aimed at slashing those fees. Being able to see behind the curtain is absolutely vital and has enabled people elsewhere to do that kind of work. What you don't see in Washington or California, where these documents are public, is any impact on demand from developers or the subsidies the state hands out. We talked to people with the California State Treasurer's Office, where projects are turned away because they don't have enough money. They said transparency around cost details hasn't affected their process at all. In Washington, we talked to their state housing finance agency and asked if they'd seen developers shy away, or projects not get built, because of transparency. They said no.
Dunne: In your article, you quote a former director of the Oregon housing agency, who says something like, 'For all the public money spent on housing, we seem to be digging a deeper hole.' Explain that a bit more, because with this lack of transparency, it seems we're almost forced to keep digging that hole.
Davis: State leaders have tied the lack of affordable housing in Oregon to the homelessness crisis here. We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build rent-restricted apartments. Despite that, the homeless population continues to grow. I think that gets to a core concern of Oregonians about what our strategy is for dealing with that underlying crisis. This is one of the key tools, and as for spending money efficiently, you can't get a feel for whether the state is doing that because you can't see how the money is being spent. How much is going to lawyers, how much to lease agents, how much to developers, how much to construction company profit? We don't know, because the state puts it all behind a black box. Understanding and controlling the cost of construction here could make it possible, with the same amount of money, to build either more rent-restricted apartments or to discount rents more steeply. When you try to explore what's happening at a detailed level, you can see when a project gets approved, and you can see what the cost is per unit, but you can't see why it cost that per unit.
Dunne: That brings up a point: It wasn't just the cost. Some of what's shielded involves more than money, correct?
Davis: Yeah. We got a sort of haphazard response from the state when we asked for cost-detail documentation on three projects. For two of the projects, we got heavily redacted Excel spreadsheets. For one, we just got the funding application, which included questions like, 'What's your plan for translating outreach brochures for tenants into languages other than English?' They redacted the answer. In that case, the developer was Home Forward, the housing authority in Portland, so we sent them a request for the same documents, and they gave them to us unredacted. You can see these sort of mundane details that the state put a black box over, because they said it had to do with a market analysis, which is specifically exempted in the law. One of the questions was, 'What are the financial risks of the project?' The state redacted that. You can't know the financial risks of a subsidized housing project in Oregon that your tax money is going to build. Again, these are really mundane details. Some of the financial risks we learned from the unredacted documents were market volatility, site-specific challenges and unforeseen design modifications. The state is keeping that secret.
Dunne: That's so odd. And you point out in your article that while the state does this, organizations like Home Forward, and probably others here in Portland, Eugene and elsewhere, that aren't part of state government, are fairly transparent, aren't they?
Davis: By comparison, absolutely. Metro, the regional government here in Portland, is overseeing the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars from a housing bond. They're publishing the cost per unit, the cost per square foot, the cost per bedroom. A spokesperson for the state told me they know that information about projects across the state, but it's not disclosable. I've been doing this a long time, and over and over again, I've found that the bias of government in Oregon, particularly at the state level, is to delay and deny, and to charge money if they can. Whether it's reports about lead dust in armories where kids are crawling on the floor, or businesses that are polluting, I can't tell you the number of times I've had to fight to get records out of state government. There have been efforts to improve it, and it has improved a little over time, but this really is par for the course here.
Dunne: Yeah, Rob. I guess my last question for you: What can be done about this? Is this a matter of the Legislature changing the law? How might something like this change?
Davis: The state could just release the documents. They're exempted, but they don't have to exercise that exemption, so they could put all these documents online tomorrow. The Legislature could revisit it. I haven't heard of any efforts there since our story published. They have a long session next year. The state does have a sunshine committee that analyzes and reviews the hundreds of exemptions like this one in the state's public records law, which is riddled with exemptions like Swiss cheese. The co-chair of that public body has indicated an interest in taking up this issue, so we'll be following along to see what comes of it.
Dunne: Fascinating stuff. Great reporting, Rob Davis. He's an investigative reporter with ProPublica, based in Oregon. Rob, it's always great to talk to you and always great to read your stuff. Thanks so much for coming on and talking to us.
Davis: Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Dunne: Before we go, I wanted to invite our own Love Cross, who was just honored with a National Journalism Award. KLCC's Morning Edition host, Love Cross. It's always great to see you. Thanks so much for coming in.
Love Cross: Thanks for having me, Michael.
Dunne: Well, I wanted to invite you in to say congratulations. You won a big national award recently. Tell folks what it was.
Cross: Yeah, that's right. It actually represents the entire news team, because we won a Best Newscast award from the Radio Television Digital News Association. This is a national award for best newscast for small-market radio: the Edward R. Murrow Award. We're so pleased. It was a newscast I delivered in April 2025.
Dunne: Maybe give us an insider's look. I know people submit for awards, but talk about how you had to choose. You broadcast every single day.
Cross: We sure do. We have newscasts every single day here at KLCC. They're usually a blend of local and regional news, and one award for a newscast is basically just a snapshot of something we're covering on a daily basis. So those newscasts you hear might just be two or three minutes, but they really encapsulate a snapshot of the entire work of the KLCC news team and our regional partners.
Dunne: You won this award during an unprecedented time for public media. Obviously, many people know we lost funding from the federal government. There are a lot more challenges, and yet the quality obviously isn't suffering.
Cross: Absolutely. It's a commitment we make to our listeners on the daily, and like I said, our newscast is just one small snapshot of that. The funding challenges that have come along for KLCC and other public media organizations haven't changed our mission in any way.
Dunne: Well, again, congratulations. Thanks so much for coming in and keep doing the great job that you're doing, Love Cross.
Cross: Thanks so much, Michael.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear about how the Trump administration is working to allow unprecedented logging in critical wilderness areas in Oregon and the West. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
