Kate Sykes in her neighborhood in Portland in October 2021. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer, file Kate Sykes has been talking about social housing as a solution to the affordable housing crisis since before she was elected to the Portland City Council last fall. Under the concept, the city would build middle-income housing, which it would then own, operate and manage using housing bonds – a type of loan Sykes believes is a much better alternative to the housing trust fund and the tax credits that the city currently uses to pay for affordable housing projects run by developers and the city housing authority.
Since she became the District 5 representative, Sykes even has gone so far as to vote against funding a housing development proposed by the Portland Housing Authority, doing so on principle because the organization wasn’t using bonds to fund its project. At the council’s Housing and Economic Development Committee meeting last week, Sykes made her formal pitch to try this model. “We are in this crisis moment where we are behind so many units.
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We’re not going to catch up or meet our needs if we don’t do something in addition to what we’re already doing,” she said. Sykes explained that to start a social housing program, the city would put out bonds to build large housing developments on city land and then manage those properties, renting out units at prices below market rate. “We use the land that we own, we act as at the developer, we use our bonds to.