By: Chuck Slothower//September 17, 2019//
Chuck Slothower//September 17, 2019//

Portland and Multnomah County officials announced Tuesday they will build or rehabilitate nine affordable housing developments that will provide approximately 930 subsidized apartments across the city.
The cohort of housing projects represents the dividend from the $258.4 million housing bond approved by voters in November 2016. A year later, a statewide measure added flexibility, allowing public housing authorities to use taxpayer dollars in concert with private dollars.
The infusion of funding will be a boon to nonprofit developers and contractors. Total spending on the projects is expected to exceed $300 million.
“Everybody deserves a decent, safe and affordable place to call home,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said at City Hall on Tuesday while announcing the housing projects.
Plans came in response to a Housing Bureau solicitation in April. Proposals were due in June. Among the criteria, all proposed subsidized units had to be priced at 60 percent of area median income or less. In addition, one-third of the total units had to be deeply affordable – priced at 30 percent of area median income or less.
The Housing Bureau set maximum available subsidies at $150,000 per unit for new construction or $100,000 per unit for acquisition and rehab. Proposals had to provide a minimum of 50 units.
Wheeler said the new projects, combined with others that were already in motion, will fulfill the goals set out by the housing bond framework plan.
“We now have all of the units to hit our bond goals or surpass them,” he said.
Multnomah County will contribute $4 million to provide permanently supportive housing services meant to keep formerly homeless individuals off of the streets.
County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury said the surge of affordable housing projects confirms that homelessness is the top public policy priority.
“Homelessness is now at the forefront of our moral compass, and it should be,” she said.
The $5 million reaped from the county’s sale of the Wapato Jail property was plowed into The Westwind – one of the new projects, Kafoury said.
The link between affordable housing and homelessness is clear, Kafoury said.
“You can’t solve homelessness without housing,” she said.
The projects announced Tuesday are a mix of rehabilitation and ground-up construction. The projects using existing buildings are:
The ground-up construction projects planned are:
The Housing Bureau anticipates it will have $45 million remaining from the housing bond.