Oregon Health and Human Services Committee Districts/Members: Renter Severe Cost Burden Counts and Percentages.

With the start of the Oregon short legislative session this week, I thought it might be useful to begin to parse out key housing data at the district level for State Representatives and Senators. 

A scheduled Thursday February 8th hearing on HB 4006 provided an opportunity to do some additional research. HB 4006 would require that the Oregon Housing and Community Development provide data to cities and counties to conduct an assessment of severe renter cost burdens, with the city and counties then providing a plan to correct those rental cost burdens. [Severe cost burdens occur when renter household pay more than 50% of their income for rent].

I have consolidated my comments on HB 4006 in a PDF file HERE. This document includes a graph I have prepared showing the count and percentage of severe cost burdened renter households for each of the districts of the nine House Human Services and Housing Committee members. The data is the most currently available, from the 2012-2016 ACS data published in December 2017.

I am pasting below the graph from that PDF. The severe cost burden renter household percentage varies from 24% to 32% in the nine districts of the Committee members and averages 28% in those districts (The statewide ALL renter severe cost burden percentage is about the same at 27%). 

I hope to expand renter cost burden data soon to include the districts of ALL Oregon Representatives and Senators. 

As a reminder of cost burdens by income, i have pasted a second image below from my December Excel blog post HERE of multiple geographic levels of renter cost burden data that shows that severe cost burdens are much higher at lower incomes. 

That data shows that statewide in Oregon 99% of ALL of the 154,000 renter households with severe rent burdens had incomes below $50,000.

Oregon Statewide Severe Rent Burdens by Income.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.