Housing Justice

Prosperity begins with safe, sustainable, and affordable housing. As Oregon grows, Unite Oregon works to ensure that immigrant, refugee, working-class folks, and communities of color are able to stay and thrive in their homes and neighborhoods. We provide access to emergency housing and rent assistance as well as protection from eviction and displacement. We also work to ensure access to affordable and safe housing and home ownership.

Unite Oregon is working to address housing equity issues through:

• Popular Education Curriculum Development: Creating multilingual popular education workshops that build upon renters’ experience and innate knowledge of affordable housing challenges;

• Leadership Development: Infusing our current structured leadership development programs with curricula designed to identify and develop multi-ethnic affordable housing leaders;

• Community-Based Research: Producing community-based research documenting the problem and outlining community-validated solutions;

• Direct Service: Providing emergency financial assistance to IR-BIPOC communities impacted by the pandemic and the end of the eviction moratorium and connecting them to leadership development, organizing, and advocacy opportunities;

• Issue Campaigns & Large-Scale Mobilization: Organizing tenants around affordable housing issue campaigns, developing strategy, identifying targets, and approaches to engage and mobilize those most impacted by policies to advocate for change.

Current Projects

• Policy Advocacy: In 2021, we helped pass Senate Bill 282, the Tenant COVID Recovery Act, protecting tenants beyond the recently ended pause on evictions and ensuring that families living in culturally relevant living conditions are protected from evictions.

• Emergency Assistance: Our outreach team has ensured that Nepalese, Karen, Burmese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Somali, Arabic, and Thai-speaking communities all have access to emergency financial support.

• Preventing Evictions in Washington County: In partnership with the Community Action Team and Hillsboro Oregon Law Center, we are empowering tenants and supporting immigrant, refugee, and BIPOC community members that have eviction cases filed against them now that the moratorium on evictions has ended. In its first month, our partnership was successful at preventing 95% of evictions for non-payment of rent.

• We Protect Us (Renters’ Rights Workshops): Unite Oregon will facilitate a multilingual mini-training series for Portland Tenants to discuss renter’s rights, resources available for renters, and strategies to share this knowledge with our communities.

• Building Leaders: In addition to multilingual renters’ rights workshops, we are hosting two housing leadership development programs to build the capacity of community members to participate in the decision-making of local housing issues and empower community members to help shape more housing options in their neighborhoods.

Let's Pass a Housing Minimum Wage!