There’s a kind of optimism that we speak of at Street Roots — a wild optimism — that I’d describe as a commitment to hopeful, bold ideas despite abounding bleak conditions. One keeps trying, and one gets more creative in the process.
That’s how I feel about Project Turnkey. Not just in terms of what this legislative plan will accomplish, but also what kind of strategy it is.
In early November, the Oregon State Legislature emergency board voted to move $65 million general funds to purchase financially distressed motels around the state for immediate winter shelter that will be converted into long-term housing. Of those funds, $30 million is targeted for regions impacted by the wildfires.
“We barked up every tree and kept getting told no” until finally, the legislative emergency board said yes, Keny-Guyer told me.
Some of these motels have suffered from decreased tourism, said Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, one of the architects of the plan, noting that other motels were already struggling.
There are several reasons why this is a visionary move. First of all, the plan manages to be both short term and long term in its impact, opening a projected 1,000 rooms to people around the state.
Shelters in which many people share the same space are a precarious strategy during an aggressively spreading pandemic. This is why the Street Roots editorial board called for the use of motels as a pandemic response back in May. Street Roots vendors also worked with other groups to survey people on the streets on which kind of dwelling people preferred in the pandemic. The overwhelming response? Motels.
The Project Turnkey workgroup — which began convening in June and included state legislators, League of Oregon Cities, the Association of Oregon Counties and the Oregon Community Foundation — incorporated that survey into its report. The workgroup concluded that the purchase of financially distressed motels was a humanitarian response grounded in fiscal smarts.
“This is unlike anything we’ve ever done before. It is absolutely a time when strategic risk feels right because the need is so dire,” explained Megan Loeb, a program officer for the Oregon Community Foundation, which is administering the funds. They are accepting proposals from around the state on a rolling basis.
The motels have to be immediately ready to inhabit as winter shelters, hence the use of the word “turnkey.”
But they also have to be turned into long-term housing.
There’s another reason why this is such an important strategy right now. At the heart of so much of our struggle around homelessness is the way in which housing is treated as a commodity rather than a right. As a commodity, ideally it would be used to build some intergenerational wealth among historically marginalized people. But it is too often used to make wealthy people wealthier.
The case study is in our rearview mirror: the 2008 financial collapse. The very desire to own a house was exploited by people who transformed housing finance into a sleight of hands to get really, really rich. Mortgages were bundled and sold, sliced and diced, and financiers puffed all that into great profit — until they couldn’t. And those who suffered the most were made to suffer more. Black Americans were disproportionately targeted by subprime mortgages, and suffered a greater loss of wealth in the aftermath.
And it’s that aftermath that we need to keep a keen eye on right now. People lost nearly 10 million homes to foreclosure as a result of the 2008 financial collapse, and private equity swooped in and profited off that loss. Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, for example, bought up OneWest Bank, which foreclosed on thousands of houses in Southern California while financing private equity to buy up those houses.
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It is a story we must know by heart as we grapple with homelessness: Housing itself was, and is, treated recklessly at the behest of extreme profits for billionaires.
This lesson is not lost on Keny-Guyer. In fact, it’s at the forefront of her efforts around Project Turnkey
“If we wait like in 2008, we will have these private equity companies coming in and sweeping up the distressed properties,” she told me. “Let’s not make that same mistake again.”
Journalist Naomi Klein established in “The Shock Doctrine” that it is in these moments of great crisis that transformation can occur, but too often that transformation furthers inequality and suffering. As properties go under — motels, college residential buildings, shopping malls — they can be scooped up with profit as the No. 1 goal, or they can be transformed with basic needs as the paramount concern.
There’s nothing neutral about standing still when private equity firms are at the ready to purchase struggling motels and other property.
And it’s absurd to let that happen when there’s widespread homelessness with many more people on the brink, knowing we lack enough quality affordable housing for people.
So it is up to all of us to keep the groundswell going. The original amount selected was based on 10% of the California allotment for its Project Homekey. (Oregon has about 10% of the population of California.)
“If all you do is tried-and-true, you are never moving ahead,” Keny-Guyer said. “We have to innovate, and we have to be honest when we fall short so we can make corrections.”
There is no one-time fix — not one housing bond, not one tax measure, not one legislative funding allocation. Our crisis of housing is enormous, and our landscape of structures across our region should be focused on quality living conditions for the poorest among us. People over profit, again and again.
Correction: An earlier version described the $65 millions as CARES pandemic relief funds, but these were Oregon general fund dollars.