Tackling Oregon's housing crisis with home sharing

KGW’s Straight Talk with Laural Porter

Oregon's housing crisis has been front and center during this year's legislative session as the state and its new governor, Tina Kotek, struggle to tackle a problem that has been years in the making.

The scale of the shortage makes it difficult for even aggressive solutions to produce quick improvements; it will take a long time to build the hundreds of thousands of housing units Oregon will need to not only make up for the exiting shortfall but stay ahead of future population growth.

But there is one approach that can produce additional housing much faster, and without having to build anything at all: home sharing, in which existing homeowners rent out their unused rooms to tenants.

Tess Fields, executive director of Home Share Oregon, Margaret Van Vliet, former director of Oregon Housing and Community services, were guests on this week's episode of Straight Talk to discuss the state of Oregon's housing crisis and the immediate impact that home sharing can have.

They were joined James Dirksen, an Oregon homeowner who has rented out a portion of his house for more than 20 years, hosting a variety of tenants, to talk about his experience as a home sharing participant.