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The Portland Housing Bureau and Mayor Keith Wilson last week launched a new “home sharing” program that offers Portland homeowners a $1,000 check if they rent out a spare room.
To receive the city check, homeowners must rent the spare room through one of two home-sharing platforms, PadSplit or the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, and they must agree to rent the room or make it available for rent for 12 months for no more than $800 a month. The check won’t be cut until the room is rented for more than 30 days under the program.
It’s unclear who exactly the Housing Bureau is trying to help find apartments through the program, though Wilson in a recent newsletter says the program could help provide affordable housing for “hourly workers, travel nurses, seniors, students, and so many others.” (Meanwhile, 11% of Home Forward’s roughly 7,000 affordable apartment units stand empty.)
The program is unlikely to help people who are experiencing homelessness, as paying up to $800 a month in rent is not affordable to many of those currently living on the streets. Housing bureau spokesman Gabriel Mathews says that’s not the program’s target demographic, and referred to Wilson’s statement about target tenants.
(Mathews also insisted that it was important to note that a homeowner could get the $1,000 check if they rented out the room for 30 days and then “agree[d] to make the room available via a qualified provider”, even if that unit wasn’t actually rented.
Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement that the program is part of his many-pronged strategy to increase the housing stock in Portland and solve for homelessness.
“Our Home Sharing program could be one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways we’ve ever provided housing to Portlanders,” Wilson said in a Feb. 26 statement. “Put simply, this pilot removes barriers and unlocks housing.”
This isn’t the first time local elected officials have tried to unlock more housing units by incentivizing landlords.
Multnomah County launched a pilot program in 2022 called “Housing Multnomah Now” that offered wraparound support to landlords who agreed to rent apartments to people directly from the street or shelters. The program ended in the summer of 2024, and the county reports that the program housed a total of 311 households.
But Wilson’s program, in many ways, makes a more difficult request: It asks homeowners to rent rooms on the cheap in the home they currently occupy. That’s a taller order than asking a landlord to rent an individual unit out to someone who recently lived unsheltered.
Mayoral spokesman Cody Bowman says the city doesn’t yet have participation numbers to share from PadSplit and the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, but expects to “have a clearer picture in the coming months as the program progresses.”
