The 2025 legislative session closed on a somber note for tenants and housing advocates in Oregon. Even as the number of renters facing eviction steadily increases, funding for statewide eviction prevention services has been cut by $100 million dollars. For three years preceding the decision to cut funding, the number of eviction cases filed per renter household rose statewide from one in thirty renter-households in 2022 to one in twenty renter-households in 2024. This alarming increase in eviction filings is visible to the public and policymakers for the first time because of the Evicted in Oregon research project. Evicted in Oregon is a multi-year mixed-methods research project led by Dr. Lisa K. Bates and housed at TSUSP’s Center for Urban Studies.
The project originated in response to the statewide tenant-led effort to end “no cause” evictions in Oregon.
For years, tenants and housing advocates in Oregon sounded the alarm about the housing instability caused by the state’s lenient eviction standards. At the time, landlords could end a month-to-month tenancy with a mere thirty-days notice. Longterm tenants, whose leases had converted to month-to-month tenancy after the initial fixed-term lease expired, could be unceremoniously evicted to make way for new tenants willing to pay more in rent at a time when Portland was rapidly gentrifying. The ability to evict tenants at the landlord’s discretion, even if the tenant had faithfully paid rent and had not violated their lease in any way, created massive housing instability across the state. In 2019, years of tenant organizing paid-off when state lawmakers passed SB608, ending no-cause evictions after the first year of tenancy and capping annual rent increases.
The campaign that led to this landmark legislation exposed how little publicly available eviction data existed in Oregon. This lack of data would make it nearly impossible to track the effects of the new laws. In response to the community’s request for accurate eviction data, the first phase of the Evicted in Oregon project began. Initially, the goal was to develop a data dashboard that would publish timely statewide eviction data online in a way that was accessible to policymakers and tenant advocates. This impressive data collection and transformation process was just beginning to get underway when COVID-19 began to spread worldwide. By mid-2020, eviction and eviction prevention was top of mind for tenants, tenant organizers, and policymakers at the city, state, and federal level. During this chaotic period the Evicted in Oregon research team contributed timely data and analysis about the eviction landscape in Oregon to help shape a series of tenant protections that prevented a tsunami of evictions from taking place.
Digging deeper to understand how evictions really work in Oregon.
Knowing the number of evictions being filed is just the first step in understanding the eviction landscape in Oregon. Eviction is a multi-step legal process in which the two parties have different degrees of power. Understanding power — the ability to control outcomes, to set terms of negotiation, and even to frame our definitions of eviction—is essential for understanding eviction. Power is part of the dynamic between landlords and tenants, and the rights and responsibilities accorded to each. It is also revealed through a legal and policy landscape that sets the terms of the eviction process and also obscures eviction from the administrative and research record.
To understand the power asymmetries present throughout the eviction process, the Evicted in Oregon research team examines the eviction process and the experience of being evicted in Oregon using phronetic social science; an approach to research defined by Bent Flyvbjerg in his 2001 book, Making Social Science Matter. This approach puts emphasis on micro-practices—the everyday communications, decisions, and activities through which policy is carried out—with particular attention to power dynamics. It asks researchers to consider what is going on and what ought to be going on to achieve just outcomes. The research team examines the eviction process using a variety of research methods, including extensive court observation in courtrooms across the state, meticulous tracking and unpacking of legislative changes and local ordinances changes related to the eviction process over the past five years, and tenant surveys and focus groups.
As a result, the research projects website displays data multiple data topics related to the eviction process including: the number of evictions filed; the reasons listed on the notices of termination for the cases filed at court; the rates of legal representation for tenants and landlords; the number of cases that end in a judgment of eviction by default; the number of cases in which a stipulated agreement was used; and the legal outcomes of eviction cases filed in Oregon published on the Evicted in Oregon website provide a much more detailed and nuanced view of the eviction process in Oregon.
The website publishes data at the statewide level and at the county level for most counties in Oregon. Both recent (the latest twelve months) and historical data is available for each data point. Data is presented using graphs, data tables, and an interactive map. Additionally, the project has produced numerous reports including: research on how tenants in Oregon react to an eviction using the Flight, Fight, Freeze framework, an evaluation of Oregon’s Safe Harbor policy, and a deep dive into the use of Stipulated Agreements in Oregon.
Spotlighting students and PSU graduates associated with Evicted in Oregon
Over the years, the Evicted in Oregon research team has included several graduate research assistants from Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning including Dr. Minji Cho, Devin MacArthur, and Andrew Lindstrom. Additionally, Dr. Natalie J. Cholula brought her expertise to the team as a graduate research assistant while completing her Ph.D in Sociology.
Evicted in Oregon is supported by the Portland Housing Bureau, Oregon Housing and Community Services, the Housing Crisis Research Collaborative, the ‘Housing Solutions Lab’ at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, the Portland Professorship in Innovative Housing, and the Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative (HRAC).