The Real Story – A Column
The City’s new Housing Production Strategy, all 600-plus pages, is full of good ideas and equity language. But it leans on 2022 data and delays real action while rents, prices, and displacement keep climbing. The finalized HPS will be presented to the City Council for a public hearing on readoption on December 2, 2025. This comes 1 year after the original plan was submitted to the Department of Land Conservation and Development, only to be rejected and sent back for more work on a couple of areas. The report is sweeping, so long that most will never understand it, and leaves many unanswered questions despite identifying all the right things.
By Dirk Knudsen – Hillsboro Herald
Hillsboro is in a housing crisis. Not “someday.” Not “maybe.” Right now.
You can see it:
Families doubled up in apartments that used to hold one household.
Friends who grew up here couch-surfing at 40.
Elders in manufactured home parks are praying their park doesn’t sell to a developer, displacing them.
Young families staring at $500,000-plus “starter homes” and wondering what planet the mortgage calculators are built for.
The City’s own numbers admit it: Hillsboro needs more than 14,000 new homes in the next 20 years, and thousands of those need to be affordable to people without six-figure tech salaries. About half of Hillsboro households rent, and nearly half of those renters are officially “cost-burdened” – paying more than 30% of their income to keep a roof over their heads. Renters of color are hit hardest.
That’s not a “market adjustment.” That’s a slow-motion disaster.
Into this reality comes City Hall’s new Housing Production Strategy (HPS) – a shiny, state-mandated plan full of charts, timelines, and buzzwords about equity and affordability.
If you’re one of the people actually living this crisis, you’re allowed to ask the basic question:
Will this thing finally help us, or is it just another binder on a shelf?
To answer that, we need to rewind to what we already learned the hard way.
Flashback to 2024: The Bias We Already Exposed
In 2024, the Herald published “Unintended Bias and Inequity Revealed in Hillsboro Housing Policies” – an open letter to the City, Council, and all of you.
That story laid out some uncomfortable truths:
In 2019, Oregon passed SB 2001, legalizing “middle housing” – duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and cottage clusters – on most lots in cities like Hillsboro. These are exactly the kinds of homes many of us, our parents, and our kids could actually hope to live in.
Every city had to adopt new rules by mid-2021. Hillsboro did that on paper.
Then, almost no middle housing actually got built here.
So I pulled comparative numbers from several Oregon cities. Hillsboro and Lake Oswego were at the bottom of the list – basically zero middle-housing units built over three years. Cities like Newberg, Tigard, Salem, and Portland? They were actually producing these homes.
Same state law. Same timeline. Totally different results.
Why? One major reason was hidden in the fee schedule.
Hillsboro never adjusted its System Development Charges (SDCs) or permit fees to match the smaller size and lower impact of middle housing. We kept charging cottage clusters and small plexes, almost like big detached houses. Other cities experimented with variable-rate SDCs and more flexible fees. Hillsboro mostly sat still.
And here’s the kicker: in March 2022, Hillsboro’s own consultant, ECONorthwest, told the City in writing that SDCs needed to be restructured – that variable SDCs based on unit size and impact were critical to making middle housing feasible. Years later, nothing meaningful had changed.
In that 2024 piece, I shared something personal:
My own mother wanted to spend her final years in a simple cottage in my backyard – the kind of “mom’s cottage” SB 2001 was supposed to make possible.
She was effectively priced out by Hillsboro’s SDCs and permit costs – punished for wanting a small, gentle home on an existing lot.
In other cities, that would have been easier. In Hillsboro, it wasn’t.
When a system repeatedly favors big, expensive projects on fresh land while starving modest homes on existing lots, that’s not “neutral.” I called it unintended bias – and the receipts backed it up.
Unintended Bias and Inequity Revealed In Hillsboro Housing Policies
That’s the backdrop for this new Housing Production Strategy.
The New Plan: Right Tools, Wrong Clock
The HPS includes a lot of the right ingredients on paper:
More housing allowed near transit, schools, and jobs, rather than just at the edges.
Promises to loosen middle-housing rules and simplify design standards and code.
Plans to use City-owned land and partner sites for affordable housing.
A commitment to review SDCs and fees and consider scaling them by unit size so smaller homes pay less.
Repeated mentions of equity, anti-displacement, and fair housing, including specific call-outs of 10th Avenue/Avenida Diez and parts of the TV Highway corridor.
If you only skim the headlines, you might think the City finally learned from that 2024 article and the 2022 ECONorthwest warning.
But the problem is in the timing and the vocabulary.
Most of the heavyweight actions are framed like this:
“We will study permit fees.”
“We will evaluate SDC options.”
“We will consider incentives and tax exemptions.”
And the timelines? Many big-ticket changes – major rezones, SDC reforms, new incentive programs – are scheduled to be adopted around 2028, with visible “impacts” beginning in 2029–2030.
Let’s be honest:
If you’re barely hanging on in a Hillsboro apartment in 2025, this plan is basically telling you: “Hang on another five to seven years and maybe the market will treat you better.”
Remember: ECONorthwest told the City to fix its SDCs back in March 2022. The Herald exposed the middle-housing flop in 2024. Now in 2025, the official answer in the HPS is still: “We’re going to study it.”
That’s not accountability. That’s a stall.
Built on Yesterday’s Data, While Today Is on Fire
There’s another big problem: the age of the data underneath the plan.
Most of the numbers in the HPS are anchored in:
2020 Census and 2021 ACS,
Rolled forward to a 2022 “base year” for population, households, vacancy, and cost burden.
For long-run, 20-year land-use math, that’s technically fine. But for the day-to-day reality of trying to rent or buy in 2023–2025? It’s stale.
Since 2022, we’ve watched:
Mortgage rates rocket from the 3s to the 7s and settle in the 6s.
Rents spike and then plateau at levels that are still crushing for working families.
New building slow down, especially for the kinds of modest homes regular people need.
Homelessness and displacement pressure become visibly worse.
The HPS patches this with a couple of 2024 snapshots – a home-price and mortgage-rate example to show that only about a third of Hillsboro households could afford a typical mortgage. But the deeper cost-burden and homelessness numbers are still rooted in 2022.
So yes: the plan is “data-driven.” But the data is mostly about where we were just as the fire was starting, not how hot it’s burning now.
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TV Highway, Manufactured Home Parks, and the Gentrification Trap
The HPS shines a big spotlight on the TV Highway corridor – the same stretch where we’ve watched ICE vans, police stops, and poverty collide.
The City wants to:
Invest in new infrastructure along TV Highway,
Plan transit-oriented development, and
Encourage mid-rise housing and mixed-use projects on large sites.
On paper, that makes sense.
But the plan itself also notes that this corridor is full of:
Older, cheaper apartments,
Manufactured home parks, and
Lower-income renters already on the edge.
In other words, it’s where some of our last “naturally affordable” homes live.
If you pour money and zoning capacity into that corridor without strong protections – no-net-loss of affordable units, manufactured home park preservation, right-of-return guarantees – you don’t just “create housing.” You clear out the people who live there now to make room for people with more money.
We’ve seen that movie in other cities. The HPS, as currently written, doesn’t convincingly prevent a Hillsboro sequel.
This Isn’t Just Policy. It’s People.
All of these charts and maps and “units” are really about neighbors:
A single mom in a two-bedroom apartment, paying more than half her paycheck to keep the lights on.
An elder in a manufactured home park who will never re-enter the market if that park is sold.
A young couple working hard, raising kids, and hearing the system whisper: “Not here. Not for you.”
My own mother, who wanted a simple cottage in her son’s backyard, hit a wall of fees and rules.
In 2024, when the Herald showed that Hillsboro was dead last in middle-housing production compared to its peers, we were giving the City a warning and an invitation: You can choose to change.
The Housing Production Strategy is the City’s official reply.
Right now, that reply sounds like:
“We recognize the problem.”
“We will study the tools.”
“We’ll get back to you in five to seven years.”
That’s not the level of urgency this moment demands.
What Hillsboro Needs to Do – For Real This Time
If City Hall wants this plan to be more than a PR exercise, here’s what needs to happen next:
Move the timelines up.
Treat key zoning, SDC, and fee changes like emergency measures, not long-range homework. 2028–2030 is too late for people suffering in 2025.Stop hiding behind “study.”
The City has had expert recommendations on SDC reform since 2022. Other cities have already restructured fees. Commit now:“If the numbers pencil out, we will lower fees and SDCs for smaller, affordable, and middle-income homes.”
Not “consider,” not “evaluate” – do.Put hard numbers on every big action.
For each strategy, tell us:How many homes are expected to be created or unlocked?
How many will be affordable at 60% and 80% of the median income?
Where in town will they likely land?
Then report on that every year in plain language.
Protect TV Highway and parks before the bulldozers arrive.
Pass no-net-loss rules for affordable units, create a manufactured home park preservation program, and guarantee meaningful right-of-return options for displaced residents.Supercharge the very housing we’ve been starving.
Make middle housing and ADUs the easiest, cheapest additions on existing lots, especially when owners agree to keep them affordable. That means scaled SDCs, streamlined permits, pre-approved plans, and targeted grants/loans.Use public land like it’s ours – because it is.
Every City-owned site used for housing should lock in long-term affordability and prioritize communities that have been pushed to the margins, not just hand prime land to the highest bidder.
We Don’t Need Another Binder
Here’s the timeline in one breath:
2019–2021: The State opens the door for middle housing. Hillsboro checks the box on paper but barely builds any.
March 2022: The City’s own consultant tells them SDCs need reform for that housing to pencil.
2024: The Herald documents how Hillsboro’s housing policies and fees quietly shut out middle housing and hurt real people – including my own family.
2025: The City files a Housing Production Strategy mainly built on 2022 data that says all the right words… and then pushes most of the big moves to the end of the decade.
We’ve seen this movie.
Hillsboro doesn’t need another glossy plan and a pat on the head. We need roofs, doors, and keys that real people can afford – and a city government willing to move as fast and as boldly for its residents as it does for data centers and megaprojects.
Until that happens, it’s on all of us to keep watching, keep asking hard questions, and keep saying to City Hall:
We remember what you were told in 2022.
We remember the receipts from 2024.
We will be here in 2025 and beyond to see if you finally act.
I do wish to recognize how big an undertaking this was by the City of Hillsboro Staff and the various consultants that they hired. I, along with others, served on the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) to provide advice and input. Some of that made it into this packet. Maybe the 600-plus pages are a symptom of the problem we are in. Too much paper, not enough sticks and bricks for building homes. If we can’t agree on a few pages to drive us ahead, we may never get there.
There should be a moratorium on building anything above the current median price. Certain developers will vanish; others will come and do the necessary work.
How much money was wasted on meetings and adding government employees to put these meetings together? Local and state government has become meeting farms. All planning, no execution. Those who can do. Those who can’t hold meetings to look busy.