District 4 City Councilor Mitch Green believes he knows a lot about housing. To be sure, he believes a lot about housing, but how much does he know about public housing in Portland and its notorious failures?
The NW Examiner is challenging Green to live in a Home Forward building for a month or two and then tell us why public housing should be the norm in our city. The agency has about 2,000 vacant units, so I’m sure one could be made available without forcing anyone to the streets.
Green, fresh off an easy victory for reelection, has not responded to our offer.
Since his first campaign for council, Green has touted social housing, government-owned housing available to all regardless of income. He led a delegation of city officials to Vienna, the international model for such a system.
Back in Portland, he spoke at a 2025 protest at The Yards, a housing authority apartment building in the Pearl where a longterm tenant was threatened with eviction over a billing snafu. I asked Green how public housing could be the answer when only outside intervention could halt Home Forward’s harsh and arbitrary ways.
Green said a tenant union would give tenants the power they needed to ensure fair treatment. Brian Harvey has lived in The Yards 13 years, helped create a tenants union there and was recently appointed to the Home Forward board. But he said those avenues of accountability are not enough. Good management sometimes involves less—not greater—lenience toward tenants who threaten the safety of other residents and vandalize the property.
We challenge Green to educate himself to reality by living in Pearl Court or another Home Forward building. Only by being part of daily life in a building and coping with the frustration of management inaction can he understand how public housing works, and how it doesn’t.
Green, who lives in a suburban neighborhood, knows social justice as a theory. But does he know what it’s like to live among the people he speaks for?
I understand despising Mitch Green for legit political reasons (he is distinctly unqualified, he is ideological vs experienced, and I disagree with his posturing in general). However, suggesting that a city official go live in public housing if they like it so much is the same as telling a state official to go live in the Oregon state hospital if they love mental health so much. We have a population of people in this city who need supportive housing; home forward is mismanaged from the top down, but that doesn’t mean that taking away cheap housing for people who would otherwise be on the street is a good idea.
I do understand the argument that the money granted to this public corporation (home forward) must be carefully overseen by the county. This ball is now firmly in Shannon Singleton’s court. We will see what happens.
I read that Green and his Nike employed wife make over 330k per year combined. None of what Mitch touts is related to his experience in any way, they are what Rob Henderson has coined as luxury belief systems, ideas and opinions held by the affluent and educated that confer high social status upon the believer at very little cost, while often inflicting real-world harm or instability on lower-class individuals. Green would never consider living in social housing, he is content on promoting it only.