What can state and local governments do to reduce segregation and foster integration?
The gap between law and implementation is a long-standing challenge. A decade ago, in a report for the Center for American Progress, Sam Fulwood III observed that despite civil rights laws such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, efforts to reduce housing segregation have, by and large, been “palliative, piecemeal, and not thoroughly effective.”
In 2019, Oregon tried to change this when the state legislature passed its own housing planning framework law. The bill, House Bill 2003, required cities with more than 10,000 residents to approve a Housing Production Strategy (HPS) listing specific actions, policies, and measures. The law not only required that these HPS documents be posted for public comment but also required that cities be held accountable to Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) standards.
The Oregon state legislature took another step in 2023, adopting a state-level affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) policy to address housing needs and access to opportunity for protected classes. As stated in statute, “A housing production strategy must include a list of specific actions, including the adoption of measures and policies, that the city shall undertake to promote” AFFH, defined as taking meaningful action to address disparities in housing needs and access, patterns of integration and segregation, housing choice, affordable homeownership and rental housing, and gentrification and displacement. Access to opportunity can be seen in so-called “high opportunity” areas where citizens have access to high-quality schools, grocery stores, public transportation, and employment options.
In 2024 and early 2025, this law began to make a difference in Oregon communities. The planning effort appeared to set forth strategies that would work, and, as illustrated below, some initial plans took steps to affirmatively further fair housing.
Shortly afterward, however, the backtracking began. Here is the story of what happened, why, and what might be done about it.
Implementing Oregon Fair Housing Law: A Strategy That Works
As noted, there are laws and there is implementation. The law provides a basis for intervention, but it’s up to community groups to make the law real. Fortunately, two groups—the Fair Housing Council of Oregon (FHCO) and Housing Land Advocates (HLA)—did so through a small, largely volunteer Post-Acknowledgement Plan Amendment (PAPA) project. The PAPA project initially focused on land use code amendments and zoning changes related to housing; it was later augmented to address Housing Production Strategies.
This work involved reviewing all jurisdictional plan documents submitted to DLCD for approval, filing comment letters that highlight when required anti-segregation measures were not included or enforced, and encouraging DLCD to reject those flawed plans.
An August 2023 letter submitted to Gresham, a city about 15 miles east of downtown Portland, offers a sample of this work. Gresham is one of the more diverse areas of the Portland metro area, where people have been pushed out of central neighborhoods to find more affordable housing. The letter picks up on this historic trend, with FHCO and HLA asking the city to adopt more suitable strategies to help rent-burdened households.
FHCO and HLA proposed, in both presentations and a 2025 report, that to comply with AFFH, a geographic element, such as a census tract mapping of race in relation to zoning, must be included in all plans.
The idea, in short, is simple. Map where segregation exists. Only then can cities design effective strategies to begin to remedy discrimination.
Mapping efforts began to bear fruit. In November 2023, Beaverton, a city located less than 10 miles west of Portland, produced a census tract overlay showcasing that “the areas most vulnerable to future gentrification and displacement correspond with areas of lower median household income and BIPOC households.”
In August 2024, Portland provided a housing location analysis that revealed that “many of Portland’s racially concentrated areas of affluence are located in complete neighborhoods and high-opportunity zones but have effectively excluded low-income households, many of which are members from … protected classes, from accessing these areas, thereby perpetuating historical patterns of racial and income segregation.”
Also, while it is a small city—with a population of roughly 16,000 residents—The Dalles produced a basic census tract map that showed “a greater concentration of residents of color, renter households, and households earning less than $50,000 per year in the western portion of the City of The Dalles.”
The PAPA project’s impact was twofold. First, the analyses prompted these cities to propose location-specific strategies to combat observed segregation. Beaverton developed a strategy to “distribute new density more equitably.”
Portland updated its inclusionary housing program and vowed to rezone sites for affordable housing in high-opportunity areas.
The Dalles, for its part, took action to legalize triplexes, fourplexes, and cottage-cluster housing in its low-density residential zone and committed to exploring a construction excise tax as an affordable housing revenue source.
The second impact, though, is that when pressed by advocates, these maps led DLCD to require that cities take additional steps to reduce segregation. For example, DLCD staff pressed Beaverton to commit to enacting its equitable density strategy within three years, rather than a nebulous timeline beyond the scope of the plan.
Portland was also required to clarify implementation timelines and address gaps in specificity, and to demonstrate how actions directly responded to the city’s identified housing needs, “particularly addressing the needs of communities of color, low-income populations, and people with disabilities, and other historically marginalized communities.”
Likewise, while The Dalles proposed a construction excise tax to address the disproportionate burden of housing construction on communities of color, the city proposed not studying how to implement such a solution for eight years. DLCD required the study to be completed in three years.
Further, DLCD staff flagged instances in which maps were referenced but not included in the resulting HPS. In 2024, Hillsboro’s HPS referenced a map completed by ECONorthwest, an Oregon-based planning consulting firm, in 2022 that was omitted from its HPS document. DLCD remanded the HPS and required the city to incorporate geospatial analysis into its final report. As a result, the city committed to adding rental housing capacity and mitigating gentrification risks within a census tract that was identified as having a high risk of displacing residents of color.
The bottom line is clear: When cities map racial demographic data, they discover segregation. When they do so, they can use that knowledge to create specific strategies, such as expanding middle housing, inclusionary zoning, and targeted rezoning to minimize gentrification and increase access to opportunity. Additionally, when segregation data was highly visible, it encouraged DLCD to require cities to expand their strategies—or to speed up their timelines for action.
If You Don’t Look, You Don’t See
The pattern of using geospatial analysis has ground to a halt after Hillsboro.
In the past year, many other Oregon cities—Canby, Happy Valley, McMinnville, Molalla, North Bend, Salem, Sandy, West Linn, and Wilsonville—have developed housing production strategies. None have used geospatial analysis.
Some of these cities, such as Happy Valley and West Linn, have incredibly exclusive populations with high housing costs that exclude protected classes. In fact, FHCO and HLA directly challenged Happy Valley’s exclusionary housing practices in court.
Notably, unlike the code amendments at issue in Happy Valley, the legislation establishing the HPS requirement exempts the document from land use appeals. Therefore, the only readily available advocacy for the PAPA project is through the comment process with DLCD.
In letters to many Oregon cities—and to DLCD staff—the PAPA project team has highlighted the glaring failure to use geospatial analysis, only to be met with radio silence. Reed Johnson, a PAPA project volunteer, says he is“concerned that, much like on the national level, AFFH is getting sidelined in the housing production conversation here in Oregon.”
Let’s look at the past to understand why this may be the case.
In 1966, Black tenants of Chicago public housing projects filed two class action complaints against the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The case, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, was resolved by the Supreme Court in 1976. The plaintiffs proved that the Housing Authority built public housing exclusively in areas with high concentrations of low-income people of color, and the victory required the Housing Authority to provide public housing in both suburban and urban locations. This victory enshrined the geospatial nature of segregation into federal AFFH law.
FHCO and HLA see similar practices in Oregon today. For example, the city of Molalla recently increased capacity by upzoning far-flung, potentially environmentally contaminated industrial land to higher-density residential land. This strategy was pursued instead of upzoning land closer to downtown, in areas adjacent to good schools or recreational facilities.
Without a geospatial analysis, this strategy can be (mis)projected as beneficial. However, only with a locational analysis does it become obvious that housing for the most vulnerable is being placed far from community resources and job opportunities.
In short, by not using geospatial analysis to inform its anti-segregation strategy, Molalla officials may appear to be acting without truly challenging existing economic development strategies that maintain de facto segregated communities.
Nationally, AFFH is under attack. But Oregon said it was different because it passed AFFH at the state level.
Make Mapping Mandatory
Oregon’s fair housing laws were an important step, and they mean that Oregonians are, at least potentially, shielded from federal fair housing backtracking. But Oregon’s laws are only as meaningful as the maps its cities are required to draw.
Where those maps exist, discrimination becomes visible—and visible discrimination demands a response. Where they don’t, inequality can continue undisturbed beneath a veneer of compliance. Under state fair housing law, DLCD has the authority and mandate to require that geospatial analysis be used in every city’s strategy. When DLCD steps up, the timeframe for implementing the strategy should be short—in the one- to two-year timeframe.
Some cities have already done the mapping work to show what is possible. Now is the time for the state to require the rest to follow.
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