Portland mayor delivers State of the City address amid housing crisis, budget shortfall

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Portland Mayor Keith Wilson delivered his first State of the City address Friday afternoon.    

The speech, held at Franklin High School in Southeast Portland, comes as the city faces a $93 million budget shortfall and a persistent homeless crisis. He’s not sugarcoating the situation.

Mayor Wilson said he is releasing his budget proposal on Monday, and he says it includes significant layoffs along with increases in fees for some city services.

Regarding the housing crisis, the mayor and Gov. Tina Kotek are pushing to suspend system development fees to build 5,000 new housing units over the next three years.

In an interview with KOIN 6 News’ Eye on Northwest Politics that will air on Sunday, Wilson said the plan will help solve two of the city’s other major problems in addition to housing.

“We have population decline, and we have the worst job creation in the nation,” he said. “What this will do is to bring good paying jobs back into Portland and start that transformation, or that revitalization that we need, so not only does it address our housing crisis, but it addresses our job creation crisis as well.”

Mayor Wilson said the following about the housing crisis in his speech:

Last month, Multnomah County released their “by name” homeless database. It confirms what we’ve seen on the streets. Our unsheltered homeless population now stands at nearly 7,000 today, far higher than it was just a few short years ago.

Emergency sheltering hasn’t kept pace, and the shelters we have are effectively full. Legally, logistically, morally… we are the responders. We are responsible for what happens on our streets. If we fail to act, my greatest fear is that we’ll see yet another year of record-setting deaths on our streets. That rate was 456 in 2023, the most recent year where we have data. The County Medical Examiner has not yet released numbers for 2024, and 2025 remains unwritten.

These are our neighbors, our classmates, and for so many of us, our loved ones. The trend of increasing deaths year over year is clear. If we do nothing, we will let people suffer by the thousands. AS YOUR MAYOR, I CANNOT AND WILL NOT ACCEPT THIS CRISIS AS OUR NEW NORMAL. That’s why I ran for Mayor, and why Portland voted for me. We have a moral and political mandate, and we must act.

Watch the entire address in the video player above.