Western Governors' Association Opening Remarks

Hello, I am Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. Welcome to beautiful Bend. I’m grateful to be here with you today and grateful for your participation in this workshop. 

I’m grateful for the Western Governor’s Association for bringing us together today. I want to especially thank the WGA staff team who pulled this workshop together. This organization provides us with a unique, bipartisan space to develop ideas, share information, and take action on the issues that matter most to our region. The partnerships we build and the work we do together makes a real difference in our people’s lives.

For our state and local elected leaders who have taken time out of your demanding schedules, thank you so much for joining us. To the City of Bend, thank you for hosting us.

To the 2025 WGA Chair, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, thank you for bringing us all together to focus on this critical issue: housing availability and affordability. We’re here today because we know that our states’ economic prosperity and thriving communities are all at stake when we talk about housing. 

When Oregonians can’t afford to live where they work or simply cannot find housing options that align with their needs, employers lose potential hires.

Health care providers struggle to hire needed professionals. Basic services like fire departments, police, and schools face chronic workforce shortages. It’s more of the same within the agricultural sector, ports, and new industries. 

When I was sworn into office in 2023, Oregon had at least 18,000 Oregonians experiencing homelessness and a shortage of 140,000 housing units. Our housing crisis didn’t happen overnight and it will not be solved overnight. Decades of underbuilding left Oregon with a severe housing shortage that drives up rents, home prices, and worsens our homelessness crisis.

On my first full day of office, I also established an annual housing production goal of 36,000 additional housing units at all levels of affordability across the state. That was an ambitious target by design. It still is. 

But to get big things done, we must first believe they are possible – and I do. And I believe you do too. 

I signed a bill designed to speed up housing production, build and preserve more housing units, and increase homeownership statewide. I signed another to provide a menu of tools and one-time dollars to jumpstart the housing production we need to see across the state. 

Come summer, Oregon will have financed 2,800 affordable housing units and provided infrastructure for over 25,000 affordable and market rate housing units, and Oregon has new tools for local jurisdictions to get more housing into production faster.

These outcomes are a critical threshold of progress and a proof point that we can deliver results. 

But we’re all here today because we agree that the work is not done – not by a long shot. For every step we take forward, there are three more that emerge and I am eager to charge ahead. We must push forward, keep listening to renters, home owners, home builders, developers, business owners, financial leaders, and keep unraveling the barriers to housing development and production. 

Thank you again, City of Bend and WGA. Let’s get to work.