Why Subsidized Housing Costs So Much
25th February 2026
Oregon Housing and Community Services, the agency that hands out state and federal subsidized housing grants, is biased toward developers who support the agency’s ideology regarding social services, a former affordable housing developer emailed to me. Responding to my recent posts about Portland’s affordable housing projects, this developer notes that “the most expensive project I ever built [was] 50 units of two story garden apartments” that averaged 1,000-square-feet in size and cost just “$88 per square foot.”
That was in 2008. As I reported in my previous post, costs in the Portland area are now averaging nearly $700 per square foot. “How is it that very profitable development went from under $100/SF in rural towns to over $600/SF in big cities in less than two decades?” this developer asks rhetorically.