The state was unprepared for the unprecedented loss of housing.
OREGON — Nearly four years after Congress approved a mammoth disaster relief grant to help Oregonians recover from the destructive 2020 wildfires, records show that more than 90% of the money remains unspent, even as hundreds of families await relief.
“It has been incredibly frustrating for the communities that were affected,” says state Rep. Pam Marsh (D-Ashland). Fire consumed more than 2,600 homes in Jackson County, most of them in Marsh’s district. Hundreds of families in Jackson and other fire-afflicted counties remain homeless or marginally housed from the 2020 blazes.
Marsh, chair of the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness, says she has been in frequent contact with Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state agency administering the federal disaster money.
“I don’t underestimate the complexity of the rules around how the money can be distributed,” Marsh says, “but it’s been years.”
In response to a mid-May public records request and subsequent questions from the Oregon Journalism Project, Delia Hernández, a spokeswoman for OHCS, acknowledged the rollout of the federal aid, which it calls “ReOregon,” hasn’t gone as the department hoped.
“The agency’s risk tolerance slowed down the process,” Hernández says. “Another challenge was that OHCS had not engaged in disaster recovery work of this scale. The agency was trying to figure out: Where did the state lead and where did it take a back seat?”
As Oregon prepares for the 2025 wildfire season — one that experts expect will be worse than normal — OHCS will be tested again. The agency has tripled in size over the past decade as the state battles a housing crisis, but it had no experience in disaster relief because Oregon had never experienced the residential destruction it saw in 2020.
That year, five “megafires” (which the state defines as 100,000 acres or more) ignited during the Labor Day weekend, consuming more than 850,000 acres and more than 4,000 homes.
Politicians acted quickly. In 2021, Oregon lawmakers allocated $150 million for fire recovery. That same year, Congress authorized an even bigger amount of federal funding: a $422 million grant through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
That grant, unprecedented for Oregon, drew widespread media coverage. “We are going to work really hard to meet all the federal requirements and try to use these funds as fast as we possibly can,” OHCS’s Hernández told KGW on Nov. 3, 2021. But she cautioned, “It’s still the beginning of a long and complex process.”
Caryn Wheeler Clay, the outgoing long-term recovery director for Jackson County, says displaced residents have faced endless bureaucratic hurdles. “It has taken an insane amount of learning to get this money moving,” she says.
The HUD money, Wheeler Clay explains, is designed to be gap funding, the last dollars after homeowners have exhausted state funding, insurance proceeds, and other funding sources. In practice, she says, repeated requests for the same information has ground down many survivors. “The number of times people have had to retell their stories is bananas,” she adds.
In Jackson County, 89% of residents who lost their homes were on some form of public assistance, and many lived in old manufactured homes that lacked insurance or equity value.
People’s experience in other parts of the state is similar. “It’s been absolutely ridiculous,” says state Rep. Ed Diehl (R-Scio), whose district includes the heavily damaged Santiam Canyon (“After the Inferno,” OJP, Feb. 5).
Kaety Jacobson, who left her position as Lincoln County’s point person for fire recovery in February, says trying to work with OHCS left her “incredibly frustrated.”
“They just could not execute,” says Jacobson, a Lincoln County commissioner from 2019 to 2025. “There were lots of false starts.”
On May 28, Marsh summoned top OHCS officials to brief her Housing and Homelessness Committee.
OHCS chief financial officer Caleb Yant told lawmakers his agency feels confident the Trump administration will not withdraw the unspent dollars before the grant expires in 2029. The agency has also made substantial funding commitments to survivors in recent months and reached an agreement with HUD in May allowing greater flexibility in distributing the biggest pot of money. But Yant apologized for how slowly dollars have gotten to fire survivors.
“We had never done this before,” he said. “The programs didn’t work as intended.”
A spokeswoman for Gov. Tina Kotek says Kotek is “frustrated” with the pace of recovery and the distribution of federal dollars. “The governor acknowledges that ReOregon was initially difficult to navigate for many people who need the support and did not meet community expectations,” Roxy Mayer says. “[She] will not be satisfied until all 2020 wildfire survivors have access to safe and stable housing.”
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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project (oregonjournalismproject.org), a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon.
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