Drazan on Oregon Housing: Rules First, Financing Second, Zoning Last [8/4/26]
August 4, 2026
Aaron Kirk Douglas

Drazan on Oregon Housing: Rules First, Financing Second, Zoning Last [8/4/26]

Christine Drazan sat down with HFO co-founder Greg Frick on July 22 to talk about what is holding back housing production in Oregon. The Republican nominee for governor, a state senator from Canby, gave a more specific answer than candidates usually give, and the order she put things in is the part worth studying.

Sen. Drazan on Housing

Click here to watch the full interview.

Three words: regulation, taxation, reputation

Drazan opened with a framework she returned to throughout the conversation.

“Regulation, taxation, reputation. Those are the three things that I think about from the jump,” she said.

She described Oregon’s regulatory load as a problem across every sector, then said housing carries a heavier version of it. Her words: “it’s just absolutely on steroids.” She tied that to both sides of the business, the landlord-tenant environment and the work of getting a project entitled, permitted, and capitalized.

On reputation, she was blunt about the state’s position with outside capital. “Oregon has been beating people with the stick for a really long time because we think that they’re just going to keep coming, and they’ve been voting with their feet,” she said. She called Oregon “still a pretty face,” then said that is no longer enough to attract investment on its own.

Why she would start with the agencies

Drazan acknowledged she would likely be working with a democratic legislature. Rather than treat that as a limit, she used it to explain her priorities.

“So much of that, those are choices that our agencies have made to add administrative burden, and we can reverse that,” she said.

Reversing a rule requires the same process as writing it, including public notice and comment. She did not promise speed. “It won’t happen overnight, but there will be clarity for what we are going to soften, what we are going to loosen, and how we are going to come more in line with the federal approach.”

Two other executive levers came up. She said she would replace agency heads she views as ineffective, and she would appoint boards and commissions based on subject-matter expertise rather than philosophy. “We need less politics in these boards and commissions,” she said. She named the Department of Environmental Quality and the Oregon Water Resources Department.

She also raised a structural point that rarely makes it into housing debates. Many Oregon regulatory agencies are funded by fees from the entities they regulate rather than by the general fund. “As an agency grows, the costs on businesses grow at the same time,” she said.

Click below to download the PDF file:

Christine Drazan Positions and policies

The wetlands question

The most concrete housing claim in the interview involved wetlands.

Drazan said Oregon’s wetland standard is broader and more restrictive than the federal standard now applied in most of the country. She pointed to a subgroup advising Gov. Tina Kotek’s Housing Production Advisory Council that recommended allowing housing on land designated as wetlands that does not actually function as a productive wetland.

By her account, adopting that recommendation would open capacity for more than 60,000 homes within existing urban growth boundaries, without expanding a single boundary. She said the state did not act on it and that a full change would require the legislature, though pieces of it live in administrative rule.

HFO has not independently verified the 60,000-home estimate, and readers should treat it as the candidate’s figure rather than a state finding.

She was careful not to frame it as a fight over conservation. “We all need wetlands. We all want to protect them. That’s conservation is critical, and that’s an important part of our ecosystem,” she said. “But also we need homes, and we need production, and we need multifamily units.”

Zoning goes last

Frick asked what the first fix would be. Drazan ranked three.

Regulation came first because it is closest to executive control. Financing and funding came second, and she connected it directly to feasibility, naming site readiness, infrastructure, and incentives as the things that determine whether a project pencils.

Zoning came third and last. “It’s an important one, but it will be a longer-term conversation, and the stakeholders are pretty diverse, and the perspectives are not close today,” she said.

She also said she supports local control and does not think one framework fits a state as varied as Oregon. She used Ontario as her example, a city she described as a frontier while Boise grows across the border.

On renters and stakeholders

Frick raised a familiar frustration in the rental housing industry: work groups where the agenda appeared set before stakeholders arrived.

Drazan said she is open to a wider range of voices. “I am not a housing expert,” she said. “But as somebody that’s asking to lead, and I’m asking to serve in a capacity that I think has the potential to have positive impacts, that means that I have to be willing, and I am willing, to listen.”

She argued that renters and owners want overlapping things. Renters “want more places they can afford, and they want to be able to live someplace that is attractive to them and safe,” she said, and Oregon’s interventions assume owners will not deliver that.

What owners, developers and investors should take from it

Owners: The near-term action she describes is administrative, not legislative. Agency leadership can change faster than statute, and rules on water, wetlands, and permitting largely sit inside agencies.

Developers: Zoning at the bottom of her list means the entitlement map is unlikely to move quickly under either November outcome. The variable she puts second, site readiness and infrastructure funding, is the one that would actually change feasibility.

Investors: Oregon competes for capital against Idaho, Washington, and Utah with fewer tools. Any real move toward incentives or abatement would change the math on deals that do not work today.

Sen. Drazan and Governor Kotek, who set a statewide goal of 36,000 new homes a year by executive order in 2023, meet in the general election Nov. 3.

Note: HFO plans to invite Governor Kotek for an interview on housing policy as her schedule allows.

HFO Investment Real Estate is the largest multifamily-only brokerage in the Pacific Northwest, with 12 brokers focused exclusively on apartment investment sales in Oregon and Washington. Call (503) 241-5541

Back to Insights & Updates