Construction is underway on a home in north Portland in July 2023. (Lynne Terry/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

The “doors are open” on a new state office charged with meeting Gov. Tina Kotek’s goal of getting 36,000 new homes built in Oregon each year.

Kotek announced on Tuesday the official launch of the Housing Accountability and Production Office, or HAPO. Lawmakers laid the groundwork for the agency in 2024 when they passed Senate Bill 1537, meant to give cities more leeway to add land for housing to their urban growth boundaries — the state-approved line around a city that dictates where and how it can expand.

In a news release, Kotek said agency staff would act as a liaison between developers, local governments and state agencies to find and streamline funding. It must provide to the Legislature by September 2026 research and policy options to boost housing and housing affordability statewide. She said the office will also be enforcing building laws and codes, investigating complaints of noncompliance in housing production and will create a “more predictable regulatory environment for builders.”

She called the lack of housing in parts of Oregon, and many cities across the U.S., a “generational crisis.”

“I believe that we can get this done. And, it is still a monumental task,” she said in the news release.

It’s all aimed at addressing a housing shortage caused by years of underbuilding that led to more than half of Oregon tenants spending more than they can afford on rent, median home prices topping $500,000 statewide and more than 20,000 Oregonians living in tents, cars or homeless shelters.

Construction on houses, apartments and multifamily buildings in Oregon rose in the 1970s then plunged in the 1980s and never recovered, according to the Seattle-based, nonprofit research and policy organization Sightline Institute. By the 2010s, the share of new homes built in Oregon that were in apartments and multifamily buildings hit its lowest average in 60 years and homebuilding never fully recovered.

Kotek set a goal of building 36,000 homes per year when she ran for governor in 2022, but the state is still far from reaching that goal. Local governments in Oregon issued just fewer than 17,700 building permits in 2023, according to a federal database. They’re further behind this year — by September, builders had pulled just more than 10,800 permits.

The Housing Accountability and Production Office will be a joint office of the state Department of Land Conservation and Development, and the state Building Codes Division of the Department of Consumer and Business Services. It will be run by longtime affordable housing leader Joel Madsen and longtime construction industry tradesman Tony Rocco.

“We have the tools to support collaboration on the foundational goal we all share of building more safe, efficient, and cost-effective housing for all Oregonians,” Rocco said in the news release.