Home Forward, the city of Portland’s housing authority, is sitting on 956 empty affordable apartment units, according to a Nov. 7 vacancy report the agency provided to WW last month.

Home Forward has 6,847 affordable units across the Portland area. That means 1 in every 7 units sits empty. The 14% vacancy rate for the housing authority is more than double the 6% overall vacancy rate for the city, and double the affordable housing vacancy rate across the city.

Meanwhile, as units sit unoccupied, 7,500 people are living unsheltered on Portland’s streets every night, according to the most recent data from Multnomah County.

Those figures add complication to what the public dialogue around affordable housing has been distilled down to in recent years, both at the city and state level: that

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