Oregon’s spending on low-income housing has exploded in the past five years. The state has given developers an unprecedented $1.4 billion, and the cost of developing each apartment has nearly doubled, to $540,000. Dozens of projects are lined up for an additional $850 million in future state funding. Federal tax credits, which the state oversees, will bring even more money to bear.

Yet one thing has remained constant: The public isn’t allowed to see the details of how all these dollars are being spent.

Oregon is one of the only states in the country with a carve-out in its public records law that prevents disclosing the financial details of subsidized housing projects, thwarting researchers and journalists who have tried to examine their costs.

The issue is especially pressing in the Pacific Northwest, where leaders have tied the lack of affordable housing to the region’s dire homelessness crisis. Understanding and controlling the cost of construction could make it possible, with the same amount of money, to either build more rent-restricted apartments or to discount rents more steeply.

Margaret Van Vliet, a former director of Oregon’s state housing agency, told ProPublica that lawmakers should revisit the exemption. Despite all the state’s spending on housing, Oregon’s homeless population continues to grow.

“For all the public money, we seem to be digging a deeper hole,” Van Vliet said.

In other states, researchers and journalists have used developers’ financial records to investigate spiraling costs of subsidized housing.

Los Angeles Times reporters in 2020 revealed that the cost of some low-income housing units in California had grown to more than $1 million each, driven in part by government rules that pushed construction prices higher. The Times found that 12,000 more low-income families could have received homes between 2011 and 2015 had costs been as low as they were elsewhere.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley showed earlier this year that California was spending $300 million a year just in development fees on subsidized housing, enough to have financed another 1,250 apartments each year. In July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that aims to slash those fees.

A study published last year and co-authored by Jason Ward, an economist who directs the nonpartisan Rand Corp.’s Housing Center, compared the costs of constructing subsidized housing among California, Texas and........

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