Portland is reaching a tipping point. With the decline of affordable housing units around the city due to the increase of rental prices we’re heading into a perfect storm. In fact, some might say the storm has already arrived on our shores. It sure feels that way.
We are dangerously close as a city to following in both Seattle and San Francisco’s footsteps when it comes to becoming a city where only concentrated wealth, (mostly white), and the most destitute live side by side.
It wasn’t so long ago that Portlanders and others around the United States were sent scrambling during the Great Recession. It’s easy to think that the recession and the impact it had on people’s lives is something of the past. It’s not.
A report this month by the Multnomah County Human Services found that one in three county residents do not have enough income to be able to meet their basic needs. If that’s not sobering, I don’t know what is.
It’s not just people in crisis seeking shelter from the storm — it’s small business owners, teachers, baristas and others finding themselves spending a large percentage of their incomes on housing. It’s not just the poor. Middle-class Portlanders are on the ropes too. Add that to a growing racial disparity in Portland’s urban core and we’ve got trouble.
It’s a problem, a big problem.
San Francisco voters, in 2012, passed a Housing Trust Fund with a goal of building and preserving more than 30,000 affordable housing units in the city.
The fund requires that the city sets aside general fund revenues beginning in 2013-2014 and ending in Fiscal Year 2042-2043 to create, acquire and rehabilitate affordable housing and promote affordable home ownership programs in the city.
That’s not to say San Francisco has somehow figured it out. It does mean local leaders there understand the housing crisis enough to know that if they don’t completely rearrange their way of doing affordable housing their city will be completely lost.
In Seattle, where a similar setting exists, they are working hard to connect transportation, density and housing through a range of different programs. The city also has a housing levy that has been overwhelmingly supported by voters since the 1990s.
Seattle is also looking at Inclusionary Zoning, which would require developers to create a certain amount of affordable housing units every time they developed new market rate housing. How about a real-estate transfer tax to support housing? They have that too.
Those all sound like amazing ideas for Portland, right? Not going to happen. Both the Inclusionary Zoning and a real-estate transfer fee are illegal in Oregon thanks to greedy, special interest groups. It’s shameful.
Instead, Portland is left talking about a local transportation fee, a regressive one at that, without really even touching on the issue of poverty.
We must be thinking bigger if we are going to combat the rapid economic and racial segregation in our city. In order to get to a more equitable Portland it’s going to take more than just charity. It’s going to take real infrastructure — like raising the minimum wage and creating something like a Housing Trust Fund. Currently, we are moving from year-to-year with patchwork-like strategies on housing that have us falling woefully behind.
An example of this is housing advocates having to beg the city to tax short-term rentals like Airbnb, only to be told by some we’re asking for to much. After all, housing got a bump in the last city budget. Talk about not being able to see the forest from the trees.
Did I mention that one-in-three people in Multnomah County are struggling to make ends meet? The reality is if Portland wants to be a world-class city, we’re going to have to get our act together on housing. We have the political will. It’s a matter now of making that happen.
