There goes your neighborhood, cont'd
One of the things Oregon has always prided itself on is its land use regulation. Tom McCall, Neil Goldschmidt before his kinks were revealed – these guys' claims to fame always included preserving livability by restricting what could be built and where.
And so it's a sad moment when the state legislature and the governor are getting ready to toss even the most basic zoning rules out the window, all in the name of solving the "housing crisis." They've already outlawed single-family zoning, but apparently that's not enough. Now they're going to force the cities to trash any other standards that stand in the way of Soviet-style apartment bunkers on every block (with no parking, of course):
A proposal that lawmakers want to pass by mid-March calls for the state to annually estimate the amount of new housing at various price levels needed in each city with at least 10,000 residents. It would then hold cities accountable if they do not clear red tape or take other action to boost development to those levels....
Under the latest version of the plan, the state Office of Economic Analysis would be required to produce annual housing production targets by January 2026 for all cities of at least 10,000, including both total home construction and housing affordable for people of specific income levels.
The state housing agency would launch a public dashboard by January 2026 listing cities’ housing production targets and their progress, or lack thereof, in meeting the goals. And Oregon’s land use agency would work with cities on strategies to boost construction of new housing.
If any cities fail to make adequate progress or deliberately do not comply, the state could place them in a “housing acceleration program” that would start with an audit and lead to further remedies.
It's such a load of stink. Forcing more crummy apartments on neighborhoods everywhere isn't going to end homelessness, even if you built a million units. The real problem is the serious drug addictions with which so many of the tent dwellers and zombie RV campers are now struggling. Many, if not most, of them are not fit to live in an apartment any more. They are so obsessed with getting high that they'd burn the place down.
But the shameless apartment weasels never rest. They've been at it for decades. They're always looking for an angle to foist their high-rise trash on the beautiful neighborhoods that once made Portland the envy of many cities. Climate change, social justice, Black reparations, homelessness, they've got all sorts of pitches. The developers, the contractors, the construction unions – they've always hated land use rules, and now they are getting a magic ticket that makes them all go away.
Cities’ progress toward their goals would be published on a state dashboard for all Oregonians to see.
Great. I'd be looking at that dashboard to see which city is pushing back the hardest. Then I'd move there.
It's infuriating that the politicians are playing along with this so eagerly. But that's the Oregon legislature these days. People like Lew Frederick, Kate Lieber, Tina Kotek, Michael Dembrow, Tawna Sanchez, Maxine Dexter, Ken Helm – they're either too slow to catch on to what's happening, or more likely, they do understand and they're fine with it.
And look who they're hopping into bed with:
Dave Hunnicutt, president of the Oregon Property Owners Association, which advocates against land use restrictions, said cities have until now largely been left to their own devices to determine how much and what types of housing they need and the extent of local approval processes for that housing....
Hunnicutt said he appreciates Kotek’s goal for Oregon to raise housing production to 36,000 units a year, but hitting that ambitious goal “might mean telling the cities we’re going to have a very expedited process for approving development that doesn’t let Karen who just moved into the house in the brand new subdivision right next to the vacant lot that’s slated to develop … to come in and say, ‘I don’t like this’ and appeal to (the Land Use Board of Appeals) and the Oregon Court of Appeals and the Oregon Supreme Court for years.”
If you think Dave Hunnicutt and the people building apartments in Portland care about helping poor people and alleviating the suffering on the streets, you are delusional. They care about one thing and one thing only: getting your money into their pockets. And it looks as though they're about to increase the suction in that regard quite a bit.
The fact of the matter is, we don't need more apartments right now. We need a new state mental hospital. Probably two of them. But no can do. Bring on the bunkers. They are the politicians' solution to every problem.
I guess our politicians don’t remember what the “projects” created in eastern cities.
ReplyDeleteNo kidding. Portland is on its way to being the next Newark. Newark was a pretty place a hundred years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe planners can spread things out to make the misery less concentrated. But, it’s still misery.
ReplyDeleteI don't see how you can mandate production of housing at a certain affordability level when it costs X dollars to build a unit. These things don't pencil out without public money. So prepare to pay (more) for these eyesores, too.
ReplyDeleteOh, absolutely. The working people will pay for all of it. I've always said, it's bad enough they're wrecking Portland, but do I have to pay for it, too? And the answer is always yes.
DeleteNot to mention: "home made ugly".....affordable or not
DeleteSoviet style central planning.
ReplyDeleteJanuary 2026? That's when the preschool tax increases by 0.8%. Sounds like a good deadline to get the heck out of Dodge.
ReplyDeletePlans drawn up
DeleteMeanwhile, conditions for many in eastern Oregon are utterly bleak, and this will do nothing to fix that.
DeleteAt some point, those of us heading towards the exits are going to have to deal with the fact that the US postwar era was a once-in-a-aeon never-to-be-repeated fiesta of wealth that set our tastes and standards for what is possible at a level that we cannot possibly sustain given our aging population and the technology changes that increasingly deskill work (and make it liable to being mechanized) or, for "knowledge work," expose US workers to competition from silicon competitors (very soon) or just plain overseas competitors (radiologists, CPAs, and soon lawyers in the subcontinent).
ReplyDeleteIt's pleasant to imagine that the suburban experiment could continue but suburban, auto-centered development is impossible to maintain without vast subsidies. Essentially, once OPEC decided to capture a lot more of the difference in value stored in a barrel of oil that we had been spending on building a way of life we can't possibly afford to maintain, suburbia's days were numbered. It has lumbered on through inertia but all over the US, the first and second ring suburbs are becoming the new slums. In urban areas, the land values require a building of, at minimum, 6-7x the land cost, and when you pencil the cash flow needed to service that development cost, you aren't putting single family homes with grassy yards on it. It's just math. Although we've become much more productive on the whole since the 1950s, most of those gains have been captured by the top 5% of households, with an astonishing degree of the gains captured by the tiny slice at the tippy top -- even as our population has more than doubled. So we have a lot more people, while we need fewer people to do all the work the "free" market is willing to pay to have done, and a populace that has been conned into thinking that taxes are theft, so things that taxes used to provide are disappearing. When Boomers were at college age, college was for all intents and purposes priced at the cost of room and board at most public schools, including prestigious systems such as U Cal and Texas. And there were many jobs that required no college (still are, but we have had a credentials arms race, and many jobs that should required no college still do). As Warren Buffett says, we've had class war in America, and his side won.
Given all that, we are kidding ourselves if we think we're going to be building much single-family anything anywhere, certainly not in any cities in the north and not subject to a collapsing water supply. The Northwest is likely to see a fast growing stream of climate refugees as the Colorado River becomes the intermittent Colorado Creek and all those boom places go bust.
The suburbs don't need to be so auto-centric any more, with so many people working from home. The need to commute to the hollow core of the city has been eliminated for most office workers. Getting away from the social problems we refuse to pay money to address is what all the smart kids are doing. If it weren't for land use restrictions, it would be one subdivision of single-family homes after another from Portland to Eugene. It may look stupid in 100 years, but it looks pretty good right now. In any event, destroying Portland's nice neighborhoods with bad infill is a real disgrace.
ReplyDeleteHow is a suburb supposed to be anything other than auto-centric? Those people who don’t drive to the office will still drive to the store, restaurant, theater, etc.
DeleteWell, allowing the last crop (houses) is a 100 year decision — or more — and while we can address the collapse and dystopian nature of our cities, we can’t grow food or fiber where subdivisions are. The bottom line is, as a wise man says, the bottom line. By leaving the provision of housing to market forces, we get a housing market optimized to maximize profits all along the value chain, rather than a market optimized for adequate supply to meet the demand. We started out with an unstable tax system without a sales tax, and to that we added Measure 5 and 50 caps, so we have a schizophrenic boom/bust tax system to which we added the absurd kicker. So we can no longer afford the style of development that demand miles and miles and miles of roads, sewer pipes, pumps, and traffic control systems just so developers can cash in on converting farms to houses. That was all a hugely subsidized activity, and it was really really sweet for those folks for decades, but once we lost the huge windfall of all the revenue that OPEC started taking (instead of leaving with us), we suddenly found that we had made no provision to maintain anything, just as the first post-war developments were all starting to age and need refurbishment at the same time. There’s nobody to tax but us, and we have a huge overhang of infrastructure that we can’t possibly maintain on our tax base, so we just sit while it deteriorates and hope for miracles.
DeleteThe worst part is that municipal and state governments consider the things they have to be “assets” on their books, because if you booked them honestly as the liabilities they are (things that consume wealth just to stay still) you’d have to say that we’re bankrupt and should build nothing new and start instead planning for what we’re going to let go.
No offense intended, but I've been here the whole time watching everything and it is basic zoning rules that have caused the housing crisis and crammed all of the apartment bunkers and skinny houses into where they don't belong while pretending to be avoiding a housing crisis. Bojack has been one of the loudest voices highlighting the lunacy. There would be no need to ruin any neighborhood like they have been if the vast sea of available land were not deemed off limits by the absurd Urban Growth Boundary.
ReplyDeleteEven Tom McCall knew better than to adopt the rigid overreach land use planning became.
This is the direct result of electing the people who have frozen every city's UGB in amber in the name of fighting sprawl (now for climate change). The only just result of Portland's scenic easement over the rest of the state is the destruction of its neighborhoods. The collateral damage to the rest of the state is tragic, but Portland's voters deserve every last bit of this.
ReplyDeleteLook north to see how our neighbors in Seattle and Vancouver BC are solving the housing crisis - building upwards and without the requirements of setting aside a certain percentage of units for certain income levels. The number of construction cranes in their skylines is greater than fingers on your hand. Both cities feel more vibrant than Portland which feels more and more like a second world slum sliding toward the third world.
ReplyDeleteDidn’t think anyone could classify Seattle in a leadership category.
DeleteCompare the latest urban planning treatises with the 1965 book, The Ideal Communist City. There's hardly any difference.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, conditions for many in eastern Oregon are utterly bleak, and this will do nothing to fix that.
ReplyDeleteWhat would you suggest? Low population areas are much more expensive to live in and to serve. Just about every amenity, from clean water to paved roads to power costs a lot more per capita when there aren’t enough capitas to make if viable. For a few decades after WWII, we enjoyed a great bounty of largess that lured us into ignoring the costs to maintain what we were building and we simply assumed that all future bills could be paid from imagined future growth. The only reason a lot of places even got electricity was because of the dreaded socialism that FDR and LBJ promoted with rural electrification — private power was never going to leave the cities without massive public subsidy. Well, now the growth era is over and the bills are coming due, the rural areas are fragile and financially dependent entirely on taxes generated in the hated Willamette Valley cities.
DeleteOne of the many reasons why they want to be annexed into Idaho. For decades Portland's ruling class has been screwing rural residents under the guise of helping them. They like where they live but hate their overlords.
DeleteWhat is the reason? Eastern Oregon consumes a lot more tax revenues than it generates.
DeleteWay too many reasons: heavyhanded land use restrictions, high taxes, mandated collective bargaining/PERS, irrational gun control rules, disproportional minimum wages (the most is a mile long). Portland exerts control over the hinterlands setting up rules that make sense to urban dwellers but make no sense to the rest of us.
DeleteI'd prefer to see Portland deannexed from Oregon and given to the Feds as a territory (let Congress administer the District of Willamettia/Antifa), but Greater Idaho also works.
Or better yet, encircle the state with a cyclone fence and declare it a national park....no development allowed.
Delete