But much of the new housing the city expects in the coming decades won’t be affordable to many Portlanders. Thank you for all your hard work in making this city liveable for all of us, and not just white boomers that were lucky enough to buy property 40 years ago. So until Austin matches its excellent affordable-housing policy with a similar reform to market-rate housing, it’s tying its own hands behind its back. forefront after it re-legalized duplexes and triplexes in 2018. If on-street parking becomes scarce in some areas, probably some folks will finally clean out their garages and start using them for parking. Bla bla bla…get your head out of Fox News. It’s definitely not true that there is no segregation in this country. “When the Supreme Court ruled about 100 years ago that it was unconstitutional to prevent the sale of property to an individual based on race, we saw zoning codes proliferate across the country and income became a proxy for race. In the last two years, the Democratic Party has rapidly come around to the position that it’s good. The City of Portland requires zoning permits even when a building permit is not needed. The added density created a lot of pressure on all the residents of my neighborhood, especially those whose rental housing does not include off-street parking. It does not have to be expensive. Let’s not justify riots by trying to hide the FACT that riots in many additional areas and abusive invasions into many residential areas are occurring every day & night!! You may add a link with HTML: text to display. Politicians are generally ignorant, short sighted, and just plane dumb they ignore facts to promise anything when it suits them. Projections at … But this legislation allows people who don’t want a car, or who only want to have one car per family, to make that decision. “We cannot deny the impacts that exclusionary zoning has had and their racist origins,” Eudaly said before casting her yes vote. These are people working every day 9-5, and we’re going to give up on them and we’re going to say you’re going to be displaced anyway, and so we’re not going to help you,” he said. By the way, I never received participation trophies. Low-density parts of Vancouver and Minneapolis currently have no such distinctions. Douglas Scott, Portland still bans apartment buildings in residential zones, a fact that continues to baffle me. This is especially true in the neighborhoods in this city and this region which continue to experience displacement by higher income homeowners and renters. Mary Vogel – RE: “Meanwhile, I will try to find Michael some better images from the Portland area.”. Do you have any images from San Diego that you could send us? Buildings that unattractive are future slums; near future. Example: The pearl district. The reason it says “most lots” is that the R10, R20 and RF zones – which includes a lot of Dunthorpe and the West Hills – are not included. An existing triplex in Southeast Portland, built before their 1959 ban. These changes were designed to: Provide for greater housing opportunities Enable infill development on small parcels By reverting back to a more lenient code, advocates and city planners believe different kinds of housing will slowly emerge, affordable to middle-income earners and first-time homebuyers who would otherwise have to look elsewhere. Portland has many beautiful places to live, but not enough beautiful places for our residents on minimum wage. For every $422 of increased property taxes a homeowner loses $10,000 in value at today’s interest rates. The city's zoning code spells out what uses are allowed in which land use zones. I am really glad we now have a place to send our addicts. Mary Vogel. To address the specific criticism about FAR maximums, the Planning commission currently has before them draft guidance prepared by staff that would include increasing the FAR caps for duplexes to 0.6 and for triplexes to 0.7 in most land use categories (but not all). Is there a point against homeownership that I didn’t catch? I referenced a Sightline article. Rural living suits you. Plenty more to work on! It’s true that many people can’t afford to build an ADU, even after pooling cash between two families. Your support right now will help make OPB's essential service available to everyone who needs it. Find this article interesting? A little over 25 years ago I was a member of the local neighbor association and we suggested mixed development along 82nd street in Portland. …Seriously, allowing more housing options so that people like me (low-wage blue collar/pink collar essential laborers) can actually afford to *survive* in the areas where people actually need the services we provide, isn’t a bad thing. But the previous rules required new buildings in these zones to be big detached homes that tore down older ones. You might know the history here better than I do! The measure will make it viable for nonprofits to intersperse below-market housing anywhere in the city for the first time in a century. Thank God I don’t live in that Cesspool of a city. I was born and raised in Portland, although I also lived in Houston, TX for many years (a zoning nightmare). Join us for a special edition 1.5-hour ADU update webinar providing the latest in ADU zoning changes for Oregon housing markets. You can submit your permit application request online via Development Hub PDX. I was told if I don’t like it, my option is to move. I wouldn’t live anywhere but a liberal town. Following almost two years of development, the Portland City Council adopted the Better Housing by Design changes on Wednesday, December 18 th. Of the council’s two open seats, a commissioner-elect and both candidates in Tuesday’s council runoff had also endorsed its principles. I fear by the RIP still primarily focusing on low density infill (highest allowed density on a 50 foot lot is basically equivalent to a low density two-flat in Chicago) it will only slightly mitigate the high housing prices and result in further displacement. If people want to pay enough for the parking to make it worthwhile for the owner to keep it as a parking lot, then I suppose there will be. The pandemic has revealed that society’s most essential laborers – the ones who keep everything from falling to literal shit, by distributing toilet paper to your local grocery store – are simultaneously the most necessary workers, and also the worst-paid and most vulnerable. “I’m ready to move forward,” Commissioner Chloe Eudaly agreed, after securing Wheeler’s support for a formal city effort to create a new “tenant opportunity to purchase” program when rental buildings are sold. Let me know if you want me to delete/change. People sell now wait a lot already are. I wonder if the decision makers would want to have one of these built next to their family home they have kept up for years? Supporters of the project have advocated for the city to take additional steps to ensure the new units created can benefit the most vulnerable residents. I think I included some six-plexes. Stay up to date on the Northwest's most important sustainability issues. Adding more housing to a neighborhood but not adding more community resources (grocery stores, post office, pet stores, etc) doesn’t create an ideal urban landscape IMO. Everything else is going down the toilet, Portland isn’t immune. Fortunately, the new state law mentioned here requires fourplexes to be legalized there included, too. “These are people of color. If Portland keeps allowing the rioters to control the city – housing will become more affordable as the population moves away. It’s very inclusive. I’m curious about the role of mixed-use zoning in this development plan. You can power us forward on sustainable solutions. Very similar to the affordable housing project just over the Columbian River in Vancouver Washington by the Vancouver Housing Authority using modular tiny homes. It’d be nice if we could all dick around in an office building on salary or whatever and afford a nice, big Victorian house in an old-growth neighborhood close to where we work, but that’s not how things pan out for most people. Wouldn’t it be great if a renter or a renting couple, who cannot afford a down payment, but could bring $5,000 or $25,000 to the table for an infill or remodel project, could use that money to buy a share of a new small home, or perhaps a long-term lease? And even better responses to the mostly uninformed haters. Plus a Ferry to New York City. It’s not for everyone, myself included. Simply look up property value in Portland or crime rates. Re ADA, I’m surprised by that, too. I have been told that a 6 unit, and two 4 units plus more will be built right next door to me. https://www.greyhound.com/en-us/bus-from-newark-to-portland-2. Because lower-density neighborhoods are 77% of residential land, no neighborhood is likely to change all that much. Sign up to get important news and culture from around the Northwest, delivered to your inbox six days a week. One only has to look at the Freeway system in LA to see semi trailer trucks choking traffic trying to keep up the demand for goods, food etc. The first word that comes to my mind is “despair.”. For which all our “titles” are fictions from the colonial era. As long as the rest of the country can sell their places and buy homes here with cash – basically commodifying a Portland lifestyle – they will always warp the housing market to unreasonable heights and depress the wage markets with increased labor supplies. Portland is NOT SAFE!! Projections at the time had the city’s population growing by more than 250,000 residents by 2035. Excellent response, Struggling Local!! Please don’t condemn those who came before you. In Austin we have a term for those negative voices, “CAVES,” citizens against virtually everything. A higher density Portland … Property valuesplummet. You end up with more infrastructure per person due to the increased distribution so in 50 years the deferred maintenance costs will skyrocket. Some folks who are committed to frequently and conveniently parking their cars in the street will look for other locations to live. You need giant apartment buildings everywhere and a 100 year old transit system to make that way of life work. © 2020 Sightline Institute. That’s exactly how prices go up. Wonderful place. Born, the three times she used the word “their”, it was the correct form. I referenced a Sightline article. If they aren’t plexes, they’ll be apartment buildings, which are even further out of reach for most people to finance. I think this is part of a larger strategy for creating that environment. Hopefully this is something they consider. My personal perspective is similar. Subway systems are far too expensive to build for mature cities, and in order to be cost effective you need to have lots of people living very close to the trains stations. “They’re” wouldn’t be used in any of them. Because by setting the entry price so high, communities were able to exclude certain types of housing and certain people.”. Making parking optional doesn’t prevent it from existing where it’s actually needed, after all. With crime rate increases in recent months, I see no reason to invest. It’s true that most Portlanders don’t have the access to capital to build apartment buildings; many Portlanders don’t qualify for 30-year mortgages, either. Under the new state rules for larger cities and the Portland metro area, middle-housing projects on residential lots of 3,000 square feet or less can’t be required to have more than one off-street parking space, total, for the first four homes. Portland has less than some cities by race, but the most racially concentrated areas, the close-in low-density neighborhoods, are full of white people and little else, way out of regional proportion. Sounds good. Commissioner Amanda Fritz was the sole no vote against the plan, calling it one of the most upsetting votes she’s cast in her dozen years on the Council. Portland City Council adopts the Residential Infill Project, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/to-add-housing-zoning-code-reform-is-just-a-start. It’s not clear which idea will win this new federal debate. But it will also push the city well beyond what the Oregon Legislature required. But that wasn’t the only effect—bans on the lowest-cost way to create new homes accidentally created scarcity for everyone. Life will always present opportunities to those before, or after, your time on this planet. Portland’s Comprehensive Plan also demonstrates how the City complies with State and Regional land use planning requirements. Get out the wrecking ball boys and girls – there is no more restriction to destroying historic houses in Portland (unless you can afford lawyers to create a ‘historic district’). It may not seem like much until you consider localities where $500,000 homes have property taxes of $14,000! Just as importantly, it makes it feasible for builders like Habitat to gradually scatter such projects through all Portland neighborhoods. Is it good to have a diversity of housing types and prices in every neighborhood? In 1959, the Portland City Council voted to expand single-family zoning to almost all residential areas in the city. You do realize that Portland is larger than the few blocks that protestors are concentrated in, right? The alternative is to allow for suburban sprawl, which means building more infrastructure. the economic equivalent of cutting a check for $100,000 or more per affordable home, began in 1924 and expanded almost citywide in 1959, segregate people by class, race, age and income, cheerfully claimed responsibility for rising housing prices, « Washington Stops at Incremental Housing Steps, California's Home Shortage is Making Everyone Else's Worse », https://www.portlandmaps.com/bps/mapapp/maps.html#mapTheme=rip, https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/download/Agenda/856/Built%20Form.pdf/46372/1789/Built%20Form%20Regulations. It shouldn’t take six years for any city to agree to give itself permission to build the sort of homes that every city once allowed. Last year, as Michael is aware, I contributed a collection of photos to Sightline’s Missing Middle library collection on Flickr. It keeps the conservative white jerks away. I hope our new city council will now focus on helping new for-profit and non-profit housing developers, creative architects and development consultants to find ways to ensure that this new housing opportunity provides benefits for renters, prospective homeowners and home owners of modest incomes and wealth. In the six years since the residential infill project’s concept was floated in a letter by a local micro-developer, Portland leaders have weighed and delayed it again and again, sending it back multiple times through the city’s wringer of public process. Also worth keeping in mind that because of the big nationwide drop in household sizes, low-density areas in Portland have fewer total residents today than in the 60s. The zoning on a site may be changed to the comprehensive plan zoning designation through a Zoning Map Amendment if approval criteria are met. I hope that your coalition will expand to include PDX-Small Developer Alliance and Homeshare of Oregon and the others I’ve mentioned. Source: Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. 5555, This will not be a problem at all with people leaving Portland due to uncertain times. the house values will bottom out. If that’s the case, this policy will help us more gracefully subdivide large homes as we all economize and leave the next housing boom to some other city. Michael – Congratulations to you and everyone else who worked so hard to get RIP across the finish line. I completely agree that we’ll need to keep fighting those loopholes. Construction must follow the current building and zoning code standards. As the Open House notes, “Fewer than 13% of the streets in the town center have sidewalks. This code change appears to be written for developers, i.e., Share … Glad this got passed but IMO I’m afraid it isn’t going far enough. It’s a choice and people should be able to choose to live without one and have the infrastructure around them to make that possible. New York City has much higher density and a good public transit system. Why? These ideas if implemented will create several bad unintended consequences. I had to actually achieve something to get recognition. This is whats happened in the rust belt. This reform lowers that bar somewhat. Parking is going to be impossible, all this will end up being is subsidized housing, and will make new ghettos. However, I have a reasonable degree of confidence that the overall implementation will be done well and we will end up with more and better housing and a less-missing middle than we started with. Oregon House Bill 2001 was passed into law in 2019 thereby requiring Oregon cities with more than 2,500 people to update their ADU codes to eliminate occupancy requirements and off-street parking requirements by January 2020 (see map of affected … Well, it has come to pass and I actually am alive to read about it. As for Seattle, that city still bans new housing from the driveways of most primary homes, making infill geometrically impossible in many cases. I live here and am actively buying and selling property right now, and I can tell you this is absolutely not true and you don’t even have to take the word of residents here. It will take away privacy when these units are looming over single family homes. With cheap housing comes the types of neighbors that will stick out like a sore thumb and lower the property values. They allow for some non‐household living uses but not to such an extent as to sacrifice the overall image and character of the single‐dwelling neighborhood.”? Reforms like this make me hopeful that we (and our younger Gen Z friends) could some day actually afford to own a home that isn’t 100 blocks away from the city. Interactive zoning app Explore zoning in an interactive map application. Ron, You just go right on believing that. And thank you for calling out one of our really forward-looking small developers. Looking at the photo of the six-plex, the first thing that comes to mind is that Portland needs to create an architectural competition to design ATTRACTIVE, affordable housing. The idea is for that extra square footage to work like a sluice gate for Portland’s housing market, rechanneling investment away from luxury remodels and McMansions and toward new homes that are affordable to the middle class on day one. Again, I’m glad this finally passed after six years. I hope that future reforms here in Portland will allow lot divisions in addition to plexes. The bill was passed in 2019, while the city’s proposal was still being hammered out. Transplants are the main driver. Retail on the lower floors and apartment above. Crime is down as a long-term trend, and that’s a statistical fact. On the street? Required to change the zoning on the site if the proposed zoning is in compliance with the Comprehensive Plan designation. Almost every city in either country that’s existed for more than a century has a similar story. Oh and we hired more cops to get rid of the dirt-bags. Throughout the process, the backers were a coalition of affordable housing developers like Hacienda Community Development, stable-housing advocates like the Cully Housing Action Team, environmentalists like Sunrise PDX, justice advocates like AARP Oregon, civic groups like the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, transportation reformers like Oregon Walks, and dozens of active volunteers, with years of staffed organizing work by the anti-sprawl nonprofit 1000 Friends of Oregon and, later, us at Sightline. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/to-add-housing-zoning-code-reform-is-just-a-start. I’m personally done with Portland — I grew tired of all the positive spin spewed by the government despite how bad things were in reality, and the ever-present fear of outside ideas that still permeates the city in all aspects. I’ve also referenced Next Portland recently. In the last few weeks, middle-housing bans unexpectedly became a high-profile issue in the US presidential race, as President Donald Trump cheerfully claimed responsibility for rising housing prices, applauding his administration’s flip-flop from saying exclusionary zoning is bad (because it drives up prices) to saying it is good (because those high prices preserve segregation). I’m still not clear on how this is not a massive shift in wealth from single family homeowners to real estate developers. How many of these multiplexes are allowed in one area? Here is a recent example. you have no idea how much money you are going to lose in the future due to your lax approach to law and order. RE excerpt from Portland City Council adopts the Residential Infill Project, “The Residential Infill Project also includes important changes to accommodate people of all ages and abilities in new residential development by requiring at least one of the homes in a triplex to be ADA-compliant.”. In retail, I think that basically means a large, economically/culturally/experientially diverse population within a fairly short distance. In 2016, the council unanimously agreed in concept to legalizing duplexes and corner triplexes in part of the city, plus a sharp restriction in building size. This proposal will bring the city into compliance with state law. While I agree with most of what this program values, you did not mention the primary driver behind your reasons why “millennials have largely been shut out of affordable home ownership,” and that is the unsustainable increase in population in Oregon and PDX in particular by those coming to live here. Meanwhile, I will try to find Michael some better images from the Portland area. Portland’s new rules set that same size limit for one-unit buildings. Lucien, in your professional observation, did the ever-spreading suburbanization of southern California lead to any similar problems over the last 50 years? 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