Get used to this logo, Portland. Itll be around til November.
Get used to this logo, Portland. It'll be around til November.

Portland City Council will almost certainly make history this afternoon. At 2 pm, the council's taking up a long-anticipated $258.4 million housing bond, which voters will consider on the November ballot.

Other cities have had dedicated tax money for housing for decades—Seattle's passed one bond and four levies since 1980, and has a $290 million measure coming up for a vote in August.

Portland, meanwhile, has never even attempted it. It never was forced to. The city's growing pains have only recently thrust us into the housing emergency making living here an increasingly difficult proposition for many Portlanders.

As Steve Rudman—the city's housing director from 1992 to 2001 and a former director of housing authority Home Forward—told the Mercury this week: "It wasn't a top-tier issue. Now it is. Affordable housing trumps all other issues."

As we've reported, the housing bond would be spent over the course of five to eight years, and paid off over 20. The Portland Housing Bureau, after lots of deliberation, has promised what proponents believe are some very safe numbers: 1,300 new or preserved affordable units, serving an estimated 2,900 people.

Advocates with the Welcome Home Coalition, which has been laying the groundwork for this afternoon's vote for years, say there's no chance the city won't hit those numbers.

"The housing bureau didn't want to put out a number that was aspirational," said Amy Ruiz, a spokesperson for the campaign (which formally kicks off tonight). "They wanted to put out a number that was a floor."

The bond measure council plans to refer this afternoon is historic in another way: It will mark a shift in Portland's central strategy around housing.

Typically, the Housing Bureau has spurred projects by assisting with funding, but hasn't had an ownership stake in completed buildings. That's not going to be the case with projects from the bond, which Portland plans to retain ownership of (advocates weren't able to answer how many buildings they projected the city will own when all is said and done).

"This is more analogous to a library or park," Rudman said. "It's that kind of asset."

The housing bond amounts to a drop in the bucket of Portland's need. The city is short an estimated 24,000 affordable units today. But it's also another step in a string of increased funding for housing the city's taken lately.

Just yesterday, City Council passed a 1 percent tax on construction projects that will bring in an estimated $8 million a year for housing. Officials have recently upped the amount of urban renewal money dedicated to housing projects, and ensured that tax money collected from services like Airbnb (a little more than $1 million a year) goes toward housing.

"I wouldn't say we’re not making an enormous and significant community-wide dent," says Jes Larson, the Welcome Home Coalition's executive director. "With this bond we can focus on where the greatest need in our community lies."

Nearly half of the promised units from the housing bond, 600, will go toward the poorest of the poor: Portlanders who earn 30 percent of the city's median family income or less. That's a yearly income $22,000 for a family a four. The rest would be fore people earning 60 percent of the MFI or less ($43,980 per year).

The bond campaign carries an air of inevitability. Welcome Home members have conducted three polls, and are confident they've hit a tax amount Portlanders are willing to pay (property tax bills will be $75 higher for the average Portland home, the campaign says). They're not sharing polling data.

Proponents also have seen a good deal of their campaigning done in the last year, through the sheer chaos the steepest rent increases in the country have wrought on the city. And they don't anticipate any organized opposition.

Still, the issue is just one of several ballot measures that could reach into Portlanders' pocket books this November. The city wants to slap a 3 percent sales tax on recreational marijuana sales. Labor unions want to enact a big increase on corporate sales tax (which, we're told, would cause price increases). And Portland Public Schools, mired in a lead scandal, wants voters to enact a bond.

The Welcome Home Coalition members don't see those as potential rivals.

"The issue is incredibly salient," says Larson. "We expect when they get to 'Yes for Affordable Homes' on the ballot, [voters] are going to be excited to say 'yes.'