Looking at the cumulative effect of several housing-related decisions, it is clear that the city doesn't care about affordable housing. For example, studies in San Francisco show that AirBnB reduces rental stock and hurts the working poor, but Portland City Hall has a crush on AirBnB and lets it cheat 24-7. The demolitions of sfh for McMansions is not helpful to affordable housing. Adding 6000k units for singles and none for families is not helpful.

I say we rehab and rent small houses. Fix up the bad house next door, and provide help
to the neighbors.

If rent were cheaper in Portland, then more people would move to Portland. If more people were to move to Portland, then there would be fewer apartments available, and the price would increase. $20,000,000.00 is a lot of money. How about paying each bum who CURRENTLY sleeps on dog shit in the park, twenty grand to leave town? Make this a surprise one time offer, spending the twenty mil before anybody else moves to Portland for a hand out.

C'mon people! Gentrification aint that bad. If you like low income people so much why don't you just give half your paycheck to them? That's basically what "right to return" folk will be gettin. Subsidized dependence

Denis: It's great that the city has found $20m for affordable housing, but it would have been better for the city had The Mercury and other local journalists covered the dismantling of the city's 30% set-aside policy, which took place under Sam Adams. That represented a far more significant commitment to building affordable housing, and it went away with barely a whimper.

It's great that you're on board with this issue now. I hope you stick with it long-term.

Where did PDX find $20 million? Usually urban renewal type money comes from borrowing against the expected increase in property taxes that would be the consequence of increased property valuations resulting from spending that money.

It is called Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, and I don't like it.

Mike: The city issues bonds (ie, debt) against the anticipated future tax revenues.

So, first they create a URA and project what those increased tax revenues will be in that URA over a certain number of years, then based on that number the City Council passes an ordinance that authorizes the PDC to take on a certain amount of debt. Once the debt is authorized, the PDC Board (and the City Council, acting as the PDC's budget committee) approve a series of annual budgets that include various projects, including affordable housing, that they're authorizing the funds to be spent on.

Once those projects are greenlighted and in the planning pipeline, the money people at PDC project what part of the money they're going to need in the short term --the next three months, let's say --and they issue bonds for that chunk of money. (In other words, they don't just have the whole amount sitting in a bank account somewhere --they only get what they need in smaller increments.) The repayment of those bonds is guaranteed against the increased tax revenues in that URA.

They may never actually bond the full amount they're authorized to borrow.

So when the Mayor pledges $20m over five years, it's money he knows can be made available when it's needed, because the Interstate URA has at least that much future borrowing capacity. At this stage, the city is asking the community how they'd like to see the money spent, so here's no project on the table yet and they're a long way off from actually taking out that debt.

There would seem to be about five or then thousand homeless in Portland. That would amount to only two to four thousand dollars apiece, a far cry from twenty grand each.

Thanks Euphonius for the excellent description of how it works. And so it is Tax Increment Financing.

The entire area's debt/proceeds go to the PDC's projects on the theory that it benefits everyone in the Urban Renewal Area in proportion to their individual tax increases.
-Maybe.

The URA is excused from incremental increased costs for police, fire, water, sewer, etc. within the general area surrounding the URA while everyone else covers the URA's share.

Awards by the Commission has a faint scent of Cronyism. But lets just say that we are smelling a mirage because there is 'criteria' for the commission's awards.

The alternative is renewal-by-owner which does not, and should not, involve the government or special tax-freezing.

Even if it were fair to the General Area, I would still oppose it because the Commission has none of their own skin in the game as an owner would.

Surprisingly, there's no requirement that these investments actually increase property values or the tax base. That's right. Nothing requires that creating a URA or spending future tax revenues today actually has to lead to more money later.

Remember a few years ago when Sam Adams and Randy Leonard wanted to build a baseball stadium in Lents Park? They were going to take at least $42m out of the Lents URA to build the stadium --on park property. Parks don't pay property taxes. Those guys tried to claim that the surrounding area would see an increase in value but refused to actually study the question. I'm not a real state expert, but I suspect that a single family home across the street from a stadium would probably LOSE value, if anything.

So there's no rule that obliges the city to show that the things they're planning to do with TIF money will actually grow the tax base.

You mention the incremental increases in costs to provide all the other city services while a URA is in effect --which is a great point. This has become a huge issue in the city's overall budget. To his credit, Charlie Hales recognizes it and has been moving to reel in the use of urban renewal. This will take a while, and you won't hear much about it because it's complicated and journalists don't like to report on complicated things that make their heads hurt.

What you might not know is that those incremental costs also affect other local jurisdictions. The property taxes that are diverted into a URA wouldn't only have gone to the city, yet it's the city and nobody else that gets to decide. The two biggest ones who take the hit are Multnomah County and Portland Public Schools. Because the county and PPS became such a thorn in the city's side about this, a few years ago they were each given seats on the various citizen committees that decide what each URA spends its money on.

Last year the city abolished those committees.

(If you missed the Mercury's coverage of this --well, it wasn't in the Mercury... or any other local press. I wrote about it here: http://fosterunited.org/pdc-disbands-lents… )

Okay, so then what's needed to adequately proved each poor homeless person in Portland a grub stake of twenty grand, is about $200,000,000.00, which is what the OHSU Tram ended up costing with "unexpected" cost overruns. Let's borrow THAT, then.