“Portland does not have enough affordable housing to meet the needs of its population.”
Everybody knows the rent is “too damn high,” and this month the City Club of Portland launched a research study to address our city’s lack of affordable housing. The quote above is the first sentence in the research charge published on their website. The statistics included in this write up are sobering:
“According to American Community Survey five-year estimates from 2009-2013, 51 percent of renters in Multnomah County are spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing.
For cities with a population of at least 100,000, Portland ranks 157 out of 302 for median rents as percentage of household income. In Portland, the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $944. To afford this rent, a person would need to work 78.5 hours a week at minimum wage.”
That’s a lot of hours.
MORE AFTER THE JUMP…
The background information cited Oregon’s ban on inclusionary zoning as one possible reason for Portland’s lack of affordable housing.
City Club researchers plan on looking at a several ways to increase Portland’s supply of affordable housing, including rent control policies, zoning for increased density, establishing housing trust funds, and expanding the use of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit.
According to the work plan, City Club researchers plan to submit a draft report on their study in December.
Portland’s lack of affordable housing isn’t a new problem. In 2002, City Club published this report outlining just how much money it would cost, and just how many units were needed, to improve the situation. Hopefully this round of research and the recommendations that come with it do more to fix the crisis than the 2002 report did.
City Club officials didn’t reply to a request for comment.
A two bedroom apartment has “2” bedrooms, hence each of the “2” people who live there need to pay 472 dollars per month, which is under 40 hours per week at minimum wage. If rents go up much more it will exceed 40 hours per week to afford a place to live, but there is no reason why a person making minimum wage should be guaranteed a 2 bedroom apartment.
Single parents, Econoline. There are a lot of them.
And I can’t remember the last time I saw a two bedroom (or a single that isn’t an APM shithole, for that matter) for less than $1,000 in my neighborhood.
And yet, the local market seems willing to bear these costs somehow…
I would imagine the rents staying put through inflation if rents were so high as being spoken to here.
The City can do effectively little in this, sad to say.
The good ol’ Portland Development Commission: using your own tax dollars to make your neighborhoods unaffordable.
People should charge less for housing. That’s all there is to say.
Hoyt Street Properties was supposed to make a percentage of the units it developed “affordable” (after the city – us – put in substantial investment to develop the section of town they were building in) and failed to do so. How many other development projects are there like this? In the case of Hoyt St, the solution was for the city to buy some land from them at a discounted rate to build housing – couldn’t the city require that it designate housing units when the developer doesn’t? The developer doesn’t designate 35% as required so the city steps in and picks the 35% for them and tells them what it is?