LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, you’ve probably complained about Portland’s high rents and property prices. However, there’s a reason we’re in this situation today—it’s because of decisions made decades ago.
It’s important to note that what’s happening isn’t just a Portland phenomenon, though. Throughout the country, cities are changing. The formerly affluent suburbs, once home to wealthy families living on removed estates of vast lawns and McMansions, are filling up with low-income residents. The urban core, once feared as a hotbed of crime and poverty (See: Death Wish, Daredevil, Dirty Harry, and most popular culture from 1975-2000) are now enclaves for the young working class.
“Downtowns used to be places of light manufacturing and other relatively intrusive industries that made it unpleasant to live around,” says Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. “Downtown became a symbol for lots of things that didn’t work with living a middle-class life. A lot of people who could leave did.”
In Portland, that formerly undesirable core is now quite different—an opulent place filled with craft breweries, yoga studios, and very small dogs. The common term for this process is “gentrification,” but according to Ehrenhalt, “demographic inversion” is a more accurate phrase, as it speaks not only to money pouring into poorer neighborhoods, but also low-income populations streaming into outlying areas.
In The Great Inversion, Ehrenhalt describes this happening in several different urban areas, but mostly attributes it to broad market-based changes in American manufacturing and demand. According to him, younger populations no longer seek out the suburban experience the way their parents and grandparents did.
In the case of Portland, far more than just market forces and demographic shifts are responsible for this inversion. Starting in the 1970s, a series of deliberate and purposeful policies drove money and affluent populations to the urban core. These policy changes are why Portland is celebrated as a leader in urban planning, and why it has a reputation among planners as being outstanding in the field.
It’s also why the rent is too damn high.
Conventional Solutions
Like other American cities in the mid-20th century, Portland had a problem. People were moving from the city to the suburbs.
“I’d say [Portland] had similar problems to other American cities in that it was beginning to feel the impact of outward movement of population,” says Carl Abbott, a Portland State University professor of urban studies and author of several books about Portland. “[There was a] suburbanization of population and slow erosion of downtown retail.”
Sy Adler, another professor of urban studies at PSU, is quick to emphasize that, although Portland was indeed experiencing a certain degree of urban hollowing, it wasn’t happening nearly as much as in other cities.
“For the early part of the post-World War II period, Portland’s surrounding economy and the industry presence held up better than what was happening in the Midwest or other East Coast cities,” Adler says, mentioning Detroit as an extreme example.
He also cites Portland’s relative lack of racial diversity as another factor that shaped the city.
“There is the old racial dimension of this story,” Adler says. “Portland was a much less diverse city than its Midwestern or East Coast counterparts, so there was not nearly the same extent of the ‘white flight’ phenomenon. It was a mix of things.”
Nevertheless, part of Portland’s self-image and self-mythologizing is based on being a leader in urban planning—and successfully reacting to a crisis of urban hollowing in the mid-20th century. The slogan “We planned, it worked” is often bandied about in reference to Portland’s bustling downtown.
We’ll return to Portland’s much-ballyhooed “renaissance” in a moment—but before the ’70s, Portland was known for embracing entirely conventional means of urban “improvement”: focusing on cars, and kicking people out of their homes.
The South Auditorium Urban Renewal Project took place around where downtown’s Keller Auditorium is today. In the late 1950s, the surrounding area was home to about 2,300 low-income residents, and in a 1959 guest editorial for the Oregon Journal, a homeowner named Elsie Perry wrote: “[We] have been the victims of rumor, propaganda, indecision, threats, and promises…. No one could sell, lease, or trade property. It was unwise to repair or build… by edict of our city, the area has become the slum that the do-good bunch behind urban renewal so heartily desired.”
In the end, all 2,300 people were displaced, along with 141 businesses, and today the formerly “blighted” area is now home to office buildings and the Keller Fountain. There were also plans for a stadium.
“A lot of city leaders expected Memorial Coliseum to be built in the urban renewal area,” says Abbott.
The urban renewal project was successful (at least in the eyes of planners), but according to Abbott and Adler it was not innovative. It was precisely the kind of strategy other cities were using in response to perceived urban problems.
Portland was also entirely conventional in how it approached transportation issues. “[Another solution] was improving automobile access with the inner freeway loop,” says Abbott, referring to I-405 and I-5, which now encircle downtown. “That comes at the end of the ’60s and early ’70s—but it was in a lot of people’s [minds] during the ’50s. Pretty standard stuff.”
- Ira Keller Fountain, 1995
- HAGAR / CC BY SA
1972
The year 1972 was one of the most important in Portland’s history: That was the year the city got the ball rolling on a plan to take money that would’ve been used to construct the Mount Hood Freeway (which would’ve been built where SE Clinton is today) and instead use the $500 million as the initial investment on a light rail system.
According to Adler, this was, at the time, an unusual thing for an urban area to do. “Portland was second after Boston in persuading the federal government to move money from highways to transit,” he says.
That focus on mass transit was the cornerstone of Portland’s 1972 Downtown Plan, which focused on getting economic activity back into the urban core.
“That was [then-Mayor Neil] Goldschmidt’s major thing,” says Adler. “Instead of highways displacing people, let’s boost downtown via transit investment.”
The plan sketched out a transit mall, a plan to lure in new retail, and, oddly, covered skyways and arcades along sidewalks that were never constructed. The plan gave Portland an entirely new and updated urban core.
Near downtown, and connected to it by various bus lines, were middle-class neighborhoods populated by single-family homes. Adler describes these mid- to low-density neighborhoods (citing Irvington as a specific example) as Goldschmidt’s constituency. He characterizes inner-neighborhood dwellers as being the type of people that Goldschmidt and other planners wanted to serve, and their type of housing was deemed important.
That meant that—with the notable exception of Albina—inner neighborhoods received preservation and investment, especially those featuring single-family housing. The kind of density necessary to meet today’s demand for housing was not on anyone’s radar. The neighborhoods have stayed static, though demand has not.
“Hawthorne is more commercial than it was back then,” says Adler, “but depending on the neighborhood, not an awful lot has changed.”
The Boundary
In 1973, Oregon passed land-use legislation decreeing that urban areas must set urban growth boundaries [UGB]. The intent of the legislation was to preserve agricultural and wilderness lands, and also, according to Adler, increase investment inside cities rather than in exurban or suburban areas.
“I think it’s very likely the case,” he says, “that there’s been more inward investment than there would’ve been otherwise [because of the UGB].” And according to Adler, policymakers knew that the UGB would increase the value of land inside it.
“As people talked about it at the time… yes, the urban growth boundary was intended to increase the price of land inside the line,” Adler says.
Today Portland lacks the tract housing found outside cities like Jacksonville or Las Vegas. Unchecked housing speculation didn’t happen here (which is good), but it also resulted in a significant lack of readily available, cheap housing.
Currently, market forces aren’t supporting affordable housing, and neither is policy. Oregon, unlike other states, has no policy on the books explicitly promoting inclusionary zoning.
“Portland hasn’t been able—or willing, early on—to do what many other cities have done and have an inclusionary housing policy,” says Adler. “Within urban renewal districts, there has been some bargaining with private investors about… affordable housing units.”
This is not an issue Portland can change on its own.
“In the later 1990s, the legislature pre-empted the ability of the city or Metro to do inclusionary housing,” says Adler, referring to Oregon’s state law banning the practice.
- Thomas Teal
Now
When asked what it would’ve been like for a middle-class family looking for housing in Portland in the 1970s and 1980s, Abbott and Adler both have similar answers: It was much easier to get a roof over your head than it is now.
“There was a lot of housing available, and at the same time Portland was not growing nearly as fast in the 1950s and ’60s—so there wasn’t demand [in the ’70s],” says Abbott. “The population was growing, but it wasn’t booming. There was a more even balance between supply and demand.”
Portland today is almost the direct inverse of what it was prior to the early 1970s: People want to live here, houses and apartments are in demand, and there’s virtually nothing that could be described as “blight.”
“Notice there’s no zone of abandonment in Portland,” says Abbott. “You go to Houston, and you see a whole sea of parking lots that seems to stretch for miles before there’s anything else. Portland has no abandoned zones. There’s downtown, there’s the Central Eastside, and then there are neighborhoods where people want to live. There’s an empty block here and there, but that’s not going to last for long.”
According to Abbott, that’s both a blessing and curse. There are no dead zones, but there are also no cheap zones—at least not within the city itself.
“What’s happened in the core area, the South Waterfront, and the Inner Eastside is very much the heritage of what happened in the 1970s,” says Abbott, who characterizes Portland (not including a brief recession in the ’80s), as being in the midst of a “25-year boom.”
Portland was designed and planned to serve a different kind of population and demographic than the one it now attracts. Somehow, this city of single-family homes, light industry, and shipping became cool. Somehow, it attracted a population eager to live in its current limited supply of homes.
When asked how Portland became cool, a fact that led to our housing supply being in such high demand, both Adler and Abbott are happy to speculate—but neither of them give answers nearly as definitive as the ones they offer about Portland’s planning history. Abbott has studied and written about this city extensively throughout his career, but to this question, his first reaction is to laugh.
“That I don’t know,” he says.
It seems like the Urban Growth planners hit this one on the head. You may not want to live in Gladstone or OC or Clackamas(Happy Valley, you’ll always be Clackamas to me)but it has the services now and the UGB just released a little pressure, right on schedule.
Finally, a sensible article about the so called high rent problem. Can’t have it both ways, if you have a decent economy and land use restrictions, you will have higher property prices. If you want cheap rent, go where one of those don’t exist.
Really though? So let’s make up a new word “demographic inversion” because those responsible for it are uncomfortable when longtime residents rally against the g-word (GENTRIFICATION). I swear, say that word in public and it’s like you dropped the f-bomb.
So now it’s some population phenomenon instead of City Hall’s responsibility to provide affordable housing and the hordes of precious yupsters (look I can do it too) can rest easy that they’re not destroying what used to be an affordable and unique place to live. Lol, what a crock of shit.
TOSPITW, So you’re MORE entitled(E-word) than the current YeeHaws to live where ever you want to live? Why?
“demographic inversion” is two words.
Yes and no… The efforts to promote density and contain sprawl may have helped speed the shortage of developable land, but those policies didn’t cause the higher rents.
If the explanation was that simple, we could look to places where sprawl is rampant, like California, and expect to see stable housing prices. But the fact that homes are being built on every vacant lot from Santa Rosa to Salinas seems to have done little to keep San Francisco affordable.
The population, there and here, is growing. We can grow well or we can grow badly, but we can’t not grow.
Portland and Oregon need to increase the supply of housing but we don’t have to plow up our farmland or toss out our land use regulations to do it. We’ve gone through a relatively easy period of pro-density development, but now is when it gets hard. That means finally identifying real resources to support publicly-subsidized housing and getting serious about regulating devlopers and landlords, while redoubling our commitment to compact and smart transit-oriented development.
PS. Urban renewal in the South Auditorium is interesting Portland history, but it’s not very representative of anything.
In that era, many large cities used urban renewal to clear rat-infested slums and build Cabrini Green-style housing projects that were supposed to be clean and dignified low-income homes. It didn’t work out that way, and the model of huge projects warehousing tens of thousands of poor people was rightly abandoned decades ago.
With the exception of South Auditorium, Portland never really tried urban renewal for housing. Partly that’s because we had few slums to tear out, and partly it’s because we just never really gave a shit about poor people.
Redlining was about poor people, bitch. So yeah Portland gives a shit. Just keep telling us we’re poor and won’t amount to shit because we’re poor. The Times just wrote an article about how racist/classsit do-gooders are.
TOSPITW: It’s not City Hall’s responsibility to provide housing. It may be their responsibility to put in place the conditions that encourage it, but “provide” it? Nahhhh…I don’t think very many of us want the City as a landlord.
Lazaar: Where did you get anything criticizing poor people from Euphonius’s comments? He’s criticizing the City for not giving a shit about poor people. That’s pretty much the exact opposite.
Euphonius, who is supposed to build that housing?
Jesus Christ this word soup.
OK, AMA. My problem is the lowest expectation on low income, to keep the industry working. Definitely not with Euphonius. Fuck, listen to the words the people you admire use to describe you and your not as capable brothers and sisters. The words are rude and demeaning, constantly. Just to get you to vote for their scheme.
@Demondog: The typical thing when the city uses urban renewal for affordable rental housing is that they put up some money and a for-profit developer or a non-profit called a Community Development Corporation (a “CDC”) puts up the rest. Some of the apartments they build will be market rate and some are subsidized and income-restricted.
So it’s built by a private developer and the cost to subsidize the affordable apartments are covered partially by the city and partially by the devloper and passed on to the market-rate renters. If it’s a CDC they probably do some fundraising and grants to help subsidize it too.
Short answer: The city puts up som money and tries to leverage it to get as much housing built as they can.
Lazaar: what? Which people? What words? And why are you calling someone “bitch?”
Yeah , sorry about the “bitch” part., But, “the words are holding you down or else you are the one using words to hold people down.” – Mao Tse-Tung
Euphonius,
Please stop posting intelligent, well-reasoned arguments in the comments section. This is the internet, goddamnit. We don’t cotton to that sort of thing ’round here.
we planned it that way… it’s just the way we planned it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84tlNzppy…
I was able to take a lot of urban planning classes in high school in the mid-late 80’s. Back then our instructor was telling us that the plan for the future is for cities to rebuild and “revitalize” the core and bring new people in. The thought of that happening some day, at the time, seemed like a distant pipe dream. The mid 80’s mid-west and east coast city centers were abandoned manufacturing, violent neighborhoods, crack houses, prostitution, gangs, shootings, ect… Portland is one of the first cities that made the once unimaginable something unimaginable. Brooklyn and Philli are the 2 east cost urban centers “inverting”.. which i think accurately describes the rapid intensity of the change. The original concept we discussed in the 80’s was based on returning to walkable neighborhoods, where everything you needed was right there (and no one worried about getting shot). Portland, Philli, and Brooklyn prove that people now want that more than ever based on the insane prices. Maybe St. Louise, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Kansas City will follow on a more realistic, diverse, and fair level.
Euphonius for mayor!
“Dr. McLoughlin” gets my vote. Thanks Euphonious for the added thoughts. I’m tired of this new blame the visionaries for making Portland (or any city) so livable and great for getting in this mess now. We need some more leadership visionaries who continually strive to take care of the current residents as they make way for new ones.
Here. I’ll write a more condensed version of this story. Too many people, not enough supply. Tah dah. That was easy. Portland has seen extraordinary population growth for the better part of 150 years. It never had any notable white flight or wholesale inner city abandonment and all the time people kept on moving here. Think of it in a regional context, the west coast. Portland, Boise and to some extent Denver were the last large cities to see notable inner city develop. Seattle, SF and LA were already re-urbanizing by the late 1970s to mid 1980s. Were just playing catch up now. At least Portland has seen the writing on the wall (cough, San Francisco nimbys, cough) and is taking some proactive measures to increase the housing supply. Part of the ball is definitely in the State of Oregon court however. We should have an inclusionary zoning component if we want to take affordability completely serious.
Fukushima will likely change all that.
^^^you do also raise a valid point. if and when we do get a massive earthquake, all the twee urban village-y shit people love about Portland will be toast. collectively, Portland has some of the oldest SF wood and unreinforced brick housing stock in the country. over 80 percent of which has not been reinforced or seismically retrofitted. couple that with A, active faults, B, crumbly 100 year old foundations, and C, sandy and loamy soil in many central neighborhoods and D, you will be moving to Houston right after your 500k bungalow is shaken to the ground!!
@Demondog & @Euphonius
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, trying to coax the housing capitalists, who are on the whole very resistant to not making a profit for investors and/or executive staff, ain’t doin’ it. It’s a strategy of more housing and profits for the relatively rich and more crumbs for the relatively poor. “Crumbs” isn’t just poetic exageration either. Just in the last couple days the Mercury reported how the City is planning to give housing capitalists more tax breaks to eek out 200 units a year. http://www.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX… That’s about 1% of what we needed according to OPB’s reporting on it. “According to the best estimate available, Portland has a shortage of about 20,000 affordable units. ” http://www.opb.org/news/article/portlands-…
^ The library is offering free classes on seismic retrofitting. Only two sessions scheduled now, but expect more in the future if there’s demand (and there will be demand):
https://multcolib.org/events/seismic-retro…
its units in general. affordable and market rate. who do you think is also competing with lifelong renters as they wade thru the maddening local real estate scene, would be homeowners who are still renting!! lots of folks also got hosed in the recession by taking out shitty loans and subsequently losing their home once they got underwater. guess what, they are renters too! so not only has the market tightened, but they renter dynamic has also changed to include people that would otherwise probably be homeowners. one note from the article, suburbs across the country haven’t become wastelands of poor people ousted from the central city, in fact tons of suburbs across the country in healthy cities are seeing lots of growth as well. albeit a bit slower then their central cores. Washington County circa 1990, 331,000 people. Washington County 2010, 530,000….Clackamas county has seen staggering growth too, and guess what, the highest per capita income in the state.
I’m not voting for old, tired thinking. No offense.
Back in the mid eighties there was some guy on OPB radio saying how if you took the entire population of the World and crammed them all together in one area with the population density of Hong Kong, you could fit everyone in the World in a place the size of the state of Maryland. The State and Federal Governments are hoarding millions of acres of vacant land.
The Homeless have been herded onto the city sidewalks. The emancipated American Negro Slave received forty acres and a mule. Instead of welfare and jail, how about just granting land deeds to those in need?
As for the Forecourt Fountain, the architect publicly announced that it’s designed for people to wade in, and the City shit a conniption fit, but had to relent due to public demand.
I mean it. Why shell out shitloads of tax payer booty to house the homeless for not paying tickets for sleeping on dogshit in the park, when there are millions of acres of vacant land everywhere, outside city limits, where a man might start out living in a tent and have the opportunity to raise some crops for food and trade, keep a few chickens for eggs, and maybe a milk cow? Then you would have a contributing member of society in general, while at the same time, out of your way.
@bigteninch Many people who live on the streets and who congregate toward the center of town rely on healthcare and social services that’re to be found there and not in the middle of no where. Pushing them out of town is a convenient tactic for getting rid of those people, but it doesn’t really deal with their problems or the problem their being on the street represents for us as a society.
It’s also ridiculous to suggest that people go just live off the land when we are systematically denied any knowledge about how to do that. Pay no mind to the fact either that living off the land as an individual producer is a ludicrous fantasy that has no grounding in the social realities that individuals of this species rely on.
Don’t go banishing the great unwashed into the forest as if of Nottingham. Of course not. How about resuming the recently defunct program of claiming vacant land? Just make it an option for Americans who want the opportunity. Just because most people have been made weak and dependent by social engineering, doesn’t mean that it has succeeded in destroying everybody’s character.
My grandpa was a farmer who was born and raised on Durham Road, now Tigard, making a living his entire life by rotating crops of wheat and oats on fifty acres. The great depression had negligible impact on the family. My mother always wore cashmere sweaters.
This article missed the elephant in the room. There’s another artificial housing bubble being blown by some of the same banks and real estate companies who caused the last crash.
Another telling statistic is ownership rates, which are at historic lows.
Stock market is the your new landlord!!!
The rental bond market is the fastest growing segment of the housing investment market.
There’s a glut of over-priced single family rental homes. Craigslist is full of them and they’re growing in numbers.
These companies are getting into cash bidding wars over homes, sometimes over bidding by as much as 35% in Portland. How are first time home buyers suppose to compete with that?