There’s a newly published article in The Atlantic today by Alana Semuels that takes a hard, and not entirely flattering, look at Portland and how we’re dealing with our current housing crisis. It’s called “Can Portland Avoid Repeating San Francisco’s Mistakes?” and here’s an excerpt:
It’s all the newcomers, some say. They’re driving prices up and they’re pushing long-time residents out. They’re why Portland was determined by Governing magazine to be the place in the country with the most gentrification over the last decade.
But that narrative isn’t quite right. Portland prices are skyrocketing, yes. And newcomers are generally the type of people who want to live in the center of the city, near transit and bike lanes, which drives up prices for those areas. But it’s not tech or newcomers that are solely to blame. Portland hasn’t been able to slow its rental crisis because in a city that prides itself on progressivism, many of the traditional tools used to create more affordability are off the table.
“I think that there’s a general sense that Portland is progressive enough to be assumed to be doing the right thing, and that’s not the case,” Cameron Herrington, the anti-displacement coordinator at Living Cully, a coalition of neighborhood groups in Northeast Portland, told me.
While the article speaks of some the measures Portland has taken to alleviate the problem—the city allowing temporary homeless shelters, extending no-cause eviction notices to 90 days, and millions set aside to go to affordable housing—seemingly liberal neighborhoods are blocking efforts to create density.
But there has been pushback on these efforts, too. Many Portlanders say they don’t want more density in their neighborhoods, that they oppose big housing complexes and in-law units in neighbors’ backyards. (There is a similar attitude evident in some San Francisco residents’ responses to that city’s housing crisis.) Some neighborhoods are actually trying to downzone to decrease density.
“There are limits to white urban liberalism,” Justin Buri, the executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, tells me. “When it comes to housing and schools, all of that goes out the window.”
A brief look at your local NextDoor site shows this anti-density mentality in full effect. Anyway, this is a very interesting article that carries a different tone than the “Rah-rah, move to Portland, quick!” articles we’ve seen in the past. READ ALL OF IT HERE.
Maybe they can follow it up with another tough article exploring the issues and controversies surrounding the other crucial issue that the city is facing, specifically the fact that Portland’s new fire chief really likes kissing.
As I have said here before, hating Californians because your rent is too high is about ten IQ points stupider than hating Mexicans because your job doesn’t pay enough. I’m certainly glad to be vindicated by The Atlantic, though I would have thought this information too obvious to need seconding.
Your package of renters’ rights—or rather complete lack thereof—is, and was always, a recipe for an unstable rental market. That bomb has been sitting there ticking for a long time.
And here’s San Francisco:
SF: OMG WE NEED MORE HOUSING
DEVELOPER: Hey, I think I’ll build some
SF: OH NO YOU DON’T
As disastrous as this model has proved, Portland seems bent on imitating it. If you want a Portland that somewhat resembles the Portland you love, density is what you need, and some new apartment buildings are what it looks like. If you want an ultra-precious, cutesy-poo mini-Frisco that virtually no one can afford, surrounded by a dismal Orange County of sprawl, keep it up with the NIMBYism.
Seeing this stupid nativism from Republican hicks in Georgia is par for the course. Seeing it from progressives in Portland who’ve done such a superb job of urban planning so far is depressing on a personal level, and also depressing because it is pretty much guaranteed to make the problem worse.
What torkfool said.
Republican types built this great city of ours and you all just bitch about it.