Portland City Council today approved the largest affordable housing project the city’s seen in five decades, a 12-story, 240-unit development in one of Portland’s most desirable areas. It was far more tense than you would expect.
Once it’s finished in 2019, the project in question—known for now as Block 45 and located at Northeast Grand and Hassalo—will inject hundreds of affordable units into the booming Lloyd District, near streetcar and MAX lines and a short distance from the city center. But as council considered an ordinance [PDF] approving $5.1 million in urban renewal money (and dedicating land) to leverage tens of millions of dollars from other sources, two questions served as sticking points: Is Block 45’s price tag too high, and will it run contrary to the city’s brand-new emphasis on housing homeless residents?
Most persistent on the latter question was Commissioner Nick Fish, who in recent months has pushed for a renewed focus on so-called “supportive housing.” That model combines extremely affordable rents with intensive social services, and is aimed at getting chronically homeless individuals off the street. In a vote last month, City Council ordered up a study on strategies for creating 2,000 units of this housing over the next decade, an effort that could cost $300 million.
The council commitment to supportive housing came very late in the process for the Block 45 development, which was awarded to local housing authority Home Forward in early 2016, and which is already designed. The development includes plans for setting aside 20 units for domestic violence survivors at deeply affordable rates (set at 30 percent or less of the area’s median family income), but it hasn’t reserved supportive units for the homeless. That bugged Fish, who threatened to vote against the project.
“This is the first project out of the box and we’re already experiencing the problem I anticipated: We’re going to lose an opportunity because of some other compelling use,” Fish said. “We now have a policy saying we’re going to hit 200 [supportive units] a year and we’re going to miss an opportunity in this project to hit one.”
Mayor Ted Wheeler, who oversees the Portland Housing Bureau, suggested Fish might be getting ahead of himself.
“The [supportive housing] strategy is being ironed out as we speak, per the resolution we all supported,” Wheeler said. “I’ve heard nothing to suggest this project cannot be included.”
Still Fish succeeded in winning an amendment to council’s approval of the project, which orders housing officials to return to council with a proposal for including supportive housing in the development. Funding would have to be identified for such housing.
The next question came from Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who wondered at the project’s $74 million price tag. Even removing price of building the ground-floor commercial spaces Block 45 anticipates, the cost reaches more than $281,600 per unit. That’s well above the roughly $200,000 per unit mulled under Portland’s recently passed housing bond, and far higher than the $100,000 per unit some housing developers have said they can build for (though project-to-project comparisons are fraught because of the many differences that can arise).
“I think the number one question is going to be the price tag,” Eudaly said, asking “why the per-unit cost appears to be so much higher than what were anticipating for our housing bond units.”
Wheeler, too, had alluded to potential backlash over the price tag. Earlier in the hearing he made a point of noting that the city’s $5.1 million investment would be leveraged more than 10 times by other funding sources in the project.
“I want to keep that front and center—10 to 1 leverage,” Wheeler said. “I know there is a lot of back of the envelope scribbling going on as a result of the total cost you mentioned in exchange for permanent affordability.”
The housing bureau and Home Forward defended the costs. They say the price tag is reasonable for a well-built, environmentally conscious building in the heart of the city.
“At a flagship location. on streetcar, on a site worth $3 million—We think for the next 100 years that’s a good investment and we’re willing to standby those numbers,” housing bureau Director Kurt Creager said.
Fish went even further. In other public projects, “I never remember someone getting up and saying: ‘I object to quality. I object to planning for the long term. Cant we go cheap? Can’t we find some way to make it look crummy?'” Fish said. “Why is it that when we build something that houses low-income people, all of the sudden cost becomes the big issue?”
Now that city funding is approved (along with $500,000 from Multnomah County), the Block 45 project will rush to close. Home Forward needs to lock in terms by December 31 to get a favorable price for tax credits it plans to sell to fund a sizable portion of the project. There’s also a more-fundamental concern. As we reported this week, congressional Republicans have signaled a willingness to wipe out some of the tax credits Block 45 and other projects are relying on. As a result, Home Forward and other housing providers around the country are scrambling to finalize deals before potential chaos strikes.
Once built, the Block 45 project will feature 240 units priced at or below 60 percent of the area’s median family income. Here’s the breakdown.
If you watched the hearing, during his ramble on the “quality” issue, Fish said something along the lines of how poor and homeless people should have the right to choose to live in really nice housing. Is he fucking kidding us? Now the “housing is a human right” has turned into “luxury condos in the heart of a major high-demand city is a human right”? What a huge slap in the face to every middle and lower middle class person who has busted their ass to afford a shitty piece of an outer Portland neighborhood, that all of a sudden it’s supposed to be a “right” for slightly lower income folks to leapfrog them and be plopped in the lap of luxury because…? I don’t even know because why. It’s insane.
The talk about quality should only occur in the context of durability and longevity of the building and its units. And given how desirable (and therefore expensive) this piece of land would be on the open market, it’s criminal that they are undervaluing it for the purposes of “affordable” housing when they should sell it and use the profit to buy a couple bigger parcels farther out along a transit corridor so they could build many more units with the available resources we have. Instead, a handful of ultra lucky low-income individuals are going to live like kings while every other low and middle income person in Portland watches in disgust.
Also, how do they pick the lucky ducks who will get to live there? Because presumably there will be upwards of 10k or more people who both qualify and want to be in one of those units. Please god tell me it will be a random lottery process, and not something where we find out a couple years down the road that they were all parceled out by Eudaly to her friends over Facebook messenger in violation of not only the public records laws but a host of other laws as well. It’s totally the type of thing that arrogant doofus would do.
If the places downtown are to judge by, then those who really devote themselves to it are those who get them. Sure a good number of genuinely disabled and in need are helped by it, but the system is definitely clogged as it is a system reliant on providing help instead of options, ergo you have a number of people intentionally making themseslves helpless. In between it all is agencies like homeforward happily lending a hand and sending out bubble sheet surveys asking if people need help. Check mark yes, okay lets go to city hall and get some money.
The politicians know it is a losing equation favoring only temporarily a select few. They just don’t care because by the time anything they vote on comes to fruition most people have forgotten about it.
Durability is not all that should be considered, but even if it were we’re doing a laughable job at it; see all that plywood making the walls of all these places? 5-8% glue. Their even using OSB board for flooring now. Particle board for trim, plastic flooring, drywall everything, made in china appliances. This is even the million dollar condos. I know a few places constructed within the last 3 years already getting mold.
Economically this cheap construction we think works in our favor because it produces more housing quickly, but housing has been the leading source of inequality for the last half century – right about the time technology and materials started rapidly changing how quickly and easily we can build things.. Everyone gets hung up on that supply-demand stuff but obviously in the bigger picture there is something seriously missing in that equation this is simply planting bad seeds.
I don’t need to be an economist to tell you something is off and this is a lopsided trade. The developer is still going to get their investment while workers get less work out of it. All the while the people are left with rotting and plastic buildings and rents that keep going up like they do in every other town because doing more of the same does not produce different results.
If one of them had a spine they’d call it what it is and stop trying to give people what they cannot afford at the expense of everyone else, provide actual options and create what are actually affordable alternatives so people can make for themselves, and sit back and let people figure out that they either do that or live outside.
And if people had their head anywhere but up their entitled a*** they’d ask for something other than more of the same for everyone whether they can afford it or not, or settle for simply saying, “that is just the way it is so move elsewhere”. That line of thinking does not explain the plain and simple fact that there was a time when things were not like this, nor what exactly changed and how we can affect it.
I’m from the Chicago area. “Projects” like this are not a good idea, ever. We figured this out 30 years ago, and despite the bleating of the baby boomers in the suburbs, managed to get rid of nightmare hellhole poor-people containment cubes like Cabrini Green. (I am aware that Chicago has many problems, thanks)
It takes a rarefied clutch of totally isolated, coddled, inane, self-fellating local pols with graduate degrees in the worst kind of circle-jerk poli sci to think that putting poor people in giant tower blocks is a solution to escalating housing problems, or is in any way a new concept, despite whatever white paper the initiator of this terrible, old-fashioned housing project (what a loaded word) might have crapped out at Vassar for a B-.
Way to go Portland — your milquetoast, limp-dick scumbag mayor wants to put the homeless in *old jails and actual warehouses*, and the people who make you your quinoa bowls in *actual projects*, while your batshit old lady city councillor Amanda Fucking Nutbag Fritz gives waivers to her pals in real estate development to build condos so tall they block everyone’s view of the river.
So progressive.
Oh hey look a food cart and a man with odd facial hair and wooden-framed spectacles! Never mind everything is a-ok, ha ha wooden frames, how novel
The numbers at the bottom of the article only refer to income restrictions, but say nothing about how much rent will be charged. It would be more helpful if you listed the income restriction for an individual who wants to apply for a studio apartment. (roughly 38K by my calculations) and then list how much that individual would be paying in rent.
Also it doesn’t make any sense that median FAMILY income would be used to calculate the cost for a studio that would presumably house one person. Is there such a thing as median INDIVIDUAL income? That would make more sense I think.