Housing Jan 24, 2018 at 4:00 am

But as City Council Prepares to Reconsider, a New Study Suggests Thousands of Tenants Are at Risk

Comments

1
Candice Aiston, a transplant who moved to Portland from Hawaii in 2006 (from the bio on her website), thus increasing Portland's population and contributing to the housing crisis. Which lower-income tenant did Candice displace when she moved here?

And this is a ludicrous power grab by the renter class, given they have no data on the financial status of those small-time landlords, many of whom are on fixed income and have their rental property as their sole source of additional non-Social Security income, and represents the majority, if not all, of their personal retirement savings. The relocation ordinance does not take into account the financial status of the landlord or the tenant, so you could get some old lady on a fixed income having to make a relocation payment to an asshole tenant who makes well into the six figures and could afford to move most anywhere else in Portland.

After all, the folks renting entire houses are clearly making enough dough to, you know, rent entire houses, and had to demonstrate qualifying income for such, which means their financial position cannot be that bad to begin with.
2
Yeah the Relo Ordinance is basically a total failure for affordability and neighborhood stability. Mercury needs to report on that.

It's caused rents to increase where they normally would not have, has caused court judgements for for-cause evictions to increase, has caused many affordable units to be taken off the market as owners are selling as a preemptive strike to flippers, high income home buyers and tear down developers; and lower income renters still can't find affordable rentals they can afford even with a relo check, and those folks keep getting pushed further & further to the fringes.
3
Yes, ES Reach, exactly right, particularly the last part - how does a relo check do anything when in order to qualify for a new rental you have to demonstrate a certain income level? The only thing that is ever going to address this crisis in a meaningful way, rather than confer a windfall to current renters at the expense of everyone else (well, those current renters not seeing a 9.99% increase or now facing a for-cause eviction that will permanently affect their ability to rent going forward versus a no-cause eviction that won't show up on their record), is to drastically increase the supply of housing.

I remember prior to the boom of the past 10+ years having to actually lower advertised rent and/or offer incentives to get tenants into units because the vacancy rate was much higher, and so landlords had to actually compete. Now it is the opposite situation. This is not complicated, we don't need rent control that has been proven to fail and have negative external consequences over and over again. We need more supply to balance out the supply/demand dynamic. Unfortunately, Chloe Eudaly, PTU, and the other grifters simply want a short-term solution that will benefit themselves - they aren't interested in data or doing the hard policy work it actually takes to solve an issue like this.

I should also add the idiot "renter rights" advocate crowd is not the only ones to blame - there is plenty of blame to be cast at the feet of Portland's NIMBY crowd, most of whom profess to be liberal, but don't want new housing or density that would help with affordability because it would impact their home values or precious bucolic lifestyle.

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