Housing Jan 31, 2018 at 4:00 am

Now, Mayor Ted Wheeler Wants to Offer a Sweeter Deal

Comments

1
Don’t build affordable housing, build standard housing, market rate. Government owned, use the profits for low income assistance programs but don’t force low income people to live in certain areas and Don’t give tax breaks to landlords it just isolates the poor. Why can’t Portland officials see that....
2
Ted Wheeler = Tool of developers.
3
Euphonius = Ignorant moron who has never priced out a housing development project in his life.

IH requirements make the project more expensive to build. It is subsidizing lower income folks solely on the backs of developers (and the other renters/owners in that unit, as the market rate prices will have to be higher to pay for the lower prices of the "affordable" units). We should simply be spreading out the subsidizing to all taxpayers, and specifically build city-owned housing that is subsidized, or let private developers build higher and denser (and with fewer parking requirements) to add supply - we are already seeing rents softening as more supply has come online, and guess what, all of the recent supply has been market rate (or "luxury" if you're a whiner). No sense in putting up extra road blocks to a proven formula.
4
gosh, turns out that no matter how you try to contort it, the free market is a terrible tool for providing human beings with the things human beings need to survive. once again, i am shocked.

tax the rich and build public housing. it isn't complicated.
5
@publichousingplz Thing is, it's not even close to a free market, because zoning itself is a massive government intervention. Zoning is good when it keeps a lead-spewing factory away from a school zone. Zoning is not good when it is used to protect the property values of the folks who already have their property and don't like more people or traffic. "The market" can certainly work with the proper regulations, or lack thereof, we just need different priorities than currently exist with the loud NIMBYs on the one side and the perpetually ignorant "rent control" crowd on the other side. But yes, you are correct that building public housing is definitely a large part of the solution.
6
Geez, what a clod. No matter what policy is discussed, you can always expect that some fanatic Reaganomics true believer will post (a lot) about how dumb everyone else is.

Sorry, dope. Go back to Texas or whatever "free market" heaven you imagine will be so wonderful. Adults who know more than you are too busy to indulge you right now.
7
Supply and demand isn't "Reaganomics," you uneducated dolt, it's a basic fundamental premise of economics generally. Reaganomics was supply side, which in this scenario would actually mean building a bunch of new housing and expecting demand will follow. We have the opposite, where there is a tremendous demand but not enough supply, hence the high prices. You know who supplies housing? It's not the magic housing fairy, it's fucking developers. That's what they do. They develop housing. There are good developers and bad developers, but every single housing unit in the city, including whatever shithole you presumably live in, was created by a developer, and 99% of it was all originally created at market rate.

Is Tokyo a conservative/Reagan shithole to you? Because that's an example of a city where reducing regulations on what housing could be built on any given parcel has resulted in continued affordability despite both economic and population growth.

Euphonius, the reason you frequently see people in comments threads where you are involved talk about people being dumb is because you shit up every comments thread with your dumb dumbness, dummy. They're all talking about you, specifically. You are the dumb one.
8
The market works and the city distorting the market makes things worse.
Subisidizng housing (affordable is in quotes for a reason. It means subsidizing in this 1984. It wouldn't be built if it wasn't affordable) makes housing more expensive. Stupid spiral downward because maybe a few people are helped but mostly everyone is hurt by increasing prices.
9
Dirk,
Explain how "there’s still ambiguity as to whether IH or other market forces are the key reason" when the change in developers seeking permits dropped to zero for the 8 months after February 1, 2017? Is it reasonable to deny that the IH regulations are directly responsible for the lack of development?
10
Don't forget that this policy is also making all non-subsidized rents higher by limiting delivery of market-rate units. Before you spout off about inclusionary zoning, please do some research. IZ has a set of winners (those who qualify and are fortunate to get scarce affordable units, income property owners who don't have affordable units and get to enjoy rising rents, and existing home owners who see home values increase due to a crushing rental market) and a set of losers (pretty much everyone else, but particularly market-rate renters). Mandatory IZ works in very robust housing markets (major California cities, Seattle, DC, Boston) where the rents are high enough to offset building costs and rent loss due to IZ. But Portland's rents aren't high enough, and the city made the set-aside too aggressive. You can't just tell developers to build affordable units and assume that they will take the increased risk because you told them to. Only a child would think that would work.

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