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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 6, 2015)
PAGE 10 | February 6, 2015 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS How Portland-area growth management may be keeping unions strong By Greg LeRoy Editor’s note: Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, is a national expert on cor- porate tax breaks, and an advo- cate for making economic de- velopment subsidies more accountable and effective. On Jan. 13, he published an article in Shelterforce, the publication of the National Housing Insti- tute, arguing that urban density may actually contribute to union density. The article looks at At- lanta, Denver, and Portland. The Portland section draws on the insights of Bob Shiprack, for- mer executive secretary-trea- surer of the Oregon State Build- ing and Construction Trades Council, and is excerpted below, with permission. You can see the complete article online at http://bit.ly/1Bq4oYF Touring Portland with Bob Shiprack in his pickup is like taking a class in labor and land use all at once. He’s the imme- diate past president of the Ore- gon State Building and Con- struction trades Council, an electrician by trade, and a retired state senator. Shiprack draws a direct con- nection between Oregon’s Ur- ban Growth Boundary legisla- tion and the building trades’ resurgence there. Shiprack re- calls how when he was young, Portland’s downtown suffered vacancies and abandonment. The trades grew weak as con- struction work in developing suburbs favored anti-union con- tractors. That all changed after the late 1970s, when the state enacted a statewide land use planning law, requiring every city or town to designate an Ur- ban Growth Boundary, or UGB, outside of which farms and open space would be preserved. To- day, 240 urban areas in Oregon have UGBs preserving rural lands while providing for grad- ual, well-planned growth. The Portland UGB forced de- velopment away from the fringes and back downtown and into other neglected areas. The trades had strength from the mostly local contractors who won the work, and the urban work was more labor intensive than the sprawl: It was more ver- tical and often meant redevelop- ment (i.e., demolition before construction or gutting before rehabilitation) rather than new construction. Portland-area residents rein- forced the UGB benefits with smart regional planning and transit reforms. In 1979, they voted to create a three-county metropolitan planning organiza- tion (Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties). “Metro” serves 25 cities with 1.5 million residents and is the only organization of its kind in the United States with directly elected leaders. Metro elections help educate voters about re- gionalism. And Metro is a model of how to avoid “frac- tured governance,” a root cause of sprawl. (The Chicago metro area, by contrast, has 1,250 local taxing bodies and sprawling, tax-base chaos.) As downtown Portland recov- ered, the trades deployed their own workers’ capital. Areas like the Brewery Block and South Waterfront were jumpstarted with construction financing and equity investments from the trades’ pension funds. National vehicles such as the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust and Building Investment Trust, J for Jobs, and the Union Labor Life Insurance Company also in- vested, always stipulating that construction be 100 percent union. Over time, almost half a bil- lion dollars of Oregon building trades’ pension assets were in- vested in the Portland area, Shiprack explains, creating a virtuous cycle of good construc- tion jobs generating retirement contributions, which in turn fi- nanced more construction. The pension funds still own numer- ous buildings in Portland, gen- erating solid returns for retire- ment income as real estate rents and values appreciated thanks to Oregon’s UGB policy. Portland also benefited from the region’s unified transit agency, TriMet, which was cre- ated to take over the service of five private bus companies in 1969. With the UGB creating higher population density, tran- sit service became better-used and TriMet added four light rail lines, a commuter rail line, a trolley and downtown streetcar. Constructing this public infra- structure was mostly unionized, prevailing wage work. But resurgent private con- struction is what really drove the trades’ recovery. More transit service begat more transit-ori- ented development, and the trades organized most of it. As the trades have in a handful of states, Shiprack’s member unions won the extension of pre- vailing wage coverage to private construction when it was subsi- dized by tax increment financ- ing, or TIF, first in Portland then in state statute. “It was contentious at first with the mayor,” Shiprack re- calls, “but we wanted all the jobs to be good jobs.” Combining all these policies, the trades in Portland regained high density. The most recent survey for non-residential con- struction work in the three- county metro area found 59 per- cent being performed union, with more specialized crafts such as sheet metal workers (70 percent), plumbers and pipefit- ters (77 percent) and electricians (83 percent) even higher. 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Ads should be 15 to 20 words, all in lower case (NO CAPITAL LETTERS). Ads must include a phone number, including area code, or they will not be published. No commercial or business ads. HOW TO SUBMIT A CLASSIFIED AD Indicate which union you are a member of, and send your ad to michael492@comcast.net or by mail to PO Box 13150, Portland OR 97213. We publish the first and third Fridays of each month, and the deadline is one week prior to that.
