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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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