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Street roots
Aug. 30, 2013
Metro: Planning for Park Place
Street Roots looks at the Convention Center Hotel, years o f affordable housing planning
BY JAKE THOMAS
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
Metro, the regional government for the tri
county area, has long known that the region
has a problem: Rents are soaring, there is a
real lack of affordable housing and low-
income families and individuals are being
concentrated in pockets of poverty.
A 2009 analysis from Metro forecasted that
the percentage of renter households that pay
more than half their income on housing and
transportation due to high housing costs
could rise as high as 70 percent by 2030.
Metro is gearing up to invest taxpayer
money on some shelter, but not for people
who are struggling with surging rents.
Instead, Metro is spearheading a controversial
effort to build a brand new hotel in hopes
that it will bring larger conventions to the
Oregon Convention Center, which is also
owned and operated by the agency.
M e t r o d o e s n ’t g e t m u c h a t t e n t i o n . I t ’ s a n
agency that looks at maps, analyzes data and
quietly shapes how the region grows. Metro
serves 1.5 million residents and 25
municipalities in Washington, Multnomah
and Clackamas counties. It was created in
1979 to handle regional issues. It’s charged
with planning growth for the tri-county area
under the state’s land-use laws, overseeing
waste management and operating the zoo, in
addition to a network of parks and natural
areas.
Now the agency wants to add one more
project to its plate: helping finance a new
private hotel. According to the agency, 60
percent of the new $197.5 million 600-room
hotel will be funded with an investment from
Hyatt Hotels, which will run the new facility,
along with its partners. The remaining funds
will come in the form of a $4 million
investment from Metro, a $4 million loan
from the Portland Development Commission
(the City of Portland’s development arm),
$10 million in recently secured lottery funds
and a $60 million bond that will be paid off
with taxes generated by the new hotel. Metro
Council has voted to approve the financing
package, which now awaits approval from
Multnomah County, the City of Portland and
the Portland Development Commission.
Metro’s reasoning behind the project is
that without an accompanying hotel, the
convention center will struggle to attract
large conventions and out-of-town attendees
who will spend money at local businesses.
“A convention center hotel will attract
thousands of new visitors who will support
thousands of new jobs,” said Metro President
Tom Hughes, in a statement heralding the
legislature’s allocation of the lottery money.
“Those jobs will create about $5 to $6 million
in new state tax revenues per year that will
help support schools, public safety, and other
important public structures and services
throughout Oregon.”
In approving financing for the hotel, Metro
councilors stressed that the project won’t
take money from social services. However,
the project is still drawing opposition.
Competing hotels have formed a group called
“Our Unfortunate Convention Hotel”
(OUCH), which argues that there’s a good
chance that the
new hotel will
fail to attract
l a r g e
c o n v e n tio n s ,
leaving
the
public on the
hook. The group
is planning on
referring
the
project to voters
for approval.
There’s little
d is a g r e e m e n t
about the need
for affordable
housing.
And
while Metro has
made
serious
attempts in the past to increase affordable
housing in the region, it often hasn’t been
able to muster the political will to follow
through on them. The reasons why reveal
much about the nature of Metro and it’s
priorities, as well as the state of affordable
housing in the area today.
“The pattern of studies and research and
actually no changes (on affordable housing)
happening has been incredibly frustrating to
me,” says Sam Chase, who worked .in
community development and on housing
policy before being elected to Metro Council
in 2012, of past efforts by the agency to spur
the creation of more affordable housing.
Robert Liberty, a former Metro councilor
who now serves as the director of Portland
State University’s Urban Sustainability
Accelerator, says some communities have
done more to develop affordable housing
while others have intentionally kept it out,
c r e a tin g
p o c k e ts
of
co n c e n tr a te d
p o v erty
actions to address rising housing costs. What
resulted was perhaps the strongest, yet most
controversial action Metro has taken to date
to increase affordable housing in the region.
In the late 1990s, Metro set “fair share”
affordable housing goals for counties and
cities under the agency’s purview. If local
jurisdictions didn’t meet their targets under
the plan, Metro retained the right to impose
inclusionary zoning, requirements that
housing developers build housing for
households of modest means in addition to
market-rate housing.
The new requirements en local jurisdictions
from Metro, says Burkholder, were a
response
to
very
deliberate
and
discriminatory efforts from Portland’s
suburbs meant to keep out low-income
people.
The cities of Gresham and Hillsboro, joined
by Clackamas County, sued Metro over the
new requirements. Metro responded by
softening its affordable housing mandate,
while retaining the right to impose affordable
housing requirements on municipalities and
counties if they didn’t meet specific goals.
“A lot of it was, we’re all white and wealthy.
Why would you make us change?” says
Burkholder of the backlash from the suburbs
to the new requirements.
Home builders became so spooked that
Metro, or other government entities in
Oregon, would begin requiring them to build
affordable housing that they took their
concerns to the legislature. In 1999, the
home builder’s lobby successfully persuaded
Oregon lawmakers to ban Metro or any local
government from requiring that affordable
housing be built along with market-rate
housing.
"It e n d e d u p b e i n g a r e a l disaster,” says
Burkholder, of the backlash against Metro’s
affordable housing mandate. He also says it
made the agency very reluctant to take
regulatory approaches to the issue. Metro’s
affordable housing requirem ents soon
became aspirational goals, he says.
However, Burkholder says that these early
efforts to increase affordable housing had
some success. He points out that Metro
successfully prohibited local governments
that can pose a burden to schools and keep
people from jobs. This issue, he says, is a
regional one that should concern Metro.
“It’s interesting, the amount of time and
energy Metro has put into the convention
center hotel compared to housing choice,”
says Liberty, who saw a considerable amount
of staff work dedicated to the hotel project
before he left the council in 2011. “The
question is, which is more important?” he
asks
“Metro has studied affordable housing a
few times and has collected volumes of data
about affordable housing in the region, and
they feel that it is not central, but peripheral,
to their mission,” says Martha McLennan,
the executive director of affordable housing
provider Northwest Housing Alternatives.
“They’re more worried about waste,
transportation and land use. Affordable
housing is needed to make all these things
succeed, and they haven’t perceived it as
being dead-center in their mission.”
McLennan says that the lack of affordable
housing could start having more of an effect
on businesses, as well as the work force. For
example, she says, if someone works in Lake
Oswego and lives in another city because of
housing costs — having to take time off to
attend to a sick child, they will likely be gone
from their job much longer than if they were
able to live closer to their work.
Metro has been concerned with housing
issues, in some form or another, since the
CO URTESY OF M ETR O .
agency was founded. The issue of housing A rendering o f the Convention Center hotel.
affordability took on more prominence for
Metro as property values rose sharply during from playing musical chairs with zoning plans
the housing boom of the 1990s and early. to prevent multifamily housing, which tends
2000s. Metro planning documents from that to be more affordable, from being built.
time identify the housing market as a regional Metro also made it easier to build accessory
issue that falls under the agency’s purview. dwelling units, or “granny flats,” which are
Documents from this time period also call for small living units often built in the backyards
policies aimed at increasing the stock of of homes, he says.
Following Metro’s ill-fated attempt to
affordable housing throughout the region -
but they don’t say much about building a new require that affordable housing be built, the
agency began emphasizing more voluntary
hotel.
Rex Burkholder says the Coalition for a approaches toward the issue. In 2000, Metro
Livable Future, an alliance of environmental Council approved recommendations from a
and social justice groups he helped found task force charged with developing a regional
before being elected to Metro Council in ,
See M e tro , page 4
r
2000, began pushing for Metro to take strong h o u s i n g