S tr e e t R o o ts • O c t. 1 6 - 2 2 , 2 0 1 5
Commentary
BY JOHN MULVEY
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Tohn Mulvey
M u h u n t was a
_ member
____-L . o e f - the
..
-
—
John
Lents
Town
Center Urban Renewal Advisory Committee
from 2 0 0 7 to 2012, a n d a contributing writer
friends. The effects reach into every area of
our city’s life, from the educational impacts
of uprooting our kids from one school to
™ ghl>orlm>‘1 bl°e fro m
Oi l to 2014. He s been homeless since
another, to the diminishing air quality that
February.
comes from the extended commutes of the
working poor.
Recognizing the unprecedented scale of
Portland’s housing problem, the city’s
Renters’ State of Emergency in the city.
Housing Advisory Commission recently
Escalating rents have displaced long-term
recommended that the city and the Portland
renters from their homes and made large
Development Commission direct 50 percent
areas of the city unaffordable to all but the
of all urban renewal spending to support
highest-income Portlanders.
affordable housing. We support that
Even people making middksclass incomes proposal and call on the mayor and City
have been feeling these impacts. According
Council to enact i t
to the City’s 2015 State of Housing report,
By any metric, the current commitment
single mothers earning the median income
of 30 percent has been inadequate to
have almost no chance of renting a home
address the problem. Taking just one
with more than one bedroom in Portland
example, in the Lents Town Center Urban
today.
Renewal Area, PDC claims to have funded
For people of color, the situation becomes 135 affordable rental units - a meager total
of only eight units per year over the 17
much worse. The same report shows that in
years since the urban renewal àrea was
almost every neighborhood in the city, a
created.
median-income black household can’t afford
And even those numbers are inflated and
to rent anything bigger than a studio
misleading. The PDC’s figure includes 31
apartm ent There are only two of Portland’s
affordable units at the Greenview
95 neighborhoods where median-income
Apartments at Southeast 148th Avenue and
Native American households can afford a
Stark Street - a project that is two miles
studio apartm ent
away from the Lents Town Center and
And very low-income people have no
which received no TIF funding.
affordable, private housing options left
T I T I
V-/
fba.nDrenf wal ® the most powerful
tool Portland has to direct
development in the ways that we as
a community w an t Without i t we are at the
mercy of private forces that we can’t
control. But when we harness the resources
of urfian renewal, we Portlanders are able to
put development to use to address the
community’s needs.
Since the adoption of Oregon’s urban
renewal law in 1957, the.program has done
some amazing things and some horrible
things. In the 1960s, clearing the “slums”
that were the vibrant centers of Portland’s
African-American and immigrant
communities was a tragedy for the cultural
life of our city. But urban renewal dollars
were also a vital part of creating the modern
transit system that today makes Portland a
world leader in the movement away from
carbon fuels.
These examples show that urban renewal,
and its revenue-generating mechanism of
tax-increment financing (TIF), can do good
or it can do bad, depending on how we and
our elected leaders direct i t
We believe that current conditions dictate
that our city again reprioritize TIF funding
and direct it to where it’s most desperately
needed: affordable rental housing.
anywhere in the city.
Portland today is in the midst of a crisis
in housing affordability. Last week, the
Community Alliance of Tenants declared a
The crisis is tearing apart the character
of our community, while inflicting pain, '
humiliation and stress on our neighbors and
Town centers like Lents are where we as
a community are hoping to see resid en tial
growth, an^ w e Ye m ade significant public
in vestm en ts th ere to accom m odate that
growth. As a result, the Foster/Lents area
has become one of the fastest-growing parts
of the city. We all have the right to ask why
the development of affordable hopsing
hasn’t kept pace.
A Housing Bureau analysis shows Lents
and the surrounding neighborhoods as
particularly vulnerable to gentrification and
displacement in the next few years. As a
community, will we learn from our mistakes
and act now before it is too late, or will we
replay what happened on the Williams/
Vancouver corridor along Foster?
To be sure, increasing the TIF set-aside
won t, by itself, fix the housing emergency
in Portland. The crisis demands a. concerted
effort along multiple fronts, including
reasonable regulations on private rentals,
commitment of new resources, and stepped-
up efforts to remove misguided state
preemption laws such as the one prohibiting
inclusionary zoning.
And without a doubt our mayor and
council must demand more public
accountability and transparency in how
affordable housing funds from urban renewal
are allocated and accounted for.
But right now we as a city have only one
significant source of public dollars dedicated
to affordable housing: urban renewal. When
we as a city commit to creating and funding
urban renewal areas, we have every right to
insist that those public resources benefit
the broader community and serve our whole
community’s goals. In our fast-changing city,
th ere is n o m ore critical public g o a l th a n
ensuring affordable rental housing.
C a re O re g o rr
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