Street Roots • Jan. 22-28, 2016
C o m m e n ta ry
Page 12
Portland must plan for healthy, diverse neighborhoods
BY JOHN MULVEY
ortland’s housing crisis needs
immediate action to help people who
are struggling. But it also requires
longer-term strategies that will undo the
decades of structural neglect that our city,
state and federal leadership - and us,
collectively - have allowed to happen.
Portland needs to plan for a more
equitably housed city.
Portland became a national leader in the
1990s and 2000s for its enlightened city
planning. We’re a city with walkable
neighborhoods, great parks and the best
bike system anywhere. The result is that the
children of the nation’s wealthy are arriving
here every day to purchase a piece, price
seemingly no object.
The people who planned the city we have
today, and the public who supported and
paid for it, didn’t pay sufficient attention to
housing as an element of their city of the
future. What was once called the “most
European city in America” is in the Stone
Ages compared to the great cities of Europe
and the moral responsibility they’ve always
accepted for sheltering their people.
Portland is currently considering its
Comprehensive Plan, which will regulate
how the city grows over the next 20 years.
There’s a draft, and the public has been
B
commenting on various aspects of it for
many months. Now there will he another
draft and the City Council will tinker with it
for the next six months or so before passing
it this summer.
Portland isn’t planning for
multifamily development
One big problem with the draft plan is
that it doesn’t include enough places that
are zoned for multi-unit development, which
is where a large number of the Portlanders
of the future are expected to live.
At a Comprehensive Plan public hearing
at Parkrose High School last month, local
developer Eli Spevak raised this concern.
Presenting a historical analysis of zoning
changes in inner southeast Portland, Spevak
showed the council how the first zoning
ordinance from 1923 allowed multi-unit
development in almost all of the area.
“That’s why so much of Southeast
Portland is built out with small plexes and
things like that - because it was legal to put
them all over Southeast Portland,” Spevak
said.
Referring to the colors used on the
current map, Spevak compared today’s
include a requirement for affordable housing they won’t be significantly hurt by this bill.
We created a great city to live in. A
and to prohibit cities from using zoning to
program like inclusionary zoning can
effectively redline out low-income people.
capture some of that value that our
“All persons are by nature free and
community created and dedicate it to the
independent, and have certain natural and
community’s need. Inclusionary zoning isn’t
unalienable rights, among which are those
a panacea for the housing crisis, but it’s a
of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of
tool among the range of tools that we’ll
acquiring, possessing and protecting
need to truly address the
property, and of pursuing
problem.
and obtaining safety and
Two things that an
happiness.:” New Jersey
What was ©ace
inclusionary zoning ordinance
Constitution, Article I,
called the "most
does that make it urgent for
Section I, Paragraph 1.
European city in
Portland right now: It
In the 1970s, New Jersey
protects neighborhood
America" is in
passed its fair-housing law,
diversity and it takes
which institutes strict
the Stone Ages
advantage of a building boom.
requirements on cities to
compared to the
That makes inclusionary
explain exactly where they
great cities of
zoning critical to have in
will house their “fair share”
Europe
and the
place before low-income and
of future residents, including
moral responsibility people of color are displaced .
the poor. Last year, New
they've always
and before properties start
Jersey was one of the few
states in the country to see a accepted for
getting bought up and
decline in the number of
permitted for development.
sheltering their
homeless people.
In much of Portland, these
people.
Oregon’s Land Use Goal
things are happening right
No. 10, which governs
now, and we can’t wait.
planning for housing, only
We’ll know next month
whether the state will allow inclusionary
requires cities to certify that they have an
zoning in Oregon. Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer
adequate supply of buildable land to
accommodate population growth.
(D-Portland) and Sen. Michael Dembrow
Using data from 2005 and 2007,
(D-Portland) are introducing legislation to do
Portland’s Bureau of Planning and
that. Call your legislators and encourage
John Mulvey is a member o f the East Portland
Action Plan H ousing Committee and the
Inclusionary Zoning Coalition. H e’s been
homeless since February.
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
draft: “One of the housing types that we
most need now is small plexes, and you
legally can’t put them anywhere that’s
yellow on the map. If you flip over to today’s
zoning code draft, you see yellow
everywhere and you see little fragments of
blue.”
The current plan doesn’t include enough
blue — the development that everyone
agrees we’re going to need the most.
Spevak’s analysis shows us that the areas
of town that have become the most
desirable are the ones with a mix of
densities — apartment buildings, duplexes
and single-family homes all on the same
street.
Much of the testimony from the public
has been against this “residential upzoning.”
Many people are alarmed at the prospect of
multi-story developments going in next door
— and rightly so. Let’s face it: What
happened to inner Division Street is
horrifying.
But they’re wrong to oppose density. Walk
through any of the most desirable areas of
inner Portland and you’ll see tasteful and
charming apartment buildings everywhere.
The council can and should insist on dense
Sustainability has already found that
zones with well-designed multifamily
housing in all city neighborhoods.
them to support it.
“currently zoned land capacity in Portland is
sufficient to meet housing demands.”
This may be all that state law requires.
The current draft plan includes excellent
policies for fairer housing in Portland, many
of which were proposed by the activists at
Anti-Displacement PDX. Still, they are
aspirational guidelines and may prove
difficult to enforce. If Oregon had New
Jersey’s or California’s state law, there’s a
decent chance Portland’s comprehensive
plan would be thrown out by the courts for
having an inadequate plan for housing.
Oregon needs to require all local
governments in the state to have real,
meaningful and enforceable strategies for
housing at all income levels.
But what then? The Portland City Council
will need to enact a city ordinance. In the
normal course of things, an inclusionary
zoning ordinance would be part of what’s
called the “Mixed Use Zoning” project and
would come before the council sometime in
the summer of 2017.
That’s too long to wait
The council needs to consider an
emergency ordinance as soon as the result
from Salem is known. One way - maybe not
the only way - would be to bring mandatory
inclusionary zoning as an amendment to the
Comprehensive Plan this spring.
Oregon has a legendary land-use system
that has protected green space and
prevented our state from the sprawl that
other western states have seen over the
past half-century. Walkable, desirable
neighborhoods, better transit and non-
motorized transportation, and better health
for our people are just a few of the
outcomes of 45 years of our smart-growth
system.
But smart-growth fails if it’s only available
to the wealthy. City leaders need to take
bold action now to ensure our city stays a
place where everyone can thrive.
Oregon needs to require
real planning for housing
In some states, courts can force cities to
redo their plan if it isn’t adequate to account
for the housing needs of people at all
income levels.
Decades ago, California’s legislators
recognized that their state’s population was
going to grow, and they integrated strict
housing planning into their requirements for
local governments. City comprehensive
plans are required to account for the
jurisdiction’s share of future population
growth, at all income levels, and judges can
and do throw plans out if they’re inadequate
on this element.
No plan equals no development, so by
connecting housing to overall land use,
cities in California are on notice that without
a real strategy for affordable housing, no
other development can legally move
forward.
In New Jersey, the courts have
interpreted their state constitution to
Portland needs
inclusionary zoning, fast
This February, the state legislature will
consider, again, a bill to eliminate the state’s
pre-emption on inclusionary zoning. These
are programs that require some units in a
new development to be kept affordable. It’s
not controversial anywhere else in the
country, and most developers recognize that
a
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