Portland

Portland Has the “Worst Housing Crisis Outlook”

Randal OToole — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Portland, Oregon is suffering from the “worst housing crisis outlook” in the country, according to a study published last week by LendingTree.com. The study compared housing prices with household incomes and current vacancy rates to conclude that Portland and three other cities in the Northwest — Boise, Spokane, and Salt Lake — are four of the five worst housing markets out of the top 100 metro areas.

While I appreciate anything that knocks Portland, I have a lot of quibbles with this study. The researcher used data for metropolitan areas, which are political units (being drawn on county boundaries), instead of urban areas, which are economic units (being drawn based on population densities). The researcher compared median housing prices with median household incomes, while median family incomes make more sense because non-family households (such as college housemates) rarely buy homes.

The numbers in the study are based on an average for the five years from 2019 through 2023. Those five years were tumultuous enough that any data from the beginning of that period no longer has any validity. I would have used just 2023 data, which are available for all 100 areas in the study.

A bigger problem is that the researcher apparently gave equal weight to the home price-to-income ratio and vacancy rate (percentage of housing units that are unoccupied). In reality, a high vacancy rate doesn’t mean much if the typical vacant house costs eight times typical household or family incomes. Median prices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose are all well over eight times median household incomes, but the study ranks them as better off than Portland, where prices are “only” 5.5 times median household incomes.

San Jose’s vacancy rate of 5.56 percent is only 17 percent higher than Portland’s 4.76 percent, yet the former’s price-to-income ratio of 8.53 is 53 percent higher than Portland’s 5.57. This makes San Jose’s housing market much worse than Portland’s.

As I say, these are quibbles. Both San Jose’s and Portland’s housing markets are in terrible shape and neither community should be proud to be among the worst in the country.

The Lending Tree study concludes by advising people to “shop around” when seeking to buy a home, to “get your credit in order” before going shopping, and to keep an “emergency fund” to deal with maintenance and repairs after buying a home. These insipid ideas are blindingly obvious, are valid whether or not housing is unaffordable, and will do nothing to make housing more affordable.

This is my biggest problem with the study: it treats unaffordable housing as something that “just happened” independent of state or regional land-use policies. In fact, it took years of hard work on the part of lobbyists and special interest groups to destroy the housing markets of the urban areas where about 40 percent of Americans live.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Graphic: courtesy the Antiplanner

Why I Am the Antiplanner

Randal OToole — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In 1997, Metro — Portland’s regional planning agency — issued its 2040 plan to guide the region for the next several decades. The plan was supposed to be in response to a 1995 Future Vision statement written by a group of citizens. Now Metro revising the Future Vision and its plans, but a close look at the region reveals that it should completely scrap the planning process.

The 1995 Future Vision called for “housing affordable for all,” “accessible employment centers throughout the region,” “equitable economic progress,” “public safety,” and reductions in poverty. By all of these measures, the region is worse today than it was in 1997, and this decline is almost entirely due to Metro’s 2040 plan.

As noted in comments submitted to Metro by the Cascade Policy Institute (and which I wrote), Portland housing has gone from expensive in 1995 to unaffordable today — under standard mortgage rules, a median-income family cannot get a mortgage on a median-value home. This has increased wealth inequality. For example, the disparity between white and black homeownership rates grew from 25 to 30 percentage points.

Far from making employment centers more accessible, Metro’s anti-auto stance has increased congestion by 75 percent. Instead of relieving congestion, Metro has been building light rail, which doesn’t adequately serve any employment centers but downtown. While 28 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 5 percent of workers in the rest of the region commuted by transit. Since only about 11 percent of Portland workers worked downtown (and far less today), it is no wonder that transit’s share of commuting has declined and, after Portland’s most recent (and most expensive) light-rail line opened in 2016, total transit ridership dropped.

Meanwhile, public safety has declined and high housing costs have increased poverty and homelessness. To make matters worse, Portland has some of the highest tax rates in the nation thanks to the need to pay for light rail, affordable housing, regional parks, and other Metro schemes.

Worst of all, Metro had a pretty good idea these things were going to happen as early as 1993. In that year, Metro reviewed data for the nation’s 50 largest urban areas to see which came closest to the model for what it planned for Portland. The answer was Los Angeles, which had the highest population density and fewest miles of freeways per capita of any major urban area, and which was also embarking on a program of building or operating nearly 500 miles of rail transit lines.

“In public discussions we gather the general impression that Los Angeles represents a future to be avoided,” commented Metro in that 1993 analysis. Yet “with respect to density and road per capita mileage it displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate.”

Instead of realizing this meant there was something wrong with its plan, Metro decided Portlanders didn’t appreciate how wonderful Los Angeles really was, with some of the worst congestion and least affordable housing in the country.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Downtown Portland and Mount Hood with the Vista Avenue Bridge — often called the Suicide Bridge — in the foreground. Portland’s quality of life has declined so much in the last 30 years that it is almost as if the city is trying to commit suicide. Source: Spicypepper999 via Wikimedia in Public Domain.

Governor Targets More Apartment Construction, So of Course Fewer Are Built

Randal OToole — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction.

For example, Portland passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring that developers of projects with 20 or more apartments set aside at least 20 percent of them for low-income families or 10 percent for very low income families. As a result, developers are building 19-unit apartments on land that could support 20 or more.

Another is that, in 2019, the Oregon legislature — with strong support from Kotek, who was then speaker of the house — passed the nation’s first statewide rent control law. As every economist knows, rent control is one of the best ways to create a housing shortage.

The Atlantic recently cited an economic study that found that when the number of progressive (read: central planning) voters in a city increases, the number of housing permits falls. As another Atlantic article noted, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all run by Democrats.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: CoStar via Willamette Week.

What's Happening in Oregon and Vermont?

Randal OToole — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 20:28:58 -0500

A few weeks ago, I noted that there appeared to be correlation between government efforts to get more people into multifamily housing and low fertility rates. The correlation is not perfect — I estimated about 0.4 — because there are a lot of factors that affect fertility rates, but it appears strong enough that, if the goal is to have a healthy demographic structure, then single-family housing should be preferred.

Unfortunately, the census data I had available didn’t allow me to make a standard calculation of birth rates, so I used a substitute. Now, a group called BirthGauge has published the above map showing birth rates calculated the standard way. It does show that birth rates are lowest in the Pacific Coast and north Atlantic Coast states that have done the most to restrict new single-family housing in favor of multifamily.

What is surprising is that the states with the lowest birth rates are not New York or New Jersey, which have the highest shares of people living in multifamily housing, but Vermont and Oregon. More than half of all households in New York live in multifamily housing and more than 40 percent in New Jersey, while Oregon and Vermont are between 22 and 25 percent. As I say, there are other factors that affect fertility rates than density or multifamily housing, but what are they in the cases of Oregon and Vermont?

In response to BirthGauge, someone named Stefan Schubert pointed out (opens in new tab) the apparent correlation between fertility rates and red vs. blue states. While Vermont is pretty solidly blue, and Oregon has been blue for most of the last three decades, they aren’t the bluest states. But it still leaves open the question: what, other than land-use policy, do blue states do to depress fertility rates?

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Graph: Source: BirthGauge.

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

Randal OToole — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 20:28:38 -0400

Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system.

TriMet’s only concession to the pandemic to date has been to convert some bus routes to bus rapid transit, increasing frequencies and speeds. The agency claims this has been a success, with ridership increasing by 40 percent. That is less impressive considering that ridership on all TriMet buses increased by about 20 percent during that time period as the agency was still recovering from the pandemic.

The FX rapid bus program is a step in the right direction, but the buses are still slow, one of them taking as long as an hour and 18 minutes to go 14 miles, or less than 11 mph. The program increases costs by more than the increased revenues. Worst of all, the buses are still oriented around downtown Portland and the improvements fail to address the fundamental problem that Portland’s transit system doesn’t work for people who are not going to or from downtown.

The Cascade Policy report evaluates several ways TriMet could reinvent itself, including transit vouchers for low-income riders, relying heavily on microtransit, and redrawing bus routes to create a multiple hub-and-spoke system. While the report suggests that TriMet experiment with the first two ideas, it gives the most attention to the third one.

The report estimates that a system with nine separate hubs located near freeway on- and off-ramps, with frequent (five times per hour during peak periods) non-stop bus service from every hub to every other hub, plus eight to nine local bus routes radiating away from every hub, would cost no more to operate than TriMet’s current bus system. Most hub-to-hub travel would be on freeways, increasing average speeds to 45 mph and making it possible for someone in any part of the urban area to reach most other parts at speeds nearly competitive with driving.

I am sure there are ways to improve the Cascade Policy Institute’s polycentric proposal. For example, some might find better locations for some of the economic centers and it might be possible to add a tenth hub without increasing costs by using existing rail lines for some of the non-stop services. In general, this proposal is far better than TriMet’s current plans and should be given serious consideration by the region’s policy makers.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route.

MAGA Attacks on Cities Are Not Working

Pete Saunders — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 20:28:38 -0400

We’re 13 months away from the 2024 presidential election, and just 3 months away from the primaries. The dominant themes of the election are forming. The Republicans have let it be known that one theme will be the crime, drugs, homelessness, and the general lawlessness of “Democrat-run” cities is a disqualifying factor for Dems, and a point in their favor.

Several cities around the country have been featured prominently on television and social media for frightening criminal acts and intractable social problems. Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and Philadelphia have been noted on many outlets at different times; New York is increasingly being described as a dystopic environment. The message? Republicans can get tough on crime and end this nonsense.

However, for the first time in memory, the strategy is not working.

Origins of the Urban Demon

How did demonizing cities become a political strategy? Well, there’s always been at least a slight anti-city bias in America since its formation. The nation was founded on the principle of self-determination, and the agrarian lifestyle was often viewed as the pinnacle of American living. Cities, however, were viewed as complex, interdependent places that made personal success more complicated.

The rise of the modern industrial economy after the Civil War was centered on cities. Labor was needed to fulfill the mass production needs of large corporations and immigrants from around the world were willing to meet the rapidly expanding need. Cities became the landing spot and training ground for a new group of Americans. However, the rapid economic and social changes of the time caused many people to question whether growth came at the expense of American values, and whether the urban lifestyle was anathema to the self-directed American Dream. In the late 19th and early 20th century, cities were gaining a reputation as disruptive and unmanageable places at best, and disorderly and violent places at their worst.

People who had the desire and ability to escape the chaos of cities did so, fueling the rise of early suburbia. The development of suburbia expanded modestly before World War II and accelerated following it. By the 1960’s there were competing narratives on American living: suburbs on the rise, rural areas in decline, and cities in flux.

And yes, it’s the 1960’s where city demonization goes to the next level. Protests against the Vietnam War, in favor of (and against) the Civil Rights Movement, and the urban riots in several cities in response to poor conditions and treatment in cities became the rule at the time. This all came to a head in 1968. Vietnam War anger forced President Lyndon Johnson to forego seeking reelection. The release of the Kerner Commission Report detailed the inequity in cities that was at the root of the frustration that powered urban riots. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy symbolized an America out of control.

The Impact of 1968

Enter Richard Nixon and George Wallace.

The 1968 U.S. presidential election between Republican Richard Nixon, Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist independent George Wallace led to an American narrative of cities that continues to resonate until today. Nixon ran on a “law-and-order” platform, promising to restore control in tumultuous cities. Humphrey’s campaign sought to continue President Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty programs, while maintaining a commitment to the Civil Rights Movement. Wallace was essentially a single-issue candidate, opposing desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement.

The election was close. Nixon won a narrow victory (less than 1%, or about 500,000 votes) over Humphrey. The election was made close by the strong showing of Wallace, who won 13.5% of the national vote, carried five southern states and won 46 electoral votes. It didn’t take long for Nixon to realize that Republicans that they could secure a stronger national majority if they made appeals to Southern voters who voted for Wallace.

After Nixon’s close 1968 win, he focused on a strategy that merged traditional “Middle America” conservative values with the populist and distinctly segregationist Southern voters who supported George Wallace. That merger brought together small town and rural Midwestern voters, an increasing number of suburban voters, and Southerners, who could agree on one thing – their dislike of large cities and the problems they incur.

Nixon’s silent majority and southern strategy plans paved the way for the GOP for the next 40 years. Nixon was able to win in 1972 in a landslide, and Northern Democrats would not win another presidential election until Barack Obama won in 2008.

Cities in the wilderness

What did this mean for cities between 1968 and 2008? Essentially it meant a 40-year period in the wilderness. Federal funding directed at cities during the Great Society era began to wither away by the mid-1970’s. Prominent issues of the Civil Rights Movement, like fair housing, poverty reduction and school desegregation, became issues of the past. Cities were left to their own devices to find a way out of the wilderness.

Cities chose one of two ways to prosper during this avidly anti-city period. One way was to tap into the still-expanding suburban development model. Younger cities largely developed as super-sized versions of suburbs, particularly in the South and West. Older cities tended to double down on their economic strengths as a growth strategy, but with a twist that led to diverging fortunes. Manufacturing centers struggled to keep good-paying manufacturing jobs in the face of international competition. Cities that were already strong in the information and service sectors took advantage of the economic winds that favored things like technology, finance, healthcare and biotechnology, advanced professional services like law, science and engineering, elite higher education, and entertainment.

Things have worked out well for the cities that became super-sized suburbs or relied on information and service sectors that would benefit from a transformative global economy. Things did not work out so well for former manufacturing hubs.

Cities and suburbs today – near-equal footing?

So here we are, in 2023. Republicans are using the same kind of attacks on cities that they used in 1973. Why is the attack that worked then not working now? Five reasons come to mind.

Read the rest of this piece at Corner Side Yard Blog.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Former president Donald Trump's infamous photo op in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, June 1, 2020. The photo op was meant to demonstrate successful "law-and-order" efforts to quell violence in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests. The photo op was later viewed as a failure after being condemned by military and religious leaders, as well as elected officials from both major political parties. Source: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, in Public Domain.

America's Sanctuary Cities Are Falling Apart

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 20:28:38 -0400

If it were not so tragic, it would be funny. For years the progressive Left — in the US as well as across the West — has boasted about its willingness to accept people even if they have arrived in America illegally. With over one million having crossed the border illegally since Joe Biden took office — and their numbers are rising — the facade of the sanctuary city is falling apart.

Border chaos is now sparking a war among Democrats, with some, like New York Mayor Eric Adams, suggesting the migrant wave may “destroy” the city. His critique has been repeated by much of the border state Arizona Democratic delegation, as well as Independent Senator Kristen Sinema. But if sensible Democrats know the game is up and want to stop the flow, others, like Chicago’s ultra-progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson and Leftist members of the New York City Council, denounce Adams and others as xenophobic acolytes who are mouthing “repugnant Maga garbage”.

Yet the collapse of the sanctuary city is not the product of far-Right manipulation, although it certainly warms the cockles of reactionary hearts. Nor is it primarily caused by shipments of migrants from what some may see as the quasi-fascist republics of Texas and Florida. The vast majority of refugees, as even the New York Times admits, go to New York on their own.

The simple truth is this. If allowed to come and stay, irrespective of legal status, refugees will keep coming. Most of them are seeking a better life, but there is also a non-insignificant presence of criminal elements — notably the Mexican cartels — to flood cities with drugs and human traffickers, too. These often poorly educated, desperate people are also arriving at a time when urban economies around the West are sluggish, and fiscal resources are drying up.

Critically, much of the new opposition to sanctuary cities comes from minority populations that now must compete with migrants for space, medical services, and schools. In New York, Mayor Adams listens to such complaints from his core base of working-class African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. But in Chicago, Johnson is proving himself a stalwart comrade despite widespread resentment of refugees in many neighbourhoods, including black ones.

Even sensible progressives should acknowledge that it may prove impossible to fund the migrants and still keep up their dreams of a European-style elaborate welfare state. New York City is already contemplating major budget cuts, and it’s hard to believe that hard-hit West Coast cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, can afford more indigents when they already struggle with a large, and seemingly immovable, homeless population on their streets.

California currently suffers from the nation’s highest poverty rate as well as the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle income earners of any state. Its citizens already confront a state with crime, disorder, homelessness and an education system in tatters. Adding hundreds of thousands of poorly educated non-English speakers may not be the salve these school districts need.

Unfortunately, several Democratic leaders do not seem to recognise the scale of the problem. California’s Gavin Newsom is now considering “right to shelter” legislation similar to that which has lured migrants to places like New York. In addition, the state seems determined to provide the undocumented with ever more benefits, offering free healthcare, non-enforcement of immigration and free college for their kids. The high housing prices might keep them away, but instead they get Government-subsidised housing.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: screenshot from KTLA news on YouTube.

A New Rideshare Model

Randal OToole — Sun, 14 May 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Alto is a rideshare company that was founded in Dallas and so far is also operating in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Washington. The company differs from traditional rideshare operations like Uber and Lyft in that it owns all of its automobiles and all of its drivers are employees, not contractors. This is supposed to make it more attractive to passengers, especially women, who may be squeamish about riding in a stranger’s car.

Alto claims that its rides are “elevated” above other ridesharers. Its fleet currently seems to consist of Buick Enclaves, a cross-over with three rows of seating. It has replaced the Buick logo on the grill with its own and added its logo to other parts of the vehicles as well. However, it plans to transition soon to all-electric vehicles.

While I’m always intrigued by new business models, I can’t help but feel this one is going in the wrong direction. The intercity bus market went from Greyhound, which owned its own buses, stations, and maintenance facilities, to Megabus, which owned buses and maintenance facilities but no stations, to Flx, which didn’t even own its own buses and maintenance facilities. In other words, the newer models shed costs and spread the risk to more operators.

Uber and Lyft disrupted the taxi market because they replace call centers and human taxi dispatchers with smart phones and automated dispatch. In 2019, some predicted that Uber would never be profitable, but it had its first profitable quarter in 2021 and today both Uber and Lyft claim to be making a profit.

Uber and Lyft have been criticized for treating drivers as contractors and not employees, yet most taxi companies do the same. Uber and Lyft may make less effort than taxi companies to ensure uniformity of service, as not all drivers own the same make and model of vehicles, but it has been my experience, at least, that vehicles are clean, in good condition, and relatively new. The drivers, not Uber or Lyft, take the risk that the vehicles they own won’t earn enough to pay for themselves, but from the customer’s viewpoint that leads to more competition and faster service.

Alto’s model absorbs all of the risk that Uber and Lyft spread among their drivers. That could be quite expensive. Buick Enclaves list for about $45,000, and while I’m sure Alto gets quantity discounts, the $60 million it had raised by mid-2021 is hardly enough to buy 3,000 Enclaves, much less replace them all with electric vehicles by the end of this year, which was Alto’s goal.

Given the limited number of vehicles in its fleet, Alto won’t promise 5-minute wait times like Uber and Lyft can often do. While people can pre-schedule a car, spontaneous Alto customers can expect to wait 10 to 15 minutes. Also, Alto doesn’t operate 24 hours a day; instead, depending on the city, it is shut down for three to five hours each night. Furthermore, while Uber and Lyft are available in hundreds of U.S. cities, Alto is currently limited to just six, which means frequent travelers will keep the Uber and/or Lyft apps even after they’ve tried Alto. Another disadvantage is that all of Alto’s fleet of cars have to be big enough to carry the largest party that might want to use them (i.e., six passengers), while Uber and Lyft can tailor the size of the vehicles they send to the number of people in each party.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: courtesy Alto.

How Not to Revitalize Downtown

Randal OToole — Tue, 02 May 2023 20:28:58 -0400

The city of Portland announced yesterday that it received a $2 million federal grant to get it to ban gasoline (and, presumably, Diesel) delivery vehicles in a sixteen-block area of downtown Portland. That means all supplies to offices in that area will have to be transferred from petroleum-powered vehicles to electric vehicles before they enter the zone, thus driving up costs.

The good news is that three of those 16 blocks are city parks and eight are government buildings, so only five blocks of private office buildings will be affected (not that anyone should cheer about a policy that makes government cost even more than it already does). In addition to offices, I count at least four restaurants and coffee shops plus a beauty salon that will be annoyed by the new rules. At least one other restaurant has already “permanently closed,” probably due to recent rioting, and this new rule may be all that is needed to push some of the others out as well. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of parking garages in the area, so none of the bureaucrats who are making these rules will have to have their lives disturbed by them.

Update: Bojack points out that the city has given an exclusive, no-bid contract to make deliveries into the 16-block zone to a company called B-line that operates a fleet of electric tricycles. Restaurants and offices that need supplies will have to have them delivered to B-line’s warehouse, where they will be transferred to the tricycles and delivered to the customers. This might save a little congestion in the 16-block area (though historically lots of deliveries were done at night), but it isn’t going to save much greenhouse gases.

The no-bid aspect of this is disturbing. The city got a $2 million federal grant to effectively support a private company that seems to get by on its political connections. Is there any real evidence that this is helping the climate? Or is it all just another power play?

Meanwhile, the small town of Tucumcari, New Mexico, which I know mainly as the place where Southern Pacific and Rock Island railroads once handed off the Golden State to one another, is considering revitalizing its downtown by rezoning it to allow for residences. I don’t have any objections to that except that claims that there is a “pent-up demand” to live downtown are overblown, as cities such as Denver, Portland, and Seattle that have built a lot of downtown housing have subsidized most of it. Fortunately for downtown property owners but unfortunately for other Tucumcari taxpayers, the city has already declared its downtown a Metropolitan Redevelopment Area, which means it is ready to subsidize any new development it can get.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: The cheery view greeting coffee drinkers looking for the Starbucks in the downtown Portland area that will be ruled off limits to gasoline-powered delivery vehicles. Source: Google street view.

The Housing Plot

Randal OToole — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Oregon’s new governor, Tina Kotek, has made housing her top priority and has proposed a number of unrealistic and idiotic remedies to high housing costs and homelessness. For one, she wants spend $54 million to house 1,200 people for one year. That’s $4,000 a month per person. Of course, a lot of that is probably going to go into various housing bureaucracies.

Kotek’s long-term goal is to see 36,000 housing units built per year in Oregon, which five times more than has recently been built. The state has not built 36,000 housing units for 50 years, which by an extraordinary coincidence is when the legislature created the state’s land-use planning process that restricts rural development.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories because the democratic societies are too complicated for anyone to take control behind the scenes. But I can’t help but feel this is all part of a plot to force low-income people — you know, the “deplorables” — into crowded housing where the rest of society won’t have to deal with them any more, except as servants.

First, use urban-growth boundaries to drive up housing prices. Second, use tax dollars to build high-density housing that few people want to live in. Third, profit from that construction and funnel some of the profits into the political campaigns of the party that claims to be on the side of the working people.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, a bunch of market urbanists went to Helena, Montana to promote their ideas of density as a solution to high housing prices. The 2010 and 2020 census both found that all the urban areas in the state covered a whopping 0.2 percent of Montana land. But the market urbanist message is that single-family zoning is the cause of the state’s high housing prices.

Housing is actually pretty affordable in Billings, Great Falls, and Helena, but it’s more expensive in Bozeman, Kalispell, and Missoula. All six cities have single-family zoning, but the last three are in counties that have put pretty severe restrictions on new development.

The main speaker at this conference was Nolan Gray, formerly with the supposedly free-market Mercatus Center and now with California YIMBY. When someone in the audience asked why the state needed density when so much of the land was rural, Gray praised the rural land-use restrictions, saying they helped to protect the environment.

Other speakers included Emily Hamilton, who is also with Mercatus, and Kendall Cotton, of the supposedly free-market Frontier Center, a state think tank. I’ve debated Hamilton in the past; she pretended that the San Francisco Bay Area was out of land because it bordered the Pacific Ocean, as if north, east, and south no longer existed. When I pointed out that nearly 70 percent of Bay Area counties was rural open space, she ignored me.

All of which convinces me even more that the market urbanists are really just new urbanists who have infiltrated the free-market movement. If free marketeers aren’t going to defend American’s right to live in the kind of homes they choose, who will?

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: Someone’s idea of affordable housing Portland, because everyone knows that people move out West so they can live in a cramped apartment. Courtesy The Antiplanner.