In an email to supporters Thursday afternoon, District 1 City Council candidate Terrence Hayes addresses what he calls “Portland’s war on cars.” The email then plays into the narrative that bicycling is a privileged pursuit for the upper-class while driving is working class.
It’s a classic attempt to create a false “us versus them” dichotomy and it’s very clear who Hayes aligns with.
Hayes is running to represent east Portland. On his campaign website Hayes says he was born into poverty and was formerly incarcerated for attempted murder. He’s one of the top contenders in his race and currently has the fourth most approved matching donations out of all the candidates. Hayes has been endorsed by City Commissioners Rene Gonzalez, Mingus Mapps, and Dan Ryan, as well as the Portland Police Association, and District Attorney-Elect Nathan Vasquez.
Here’s more from Hayes’ email:
“We all know that Portland is a big bike-riding city, and that’s really great, but we have to recognize that the majority of East Portlanders have to drive a lot more than the rest of the city [emphasis his]. It seems like no one told City Hall, and they make it as difficult as possible for those of us trying to get around and live our daily lives. The roads are a mess, and the traffic often makes us late for our jobs…and East Portland doesn’t usually have the luxury of working from home.
Our highways have the same problem; they simply haven’t kept up with the increase in population, while the activists constantly push back on any efforts to make it easier to get around. They don’t see their own privilege [emphasis his], a privilege that negatively impacts the working class.
Can we talk about Division Street and the awful divider in the middle of the road? It seems like it was purposely put there to tick off drivers, and it’s hurting businesses that didn’t want these changes…”
Hayes goes on to say he’s not “going to war with” bike culture, but that, “District 1 is pragmatic and blue collar. “We’re not software engineers working from our home office,” Hayes continues. “We’re doing the hard work that the upper middle class in the city pays others to do.”
Hayes also says he thinks we should keep the bike infrastructure we already have “clean and clear from camps, trash and overgrown vegetation” on the I-205 and Springwater paths.
When it comes to neighborhood greenways, Hayes appears to be a big fan. He says he and his supporters whant them to “remain safe as the city converts houses to multi-family and bring even more vehicle traffic into our neighborhoods.”
Then Hayes writes, with an underline for emphasis: “We just want to be able to get around safely, efficiently, and with less hassle.”
I know a lot of folks who agree with that.
Thanks for reading.
BikePortland has served this community with independent community journalism since 2005. We rely on subscriptions from readers like you to survive. Your financial support is vital in keeping this valuable resource alive and well.
Please subscribe today to strengthen and expand our work.
I work in a brewery for $20/hr that I bike six miles to from my home in East Portland. Please tell me how I’m upper-class, Mr. Hayes.
And as a more general argument, biking mode share was significantly higher before the pandemic and work from home software developers was really a thing. People were biking to work. Working class people bike to work. Even out in East Portland, the city is not so big that biking is a bad option. The only thing that makes it a challenge for East Portland is the bad cycling infrastructure.
The collapse of biking to work started well before the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home.
Heck, one reason (of several) I never biked to work is no showers. I’d have to ride almost 10 miles to get to downtown from my house and the thought of being the one who stank at my desk didn’t appeal to me.
Yeah, and for what it’s worth, that’s exactly what I said.
Point being, work from home software engineers do not account for the existing cyclists we have today, as Terrence Hayes’ comments imply.
People get tired of riding bad infrastructure, on crumbling & dangerous streets. Can you blame them?
Do you have a college degree?
I have a B.S., work in an inner SE warehouse, make 20+ an hour, and bike to work daily from outer SE.
When I was 25 years old, I moved to Portland with a college degree and worked at Chris King. I made $10/hr. I was solidly work class/working poor. However, my mindset was not that, I was just ideologically opposed to working a soul sucking corporate job. My income was the same as someone working at Jiffylube, but I was fundamentally different.
Who’s he running against? How can I donate to their campaigns?
Steph Routh and Timur Ender are both solid candidates in District 1 so far.
Seems like Steph may have sunk the CCC as interim ED and Timur and Steph both participated in reciprocal campaign donation agreements with dozens of other candidates to get the required donations for public financing to kick in.
They’re candidates who do understand transportation and planning issues a bit better than Mr Hayes. But I’d say they’re a bit more malleable than “solid”.
Given the new voting system and generally how historically conservative East Portland voters are relative to all other city voters, Timur & Steph (and all the other more numerous “liberal” candidates) will end up eating each other’s limited number of voters, and do rather less well than expected. Any East Portland candidate who presents themselves as “conservative” or even middle-of-the-road will probably get more votes and do better on the rankings, particularly if there are much fewer candidates so listed.
I like this guy, He has my vote!!
Poor people having long commutes is definitely an issue but being upset with bikes lanes and improvements to pedestrian safety is insane. Not to mention that the people who are probably more impoverished have to walk and bike, should we be okay with their deaths? How about we stop using bikes as a scapegoat and instead deal with the actual underlying issues.
People who are really poor are also much more likely to take transit. If you’re actually concerned about helping them, maybe you should be advocating for bus lanes, increased frequencies, etc….
Sounds like he was generally speaking about the working class. People that punch a clock for 8-9 hours, that drive to work.
Endorsed by PPB, Vasquez and Gonzalez, stoking a fake anger-based culture war, attempted murder. Checks out.
I’m finding some disagreements with Mr. Hayes for sure but linking those issues to his past record, with no context, feels like a cheap shot. If I lived in District 1 I’d want to know more about all the candidates who aren’t named Steph Routh or Timur Endur, because of ranked choice.
I just don’t even know how to respond to this. I work in education and very much have working-class wages. I do own a car that is paid off and very cheap to insure, but if I had to buy a new car – hell, even a used one that doesn’t need repairs every 400 miles – it would push my budget over the edge and destroy me financially.
Being able to safely bike (on Division, thanks to the recent upgrades) or take the bus to work in East Portland has been huge for being able to get myself in a financially stable position and build some savings. I saved almost $1000 on just gas last year, compared to when I was driving to work every day. Not to mention the wear and tear on the car itself. I also have a whole tangent about how much my mental and physical health has improved as a result, but I won’t share that here.
I really wish that Mr. Hayes could spend a couple weeks getting around using a bike and transit so he can experience what it means to truly be relegated to the margins of the transportation system. Making u-turns on Division is kind of a pain, I guess, but not as much as pedaling a winding neighborhood greenway route only to get dumped on the shoulder of a dangerous highway for the last mile of your trip. Traffic sucks, but not as much as watching your bus transfer sail by while you wait 6 minutes for a walk signal as some godforsaken intersection of two stroads.
What city, in Mr. Hayes’ eyes, has done the right thing with regard to transportation planning? Dallas? Houston? The Boise, Idaho area has massively invested in huge arterials and a highway expansion of I84 that brings it to 7 lanes in either direction at one point – and rush-hour traffic is still horrendous. LA went all-in on cars and driving there objectively sucks. As much as business owners on Division don’t like the bike lanes and median, I’m guarantee they’d be pretty upset about their property being taken for additional car lanes.
The unfortunate thing is that that the way Mr. Hayes has framed the argument, it just doesn’t matter how many blue collar folks talk about how transformative biking is for them, the idea is set in stone that biking is something only privileged upper-classes do while the car-driving masses suffer.
Maybe Mr. Hayes could tour his prospective district by bike before he passes judgement? Maybe his fellow candidate Timur Ender could lend some perspective on cycling conditions in EP like he did for Jonathan a while back? Hell, I’d be willing to take an afternoon to show Mr. Hayes the good, the bad, and the ugly if he would be willing to engage in a constructive way.
The bigger message here could be interpreted as: not enough practical, family-sized housing exists in inner Portland that is accessible to working class folks. I agree with that, at least.
Comment of the week
Regardless of any concurrently needed cycling improvements upgrades needed. Portland has failed to keep up it’s car infrastructure with the population increase over the last twenty years. We can’t even get the engineering bottleneck of the Rose Quarter fixed, where I5 (the only North-South freeway for the entire West coast) pinches down to 2 lanes, without the activists coming out to gaslight us all about how this will hurt BIPoC and kill kittens.
Disingenuous argument. I405 and 205 both exist as bypasses. After the Rose Quarter expansion it’ll then be “the engineering bottleneck where I-5 pinched down to only 3 lanes” rinse and repeat until there’s no more city to drive to, just a highway to use to drive through it. The worst traffic I’ve ever experience in the Portland area has been on I-5 near Wilsonville, where the freeway is 6 lanes wide, and the recently widened OR217. The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
The more the population increases, the more space is needed for people to live, get around for basic needs and recreate. Cars and car infrastructure are the biggest waste of space in cities, Nathan. Hayes has never seriously thought about this before and sounds like a classic newb. “Moar roads, Moar parking!” He, like many windshield warriors, haven’t done the math or thought beyond their basic urges and frustrations. This type of rhetoric should be disqualifying for anyone on city council.
“He, like many windshield warriors, haven’t done the math”
To be fair, those who think we can make transit (or biking) work for a critical mass of drivers haven’t done their math either.
It’s obviously possible, because some places seem to make it work.
Great! Would you be willing to share your list of American cities that have cracked the code?
He’s probably thinking about the Dad commuting from Beaverton from his construction job to pick his kids up from preschool before it closes at 5. Then he immediately goes to the library, then grocery store and buys five bags of groceries.
The dad can’t just get another job closer to home, dad follows where the works at. You ever been on the freeway at 6:00am? There’s thousands and thousands of people like this, you can tell because they’re all wearing high visibility shirts…
Sorry to break it to you, he is thinking about how to shake a few votes out of angry people. People frustrated by a transportation system that is primarily designed to take their money, who can’t imagine anything doing anything different because the world from their windshield looks like an asphalt car-sewer filled with jerks.
As for your example- sure, desperate people can drive a car when needed. No one is saying otherwise. But there is actual data, much better than made up tear-jerkers, about what people are using cars to actually do. Most of it is easily accomplished by better means than an SOV.
And, shocker, the reason this guys life sucks so bad is because disingenuous shills like Hayes sold people on car-based transportation systems that pushed sprawl and resources to distances that magnify systemic inefficiencies.
Ugh. Just…ugh.
The lesson of the past century of transportation engineering–globally, but especially in the U.S.–is that you cannot keep car infrastructure paced with population growth. If you build it, they will come, and for every 1% increase in roadway miles built, there is a 1% increase in miles driven. It’s just too low bandwidth of a transportation paradigm to actually work as mass transit…which makes perfect sense given that cars aren’t mass transit.
Not original to me: “the only solution to traffic congestion is viable alternatives to driving”. That is what Portland really needs.
“I5 (the only North-South freeway for the entire West coast)”
Perhaps you are thinking of somewhere outside of the U.S.
There are many freeways that run North-South along the west coast of the U.S.
And kittens are valued higher than freeways in many households.
US 97 isn’t in the Interstate system but it’s a favorite truck and long distance travel route with bypasses around many towns, and it doesn’t go over the Siskyou Summit or through Portland.
COTW!
Listen to BIPOC voices.
I think this is a great comment. Your situation is far from unique; why do you think more residents of East Portland, experiencing the same pressures you described, don’t see things the way you do?
Bonus points if you don’t use the word “brainwashed”.
Thanks.
I’ll try my best.
Honestly I think there’s as many reasons people don’t see transportation the same way I do as there are people.
The biggest reason I see is the infrastructure itself. There is a historic lack of investment in transit, walking and bike infrastructure in East Portland. There’s a lot of work being done to try and rectify that situation, but many residents think, “why now?”. On the ground, in the moment, it seems to be coming in the form of big, disruptive projects like Division, while many streets connecting to it still don’t have sidewalks or adequate bike facilities. There are people in the community I work who have been asking the city for a sidewalk so their kids can walk to school for years, but they still haven’t built it, so the city pouring a bunch of concrete in the middle of Division feels like a slap to the face.
While I find the experience of walking, biking, and using transit in East Portland to be much better than where I moved from in Idaho, it is still usually faster to drive. A lot of 2-3 mile trips are the same time by bike, though I usually have to get creative to find a route. It’s so much easier so just “Go up 122nd and make a right at Glisan” instead of winding through neighborhoods in a way you don’t have to do in inner Portland’s grid. I’m also incredibly lucky in that my commute to and from work is basically the same whether I bike, bus, or drive. If I moved a mile south my bus commute would balloon from 25 minutes to almost an hour. It’s easy for me to see how someone could punch their job into Google Maps, see that it would be a hellishly long bus commute, and decide that they just “aren’t a public transportation person”.
Which brings me to my next point – the way we are socialized into car culture. Cars are just the way people get around, or so we’re taught. Instead of viewing transportation as a set of tools in a toolbox, it’s one-size-fits all. Many people don’t have the time and headspace to think of it any other way. Honestly, that is understandable. Bikes, espeically ebikes, can be expensive, and why would folks need a bike if they already have a perfectly good car? I didn’t really come at the transportation thing from a financial or health perspective – for me it was idealogical and lifestyle related. The financial and health benefits were tangential, and something that I discovered after I had already decided I was going to use my car as little as possible.
For many, car ownership is a point of pride and a way to show success. We work with many families who immigrated to the US recently, and for a lotf of them, being able to have and drive a car everywhere is a huge point of pride. Why wouldn’t it be? That’s part of the American dream.
A big part of it is safety – both perceived personal safety and traffic safety. Someone I work with told me that I’m brave for riding the bus out there because there’s so many “sketchy people”. Biking and walking around the neighborhoods is ok, but as soon as you get to the stroads boxing every neighborhood in, you feel incredibly exposed and vulnerable to getting hit by a car. I’ve also had people express to me that they won’t want to bike because they are afraid their bike will get stolen.
There’s a lack of third places/community spaces in many EP neighborhoods. For many, especially those living in cramped, low-income housing, the car is the third place.
There’s also a small, but very loud, contingent of just salty boomers who don’t like change. For as dynamic as East Portland is, there’s still pockets of people who bought a big ranch house on a big plot and just want their neighborhood to stay a suburban enclave forever. I sat in – virtually – on a school board meeting in 2021ish and 2 older folks showed up just to use their time slots to complain about Division (can you tell I’m fixated on that street). One school board member chimed in to agree with them, citing how having to go 3 blocks to make a u-turn to get to Fred Meyer was such a tragedy.
I don’t think that most folks are NIMBYs, or anti-bike, or anti-transit, or anti-walking, though. Pretty much everyone I end up talking to about it says they’d like to see their neighborhood get more walkable and have better transit connections. The rub is usually if that comes to changing car convenience or access. It’s hard for most regular people to see the bigger picture when it comes to street redesigns. I hope that Mr. Hayes’ potential constituents are smart enough to understand that better bike lanes =/= a “war on cars”.
I think that in 10-15 years, assuming we don’t have a city council that kills all non-car transportation projects, I think that East Portland will have a much higher percentage of people biking and walking to get around compared to today. I do think it’s important for the city to address the most immediate needs – like sidewalks so kids can walk to school – in order to build trust for big projects like the impending 122nd redo. It’s also encouraging to see the almost universal popularity of neighborhood greenways. Even Mr. Hayes calls out greenways as being an asset that should be protected and expanded. There’s a lot of potential greenways that I think could be pretty cheaply built but would pay off big in political will for better streets overall.
I never see any cyclists in the bike lanes on outer SE Division and the facility is both over-designed and under-maintained. Same goes for outer NE Glisan and E 162nd. PBOT needs to review and revise their priorities big-time.
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, and I think you hit most of the points I would have made (and a few others I hadn’t thought about before). The only real point of departure is I don’t expect to see big changes in the way people get around East Portland in the timeframe you identified, at least not unless there are more nearby places to go. If you have to travel several miles to go out to dinner or go shopping, you’re going to drive, and lots of people are going to drive much shorter distances than that.
I have a friend who drives 5 blocks to the grocery store, and he commutes much further by bike for goodness sake. He knows it’s stupid, and yet…
Is it stupid? I really only want to deal with Fred Meyer once a week and Costco once monthly. A car makes sense in those circumstances – large quantities of perishables, weight, speed, ease, etc. Commuting by bike makes a lot of sense. Household shopping really doesn’t, especially in extreme weather conditions.
As much as we would like Portland to be a quaint Euro village with a daily farmer’s market, convenient bakery, and the like, this isn’t reality. Nor is it realistic that 90% of households are going to drop thousands on a bakfiets.
His response is “I know it’s stupid but…” then gives a similar answer to yours. At least he uses an EV, so there’s no cloud of emissions while the cat converter warms up.
Watts won’t disagree because your comment defends the status quo, but I will. His friend’s example is 5 blocks, it’s his friend, not whatever scenario you’ve dreamed up. People can always “well what about” any suggestion for why biking works.
I may be just one example, and my family may be special, but when I go to the store that is only a few blocks away, it too is teeming with other people who are making similar sized one basket / one bag trips. They aren’t making the mega suburb apocalypse prep trips in a Suburban you’re describing. If you are getting one or two bags, a regular bike will carry that easily. A pair of panniers and/or a front basket will carry a lot of stuff. An imported $7000 e-bakfiets isn’t the only thing that will carry a weeks’ worth of groceries.
Also Portland doesn’t get extreme weather.
You may say the 5 blocks example is contrived, but the question I have is about those 5 blocks people. I’m not a lucky elite that lives close to a grocery store, huge parts of the city have one within a mile. There are places that don’t but the question is about why the places where it’s easy don’t have people getting their groceries by bike.
Maybe your response is what people will say, but I’m saying that answer is incorrect so I wonder why they’re saying it. Or why they think it.
A week of groceries for a two parents and two young boys costs $185. I’d need a bike trailer to carry all the bags of groceries, which isn’t too expensive. But yeah, I used to ride 2.5 miles every few days to new seasons and shop with my panniers and I could do it when it was for me.
My friend has a small EV, so let’s say he gets four miles per kWh. Five blocks is about a thousand feet, so to the store and back is 2/5 of a mile. That means he uses .1 kWh to do his shopping trip (and probably less since he would be traveling at low speed the whole way).
If he does that once a week, that’s a de minimus amount of energy (akin to running a typical laptop for two hours a week, so less (probably a lot less) energy than it takes to stream a movie). So what specifically are you “disagreeing” with?
Oh right, war on cars. If my friend doesn’t do things the way you prefer, he’s “incorrect”. I’ll tell him you said he should straighten himself out.
I mean yes, making short silly trips like that is a serious problem. Everyone just does “sometimes” (read: always) short trips like that and our roads are full of people making short trips and parking lots taking up space in the city, making it less livable and less friendly to not driving everywhere.
This isn’t just an “I don’t like your lifestyle” kind of thing. If it was actually a harmless personal choice, I wouldn’t care. But it isn’t. It makes the city worse and continues to keep car dependence entrenched.
Like I’ve said before, I don’t know how to make people think different about this stuff. People are lazy thinkers, they like to think they’ve already got this transportation stuff solved so no need to consider alternatives. Your friend is incorrect but I don’t know how to change his mind. But the alternative – pretending actually it’s not a problem because it’ll all get worked out by hand-waving electric + self driving cars – doesn’t seem great either. I guess it’s less depressing, maybe palliative self delusion.
Why, specifically, is a short weekly trip a “serious” problem? I think it’s mostly an aesthetic affront to your judgement about how other people should run their lives in a manner you deem “correct”.
I know you’ll call it “pro-status quo”, but we need to build from the the world as it actually exists, not as we wish it were. You’ve deemed my friend “incorrect” and yet he exists, continuing to live his incorrect life.
Purity tests will not move us forward.
It has nothing to do with my aesthetic judgement and I explained why in all the words that came immediately after the quoted text.
This has nothing to do with purity tests and aesthetics, it has to do with the reality as it actually exists where everyone driving a car to get around in a city makes the city less safe and is not scalable. For all the reasons that are always cited about why car dependency is bad. It’s not because that particular arrangement of atoms into a car is intrinsically bad, it’s because of how it interacts with us, the people who live here.
“is not scalable”
People driving to the grocery store has already scaled, so I don’t think we need to worry about that problem.
The only real reason you don’t like what my friend does that I could see in your post was “taking up space”. The space has already been set aside, and would be taken no matter how he chose to make that trip. The store’s lot is not going to expand or shrink in the foreseeable future, and has probably been there since the area was originally developed. There’s rarely other drivers on the street I think he takes.
“Taking up space” is not convincing, but at least it’s a concrete argument. Everything else you wrote is judgement.
In any event, neither of us has any idea how to change the behavior, so we’ve got to accept that it’s part of our starting point for building the future.
“Taking up space” is one of the main causes of urban sprawl. And that’s the reason public transit and cycling are harder to make work in cities that do it. One of the big arguments pushing back against cycling infrastructure is that it might take away parking from drivers. So would a dedicated bus lane, or a streetcar track. It all would need some of the space taken up by car infrastructure.
Without so many people taking five block car trips, we wouldn’t need so much street parking and parking lots the size of the buildings they serve. That’s a lot of possible alternative infrastructure and room for new construction.
But no, nothing is connected to anything else. Your friend’s decision is in a vacuum and has no negative externalities.
You can make these connections yourself, I know you can.
Obviously your friend’s current behavior is the starting point. For anything to change for the better, we have to recognize what “better” would be.
His actions do not change the amount of available “space”, and has no bearing on transit or street parking or future construction options. The only thing at stake is 100 Wh of power.
I’m sure you are thinking that if everyone drove 5 blocks instead of walking, we might have a problem. But that would be equally true if my friend instead chose to walk.
Don’t confuse policy level actions with those of individuals. My friend’s actions may offend you (they offend me) but they have no larger impact. I offered the anecdote to illustrate how even very aware people think about transportation outside our bubble. It’s a means to an end, nothing more. If he had an easier means to achieve his end, I’m quite sure he’d use it.
That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m saying we do have a problem. Space on the side of the road and parking lots is allocated to cars to support what we have. And because people like your friend use the ample car infrastructure, it is seen as necessary (circular logic). Much of that is (a thing you may not believe in) induced demand. But people making short unnecessary trips really does add up. No individual action is “the” cause of the extra space being set aside for cars, but in aggregate it is. The fact that something is a problem in aggregate doesn’t mean individual actions have no impact. An aggregate is… an aggregate of individual actions. It means the problem needs to be solved systemically of course.
This is like saying it doesn’t matter what size and how bad the gas mileage is of the vehicles someone chooses to drive. Or if someone decides to vote, or who they vote for. Or if someone recycles. None of these things on their own have any effect, so you can’t “blame” an individual for the systemic problem. But you can certainly question the decisions of individuals and think about what we can do to make that action not “facilitated” as someone else suggested.
Maybe we do have a space allocation problem (I don’t think parking on most streets is realistically available for other uses, but let’s save that for another time).
But that has nothing to do with my friend. His actions have zero impact on the amount of land set aside for parking. My friend is an individual, not the aggregate, and his contribution to the aggregate is effectively nothing.
And yes, the mileage of my vehicle matters not one bit in any practical way. Our policies around vehicle mileage matter a lot, as do our efforts to electrify. But my vehicle? No impact.
You may have missed the part where I did question my friend. Look for the post just before you falsely accused me of defending the status quo. I asked, he answered, I listened, we moved on.
I’d love to hear your practical actionable suggestions for “not facilitating” him, but I’m not hearing any. I’m the meanwhile, by listening without judgement, I learned why a rational person does something I thought was ridiculous, and now I have greater insight into why people find their cars so useful.
Micah is making a good point, that the aggregate effects are a sum of all the individual actions. You can’t escape that – if you (or your friend) use the infrastructure, you’re contributing to its demand.
The point of recognizing that your friend’s trip is part of the problem (I don’t know how much, I’m sure it’s not the biggest fish to fry). In order to make systemic changes, you have to know what behaviors you want to change systemically.
“Not facilitating him” can take the form of some things maybe we’re already doing. Removing parking mandates. Parking has to become harder to access. Making him pay for parking – maybe he already does, but a lot of people park for free on the street.
Things like a five block grocery trip are perhaps tricky, because the best way to do that trip is by bike. And if someone doesn’t ride a bike, they’re going to see driving as the only reasonable option. Five blocks really is so mind bogglingly close, the only things I can think of for dealing with that problem is making driving a worse option.
I don’t think you did. The “why” was just because it’s the easy option. I already knew that, I’m sure you did too. The problem is treating whatever is easiest as if it is a natural thing. It’s easy because we make it easy and we make alternatives hard. That’s a policy choice.
“In order to make systemic changes, you have to know what behaviors you want to change systemically.”
Yes. If you want people to change their behavior, we need to find alternatives that work better.
Street parking is not relevant to this conversation as I’ve said many times, and I highly doubt you would be able to convince a grocery store to charge for parking. As I said earlier, my friend does ride a bike, and is well aware it is an option. As discussed earlier up thread, biking is less convenient if you are carrying a load. Of course you can appeal to people to think of the greater good and change their behavior, but we know how well that works.
Perhaps some of this can be fixed with policy, but there are very few implementable suggestions in this conversation. And so the status quo continues.
Hi Watts, I’m not sure I follow your logic. I don’t see how the parking space used for the 5 block grocery run is different than the electricity: their utilization adds to demand for parking spots and electricity, respectively. The car is certainly ‘taking up space’ and contributing to traffic, even if there is excess capacity in the parking lot and streets. If many fewer people were using personal autos for the 5 block trip, the parking lots would be emptier, and, eventually perhaps reduced in size. If the streets were carrying much less traffic than they currently are, they would be a much nicer place to be outside of a car. Sure, your friend’s specific trip is not going to be the tipping point that leads to a parking lot expansion, but neither is their charging of their EV going to necessitate grid upgrades. Collectively, though, the effects are not negligibly small. That being said, I don’t think 5 block grocery runs constitute the biggest fish to fry.
Once the electricity is used, it’s gone. After the parking spot is used, it becomes available for someone else. If my friend drives off peak on low traffic streets, he’s not contributing to congestion. If he shops when the lot isn’t full, his parking spot would be otherwise unused. Not renatured or turned into housing. Just unused for anything.
Perhaps “nicer” is an issue, but that’s the sort of aesthetic judgement that John V was making.
Individual actions matter very little. Collective actions are hugely important, which generally requires government action. We need more of that and less judging of individuals for doing what works for them.
I’m still not following your argument that parking and road use are a free lunch because the duration of the trip is short. I fail to see a fundamental difference between your friend’s use of the transportation infrastructure and the electricity infrastructure. The total demand for these things is the aggregate of many individual consumptions, including quick trips to the store (which are very likely to be during busy times, but that is beside the point).
I agree that shaming homeslice is not a good approach to reducing our large consumptions of energy and land for transportation and that collective action to improve the situation. Focussing on individual actions (if I just get that last bit of multilayer plastic into my ridwell…) misses the bigger picture. But that doesn’t mean quick trips to the store don’t contribute to the challenge we face.
I am arguing that parking and road capacity are a free lunch off-peak because they are essentially a resource that would otherwise go unused, and, unlike other resources like water or electricity, if they are unused, they are “wasted”. You can’t save them for later. I’m that way it’s not an aggregate like other resources. What really matters is peak demand, similar to the way water pipes are sized — you don’t need to make the pipes bigger if nighttime demand doubles.
That framing is not exactly right, but maybe close enough for the moment.
I agree in some sense that short trips matter, but only because they help illustrate the challenges of replacing a very versatile tool with one that is (perhaps) more efficient in some dimensions, but a lot less flexible. I think that flexibility matters a lot to people and tends to be overlooked by transinistas (to coin a term) because their preferred solution does not serve that need well.
Your point is well taken, Watts, even by this proud transinista. A similar efficiency of the personal automobile is that the incremental price of short trips is very small (esp. for the small EV of your example), since much of the cost (purchase/lease, insurance, registration, etc.) is the same whether the short trip is taken or not.
Still, I disagree with the idea that short trips don’t contribute to the negative effects of auto use and can be ’rounded down’ to 0. Your example trip is most likely in the evening near peak usage. And even if it is off peak, and the neighborhood street is not near capacity, carrying the traffic negatively impacts the street.
“carrying the traffic negatively impacts the street.”
How, specifically?
In an infinitude of small ways. The most important to me is noise. It’s way nicer to be outside in my neighborhood after the traffic rush has died down. There are many other examples: basketball, football, and other sports in the street is a great American tradition that is strangled by sporadic driving on side streets. Ditto for kids riding bikes, scooters, etc. Or adults chilling on the corner drinking malt liquor and discussing the issues of the day. Nonhuman (and human!) animals are much more likely to be seen when there is not traffic, etc. In short: life.
You’re probably thinking those are just your subjective preferences, and they are. But limiting the analysis of the impact of personal autos to road and parking capacity is also a choice that is subjective. My main thesis is that the social cost of local traffic is a smooth function of the amount of traffic that increases steadily from the first auto not a step function that turns on abruptly when drivers have to start waiting for each other.
These are all systemic problems, not problems with an individual, with the possible exception of noise. But even there an electric car traveling at low speeds is basically silent.
So if your criticism boils down to my friend’s car is too loud and is disturbing the neighbors, perhaps disrupting drinking malt liquor on the corner, I’m going to say you’re really digging.
Of course they’re systemic! They’re still problems. I’m not bagging on your friend: I do the same thing. But the idea that such decisions are without consequence is wishful thinking. I do appreciate that EVs are quieter than ICE powered autos.
Thank you for such an insightful and well-written post, dw. Much of what you say rings true to my experience. Out of the many good points you make, I would like to pull on thread of transportation preferences as identity markers.
This. I would go further and say that for many people the car (or truck) represents the fullest expression of their individual identity, both as a visible communication to society at large and as a personal refuge that they exercise sole control over. I think there are very interesting parallels to be made with bikes. (How much do you assume based on the kind of bike somebody is riding?) This car-based identification (which is the dominant on-the-ground reality, even in PDX) has implications for transportation activism and political strategy.
I think an important path forward for developing more active transportation in greater Portland is to expand the coalition that supports (or at least does not actively oppose) improvements. While Hayes’s rhetoric is infuriating and based on false premises, it might be effective. If he, or another like-minded person, is elected to the council they could serve as a conduit to credibility that representatives of the woker parts of the Portland political milieu can’t access. Competent pro-bike politicians (I know, I know) could horse-trade with Hayes or ideologically similar folks. I don’t know how to stimulate/execute activism that will accomplish coalition building with car supporters in EP, but I think there is a lot of opportunity for growth there. These people are not our enemies — they just have different visions for their neighborhoods. FWIW, I think a lot of these comments apply to closer in N/NE — areas that are now typically seen as already gentrified. I think the whole NE 33rd bike lane debacle was sad and counterproductive, and I think the resulting resentment leaves the bike activists vulnerable to efforts like the ODOT campaign to build support for freeway lanes. I’m interested in political framings that allow us to get new infrastructure AND build durable political coalitions by using culturally appropriate arguments that are true and persuasive. Thanks to dw for stimulating these thoughts.
Vote Terry Parker! (haha, just kidding… please don’t.)
PS Liked your post.
Two parent household here where we both have to physically be at our jobs to make money. We both commute close to 20 miles one way. And I tell you, it’s a grind, it’s difficult with two children. Coordinating work schedules, school pick ups and drop offs with grandparents, trying to fit in errands. It’s hard and my wife and I make almost $200k a year. I can’t imagine what it’s like for a struggling family. The car is unfortunately a default tool. We couldn’t do it by bike, you just can’t.
I hear you, Matt S., and I am sympathetic to your struggles. You use words like “can’t” and “couldn’t”, but the dual 20 mi. commutes and individual transport to and from school of two children are lifestyle choices. In the status quo they strike me as unusual (why, e.g., not live closer to at least one of the jobs or send you kids to school on a bike or trimet?). I think it’s fair to question the extent to which we should craft transportation strategy to facilitate such choices. There are ramifications to building/keeping a road network that can carry everybody in separate cars from the eastside through the central city every morning and evening at high speed. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice neighborhood?
Let’s stipulate that everybody would. But what’s missing is a implementable strategy for getting from where we are to there.
People have been trying to discourage parents from driving their kids to school for decades. That’s proven to be an ineffective strategy. Where do we go from here?
“Discouraging” people isn’t a strategy, it’s wish casting. People need alternatives. It’s a long road to get to a perfect transportation utopia, and with so many people peddling the narrative that nobody should ever suggest you don’t drive somewhere, it’s challenging. But building good public transit has to start somewhere. Increasing density in the inner city. Actual investment is what is needed, not piddly here and there half measures (while spending billions on highway megaprojects).
Self driving electric cars that are not owned by individuals may be one ingredient that helps. But at the moment that is an unknown (20 to infinity) number of years in the future, and even that does not solve the scaling problem of individual cars on a 2-D landscape (see: LA). We can build better public transit that people actually want to use, and the only thing I ever hear from the detractors is that it’s hard. Not that it wouldn’t work.
I agree it’s been ineffective. How do we get people to stop driving their kids to school and instead use the school bus, walk, or bike?
This should be the lowest hanging fruit — we already have school buses on routes designed to work for most families, all we need to do is get people to use them.
All it would take me to get fully on the transit bus (so to speak) is a plan that shows how we could build a system most of us would use given our political, economic, and environmental constraints. Without that, it’s just wish casting.
If such a plan is not forthcoming before our next revolution in transportation, it’s likely to fall by the wayside. Tell me why I’m wrong.
I don’t know how we get people to use a school bus. It is definitely the lowest hanging fruit. I haven’t looked into the specifics about how creeping car dependence got there. Likely driving your kids to and from school should get a blanket ban and require a specific waiver with good reason to do it (e.g. lack of access to a bus). And of course, under-funding the school bus system! Always shooting ourselves in the foot. There are billions to widen a freeway but not keep the incredibly effective school bus system going.
Your alternative to “I’m not sure how to do it, but public transit seems like the way” is “I’m not sure how it’ll happen, but self driving cars will somehow exist and make this all better”.
We don’t have self driving cars. 75% of the way there is 0% of the way there (if we’re even that close). And then even if we did, there has been no compelling arguments why that would make traffic in cities any better or safer or more pleasant to live around. There are a lot of well maybe’s, and in theory’s, but nothing to suggest people will drive (er, be in a car) any less.
On the other hand, we have examples from around the world and throughout history of effective public transit. We know it works, and further, we know how it was built. We know how to do it physically here. What we lack is leaders who will make the case for it and unfortunately voters who are convinced by monied interests that we shouldn’t be raising funds for anything. That last part is a problem more places than here (see: UK crumbling infrastructure and refusal to sustain their own public services which everybody there loves).
“under-funding the school bus system”
Do you have any reason to think putting more of our education budget toward school buses would address the reasons people drive their kids to school?
“self driving cars will somehow exist”
They already exist, and are in use in a number of cities worldwide. The future is going to unfold how it does, and I can see many plausible paths where we get automated cars. I can see some plausible paths where we don’t. But I see no plausible paths where cities like Portland turn to mass transit as our primary means of transportation, and you can’t either.
This exactly, I love that way of framing it. It’s not that we need to shame or make illegal driving 20 mi to work (to two places) by cars. It’s that we need to make that the oddball choice, the exception, and not facilitate it. We need to facilitate the choices that will actually result in the most good for everyone instead of facilitating the tragedy of the commons.
Any idea how to do any of this?
It starts with NOT making things worse. Refusing to widen I-5 is effectively not facilitating car dependence. But further, we need to actively build alternatives.
We live in SE Portland, our interest rates are too low to sell and move. My wife got her new job at the hospital in Hillsboro, only so many hospitals to pick from. I work in construction, 6 months I’m in Gresham, another I’m in Beaverton, I can’t predict where I’m going to be.
The Max doesn’t work, it takes too long for my wife to drive to the park and ride, ride the Max, then walk to work. Definitely a no for me considering I carry tools and then most days go straight from work to picking up the kids.
Many people say things like you did, “why not just find a closer job” or “why not just take the Max.”
Because it’s not that easy, sure my wife and I could rent an apartment pretty much wherever we want overnight. However, the kicker, is that we have two children in preschool. My one son, is 2 1/2 years old, we have had him on a waitlist for a particular preschool for two years now. we can move overnight, but it is extremely hard to find preschool, as of now our preschool is a half mile from our house.
So it’s a balancing game, involving interest rates, preschools, having various work locations all over the city, needing to be by grandparents— bicycling is wonderful for your health and environment and all that, course I want nice neighborhoods. But as of now to be a parent raising two children, and having to physically be at a job with ridged schedules, there’s just no way bicycling can be a part of our life outside of recreation. I get on here and write commentary like this, because I know so many other people that are in the same boat that I’m in, and a lot of BikePortland commenters act as if we’re being negligent because of our choices are that we’re ignorant and just continuing the status quo, but it’s far more complex than that.
I have 25,000 bike commuter miles on my Surly, I used to live and die by the bike.
And lifestyle choices, come on. I guess I could say that about you and biking—you want better access, why, it’s just a lifestyle choice…
What would you call your decisions that lead to the current state of affairs? You claim to have no agency over where you live, where you work, how many children you have, where you send them to school, or how you commute. I didn’t say I thought it would be easy or feasible for you to commute by bike. I wondered why you had made choices that foreclosed anything like what I would consider a fulfilling existence. We all make decisions based on where we want to live, work, and form our families. Certainly I would say bicycling is a lifestyle choice (proudly). More generally, I would say the choices I’ve made (some good, some otherwise) have brought me to where I find myself now.
Do you think we should tailor our transportation policy to accommodate your driving because you “can’t” give up good terms on a house loan? Or find a job in the city in which you live? Or move away from a preschool you like? The only reason that you can even entertain the possibility of your current lifestyle is that previous generations invested heavily in an extensive road network for cars that connects EP, Gresham, Hillsboro, and everywhere else. The question facing us now is how to curate/modify this infrastructure for the future. Hayes is running on designing for more driving, which does not jive with my preferences. Sounds like he’s talking your language.
It’s about the middle path, maybe he’s not the candidate. Until the vast majority of people can work, live, play, go to school, and make enough in their immediately vicinity, we’ll need safe roads to efficiently move cars AND bikes around the city.
I agree. I would urge car supporters to work cooperatively with pro-bike forces to produce the best outcomes. Streets of the future will differ from those of the past, and that is something drivers will have to accept. Despite this, the personal auto will be around for the foreseeable future….
Regarding getting sidewalks on the neighborhood side streets in East Portland, this – unfortunately – won’t happen unless there is a major change to City policies and transportation spending priorities. The focus has been on safety improvements on the big arterials (such as 122nd and outer Division) because those are the high-crash corridors where people have been dying. Along side streets, the adjacent property owners are responsible for adding sidewalks (sometimes happens when a property redevelops). Most neighborhood streets in East Portland don’t have sidewalks – changing this with the City building sidewalks would be a herculean task and very expensive. The focus instead has been on traffic calming on neighborhood streets. Would be great to get more sidewalks on all neighborhood streets in East Portland, but probably won’t happen – maybe Portland could at least prioritize sidewalks in multifamily areas.
Another issue with East Portland is that it is the furthest area in Portland from the largest concentration of jobs (the Central City), which makes it less attractive to bike or even take transit to work. Many East Portlanders work in the Columbia Corridor employment district (up by the Columbia River), but there aren’t many safe-feeling bike connections or bus routes to get you there. Would be great if those transportation connections could be addressed, or there could be a lot more economic development and jobs in Gateway and other East Portland districts. In the meantime, driving is going to be the most convenient way to get around in East Portland.
A great comment and I’d encourage you to email it to him/his campaign directly to understand at least one constituent’s perspective (if you haven’t already).
When he says biking is an upper class activity, in the manner that he has, I immediately think, a RAD e-bike, with a corral on the back, two kids and a white parent riding to the park during daytime work hours.
Good. The program is working, but you may need an update. It should be a Tern or a Riese and Muller cargo bike to keep the stereotype fresh.
I’d really like to sit down with Terrence and explain that:
Do your statistics include drivers that legally shouldn’t be driving, ones that in normal cities would be detained by LEO, and those killed that are actually “unhoused” that in their delusions decided to stumpled onto I84 at 3am wearing all black!?
Do your statistics?
There are layers of this. Working class people may struggle with bills and bureaucracy. They may be out late at night on foot, or in the car they can’t really afford but feel like they need.
There are unhoused people that are straight edge and work for a living. It’s a small percentage that would ever try to cross I 84 on foot. Do you know that sometimes it’s hard to cross NE 42nd on foot?
A person can become a statistic almost anywhere. Why should we have such large areas that are hostile to foot travelers?
“stumpled”…?
“We just want to be able to get around safely, efficiently, and with less hassle.”
means we don’t want to share the road with anyone else-that’s a hassle
means we want to speed with impunity-it’s a hassle to drive slow
means we want to crash into anything or anyone and live while they die-such a hassle that I chose to drive like a ding dong and killed someone.
means we want to intimidate anyone without the means to drive-
means we don’t like buses, trains or street cars, even though they are more efficient-efficient is really code for how selfish car drivers are and is incorrectly and inaccurately applied to cars.
means we don’t want safety for people who walk, ride bikes or take transit-safely is also inaccurately used, driving a car is not as safe as many other modes of transportation.
Driving a car is not safe or efficient,
A car is a tool, sometimes an effective tool.
The City want 25% of trips to be by bicycle, not 100%, Hayes needs to understand that..
So much for avoiding the “us vs them” dichotomy that Jonathan explicitly stated he wanted us to reject….
“As a bicyclist, I just want to be able to get around safely, efficiently, and with less hassle.”
“As a person walking, I just want to be able to get around safely, efficiently, and with less hassle.”
“As a person taking the transit, I just want to be able to get around safely, efficiently, and with less hassle.”
How do you think those three sentences sound? reasonable?
I agree that we all want to the same thing, “to be able to get around safely and efficiently.”
But a car takes up at least 4x the space of a bike,
So when do I get a 10′ wide bike lane to ride by myself like someone does when they drive alone in their car?
Can we all imagine that?
Sounds great to me.
Please help me and others walk, ride bikes and take transit safely too.
Please tell me who is entitled to the safest and most efficient way to travel and the rubric.
How would you make streets safe, efficient, just, fair, equitable, and equal?
The person with the largest vehicle? or the most money?
What about children walking to school? Should we care at all about them?
Should we build affordable housing near where people work so they can walk, bike or take transit?
I don’t want our transportation system to be us vs them, but we should not tolerate an ignominious statement by Mr Hayes (or others) with a preamble that initiated the us vs them dynamic.
People who drive cars should should not be given supremacy over people who walk, ride bikes and take transit everywhere, especially in east Portland where we all know we have a car/truck/suv crash problem..
Efficiently to me means driving down Division at 25 miles an hour, hitting all green lights, and then arriving to your destination.
As of now, you drive the speed limit on Powell, you hit every red. You drive 10-15 over, all green.
There’s a reason why people speed, I don’t understand PBOT/ODOT.
I make about 15k a year. I can’t afford a car, and even if I could, I wouldn’t get one. Wild to know that me being in poverty is actually me being upper-class…
He pretty much nailed it, seems accurate to me. I’m saying this as a daily typical bike commuter, who does have to drive at times for business or personal trips…
The irony of your comment is that if everyone in the city behaved like you, only driving occasionally when needed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We have traffic because people drive every day, drive a half mile to the store, etc.
I might walk to WINCO for groceries, but if I walk down 82nd, I’m most likely going to encounter someone smoking fentanyl. If I go the other route on 79th, I’m going to run into an RV with their awning hanging over the only sidewalk on the street.
The WINCO on 122nd is way better.
I go to the one in Clackamas with the kiddos.
The only thing making it difficult or a hassle for me to drive around East Portland is all of the other drivers. Strangely, they also make it difficult or a hassle for me to ride the bus, ride my bike, or walk around East Portland.
I somewhat agree with him. PBOT will refuse to install bike lanes, school streets, or modal filters/diverters in areas of SE that have a massive latent demand for biking (and many advocates). The size of, say, the Abernethy Bike Bus is a good example of what the minimum bike mode share would be when it’s safe. Instead, PBOT is spending tons of time and energy adding bike infrastructure in communities that don’t want it, with no plans to complete a network that would make it viable. The Outer Division change is a good example- good bike infrastructure that connects to an unusable bike gutter west of 82nd.
PBOT’s message cannot be “wait 30 years for us to complete a bike network that makes biking viable.” It’s ineffective and unjust. And counterproductive as it directly produces and feeds into (somewhat true!) narratives like this.
That said, he’s wrong about certain things like road capacity, which induce demand and only make traffic worse. And the cost of the actual car infrastructure that he says is needed to support drivers in East Portland, is impossible for East Portland to afford without massive, unsustainable subsidy from the rest of the city: the bike lanes aren’t making any of these big road projects expensive, it’s because the extensive surface damage, and complex crossings needed to support pedestrians across a river of high-speed cars.
Sorry, what communities don’t want bike infrastructure? Or are you just making that up?
https://bikeportland.org/2023/12/18/crews-have-scrubbed-off-ne-33rd-ave-bike-lanes-382601
JM did a great job covering this issue with several articles.
That wasn’t a community that didn’t want bike lanes, it was one household
Are you sure about that? All that drama and a bike lane removed because of 1 household? Or was it because there was a community united in opposition to what it was and what it represented to that community? A community doesn’t have to be geographically contiguous to be considered a community.
The neighborhood wanted the bike lane and traffic calming, which is part of the reason it was on the schedule to be done, in the first place.
Two issues: First, too many cars. This one is rooted in our culture and recent history. I sold mine.
Second, how we manage them. Turn lanes, slip lanes and buffering capacity around signal light regulated intersections take up incredible amounts of time and space. Also they kill people. It’s easy to show that traffic circles have better throughput and less carnage.
Which communities don’t want bike infrastructure? Are communities monoliths where everyone in on agrees?
If anyone here disagrees with my “communities who don’t want bike infrastructure” I would encourage you to look at the precinct voting for the recent Fixing Our Streets 3 renewal on the Oregon Secretary of State website. Many (most?) areas in East Portland voted against it, in some cases overwhelmingly. Even though most of it would go to things directly benefiting drivers, and schools.
They were also the only group in the recent Portland Insights survey this year that had higher results for “want to drive more” rather than “want to bike more.”
I would love if there were a compelling argument that East Portlanders actually want the bike infrastructure needed to bike more. I understand thousands of them do! But that’s a fickle way to decide policy- thousands of people in SE also want bike infrastructure removed. If the data were close, there’s an argument someone could provide some type of leadership on this (since there is no future where car infrastructure is financially viable, and all the arguments made about safety and demand here are true). But the sentiment is pretty overwhelming. We’re hurting green investments in the rest of the city by imposing them in the most hostile areas. We can make areas of the Portland the best areas to bike in all of North America instead, and when more of East Portland wants that, they can get it.
But if you have some data showing a majority of East Portland thinks differently than I’ve concluded here, let me know! Every shred of evidence I’ve seen seems to support the depressing conclusion that EP is largely hostile to anything that negatively impacts driving, including (especially) bike infrastructure.
The gas tax may be a referendum on bike infrastructure in your mind, but that’s not true for most people and that’s not how it appeared on the ballot. That goes for me too, and I voted for the thing knowing it would support bike infrastructure funding among other things.
If you have some direct polling data to show these people don’t want bike infrastructure, I’d be interested to see it. But writing them off when they are probably about to elect at least 2 staunch pro-bike City Council members seems premature.
I reject the idea that we can’t find funding for a bike infrastructure network connecting the whole city, including East Portland, when our society is ready to spend tens of billions on freeways for that same city. What we lack is political will.
Fair enough on the gas tax! That is my interpretation. But “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” and I’m still looking for actual data that says “East Portland wants bike infrastructure” since everything I can find (including literally asking people about how they want to get around, as per the Portland Insights survey) says they want to it to be easier to drive/drive more/don’t care much about biking. That is not the same as “do you want bike infrastructure”, and communities aren’t monoliths, but at some point we need to draw conclusions from evidence and I’m still looking for an alternative. If Timur and Steph win, that would be a compelling counter-narrative, and I really hope they do and my conclusions (the only ones borne out by evidence/data that I can find) are wrong!
And in case it bears repeating, I am very much in agreement that it is a matter of political will, not funding (it’s very hard to estimate but the studies I can find say about 10% of a DOT’s budget is spent on all non-car infrastructure and doubling that would be transformative). My point with my arguments about East Portland is that it is likely the most hostile area to active transportation politically and we’re burning political capital there instead of building political capital in more receptive areas.
I’m curious how you know those votes against fixing our streets had more to do with bike infrastructure than taxes? Did you compare those results against East Portland’s consistent no vote against any new taxes? Also what’s the overlap in East Portlanders who want safer streets and those that vote against fixing our streets?
Based on the interactions I have with my neighbors over these changes most of them don’t seem to understand that safer means slower and more difficult to drive. PBOT certainly doesn’t help bike advocacy by using bike infrastructure to achieve those goals. I understand why they do it, it’s cheaper and faster, but the community largely doesn’t understand that and bicycle commuters are the ones who take the brunt of the backlash.
Fact of the matter is East Portland has been screaming at the city for decades to make their roads safer and now that the city is doing it they’re screaming “No not like that!”
They want safety for cars. They could care less about bikes and pedestrians. I still don’t walk my neighborhood because of the a-hole drivers around me.
Actually this election had a fun natural experiment, where the Portland Teacher’s Levy was on the ballot along with FOS. If an area skewed more against FOS than Teacher’s Levy (which citywide had very similar vote totals), I took it to indicate it was a vote against transportation taxes specifically, not new taxes in general. I didn’t do a rigorous statistical analysis but did spot-check many precincts, and compared to SW and the rest of the city. I will check if I can find anyone to do a more rigorous statistical analysis of the results.
As for the rest of it- yes I agree with it all!
I agree that this is a fun natural experiment. I would be interested in reading an analysis.
To add some clarification, people in East Portland DO WANT TO RIDE BICYCLES.
While it is not as high as other parts of the city, it is still more than 30%
Please review Portland Insights Survey, especially page 44 of 161 and look at Figure 36.
https://www.portland.gov/cbo/documents/2022-portland-insights-survey-report-pdf/download
East Portland had different interests in future transportation, with the largest proportion interested in increasing their Driving (55.2%), followed by Riding Public Transit (49.3%) and riding bicycles (over 30%).
see Figure 36 on page 44/161
—————————————————————
Other issues are also of interest in East Portland:
Although Homelessness was the most pressing issue identified across the six Portland geographic areas, differing secondary issues were identified across the city, with Community Safety noted at a higher frequency in East Portland (29.0%) when compared to other areas, and concern regarding the Cost of Living was reported at the lowest level in Northwest Portland (16.8%).
Affordable Housing/Homeless Services remains the most important city service when examining Portland geographic regions, with Safety Services holding the second position with the highest reported rate in East Portland (34.8%).
Seeing dirty streets that are infrequently cleaned, sensing that the city is not witnessing the increased deterioration of many neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods in East Portland, feeling like the city has forgotten about its community members, and witnessing the overall degradation of the central city have created sadness, frustration, and fear for many, especially as taxes, rental costs, and the cost of living in Portland have all gone up.
Residents in East Portland reported the highest level of combined Dissatisfaction with Portland as a place to live (47.2%), while those living in Southeast Portland endorsed the highest level of combined Satisfaction (55.9%).
We have a lot of work to do in East Portland, including building more bike lanes.
What he says about professional workers living close to downtown w. short commutes, and/or flexible WFH / office days is vs blue collar workers living farther out in more car oriented designed areas is true.
However, there are plenty of non-prof workers who live closer-in who walk, bike and use public transit. I’m one of them.
Unfortunately, this is just standard throwing red meat to the base of voters based on stereotypes and othering and all it accomplishes is keeping poor people on the treadmill of living in poverty, of which myself and many others are very familiar with.
In which the car is a necessary evil, that traps people financially and destroys or severely limits the people’s ability to experience any sense of community or neighborliness.
This is just cheap & easy politicking. I hope Timor & Steph get out in the community, talk to folks about the real problems they’re facing and discuss some actual solutions to the very common issues that working class folks face everyday that will actually improve their day to day life.
It’s very hard for bluecollar workers to afford closer in living as most of it is overpriced beyond belief
The primary reason everything is spaced so far apart is to make room for car infrastructure, parking and people to live with some buffer between themselves and the noise, pollution and danger. It is also the reason for the price differential. Outer Portland has been built for sprawl, travel is inconvenient and there are even less amenities due to poor urban planning.
I think that Portland’s predatory annexation of the surrounding areas over the decades needs to be looked at as well. I believe East Portland was annexed in the early 80’s and like all the annexed areas the tax money funded the central core and paid for all the goodies it enjoys now. So “outer Portland” is how it was supposed to be with all the tax funds going to support an inner core. Go colonialism!
This is exactly backwards. The inner core produces a massive tax surplus that subsidizes the other parts of the city. You can do a pretty simple cost per acre analysis and see this. It’s just incredibly expensive to provide city services to low density areas. I’m not denying there are big problems with governance and equity in East Portland, but a tax based analysis doesn’t support what you’re saying.
I am looking at the history of “blight removal” and the the city’s use of Urban Renewal zones to to remove the unwanted and replace them with a higher tax base when I talk about the city’s venture into colonialism.
In a TIF district, a community’s property values are frozen as the city invests public dollars, encouraging business and housing development and leading property values – and property taxes – to rise. That tax increase, or increment, is then used to pay off the bonds sold to finance the revitalization efforts.
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2023/01/a-mixed-record-on-urban-renewal.html
That article talks about 17 Renewal Zones and the resulting devastation for the local neighborhoods they caused. Oddly enough it worked out great for wealthier people as they had incredibly inexpensive development and the city also profited as it’s tax base increased. Who didn’t prosper? The people pushed out of the neighborhoods.
Once the bonds were paid off and the newly gentrified renewal areas were filled with the desired “better quality” inhabitants such as hospitals, businesses and upper middle class residents the now unfrozen and increased tax funds came to the city to be spent on goodies for the core.
The inner core and whatever tax surplus it produces is a product of the calculated destruction of many neighborhoods for the sole goal of increasing that tax base.
Those outer areas still lag behind the core in other than car modes of transportation, resulting on a reliance on auto use that is of course not sustainable. If there is such massive tax surplus generated by the inner core, where does it go? It can be seen with ones own eyes that it does not go very far from the core.
The condition of modern Portland is the result of elected people making decisions that made it this way. It’s not a bug, its the feature that the well off desired and how the well off thrive while the rest suffer through congestion, lack of services including sidewalks, bike lanes and anything resembling a modern public transportation grid.
We’ll never know how many people can live without cars until the city actually gives them a chance to try it.
Plenty of people have a chance to try it right now. It may be harder in East Portland, but there are many places where it is about as easy as it can get. I was out walking late a few nights ago, and walked along the residential streets parallel to Division, where residents have access to some of the best transit and biking in the city, with plenty of nearby shopping and entertainment opportunities. Not only did every house have at least one car in the driveway, but the street was completely filled with parked vehicles.
We may not know what East Portlanders would do if “given the chance” but we do know what residents of inner neighborhoods would do. They overwhelmingly choose cars.
Which might correlate as to why car centric views seem to win out at city hall, pbot and ancillary planning agencies despite so many excellent reasons to go in a more sustainable way. The influential and well off want a car centric landscape and that’s what they’ll get at the expense of others.
Activists trying to use government to promote a healthy, sustainable future are trying to use a system dependent on the good will and donations of a car centric majority. It’s delusional and never going to work. I’ve brought up the question as to why Portland raged for months at events and people that didn’t really affect it and yet remains so quiet at the damage that is being directly done to its inhabitants and it’s future by a local government actively siding with car centric short term gain.
You’ve talked about participating in the protests in the past, so do you have any idea why activists aren’t taking to the streets now in regard to the obscene debt, pollution and deficit of hope more car infrastructure brings that affect them and their future directly?
Ask yourself what would have happened if George Floyd had been killed today. Would we have the same outpouring of action when people were not so frustrated about being locked up during covid? No need to guess… there have been some pretty egregious police killings since then (as well as plenty before) and… nothing.
And you expect people to protest against the car infrastructure they depend on to defend some pretty abstract ideals?
People value time, money, and convenience. They discount risk and generalized, impersonal harm to others. Of course they’re going to drive.
I still don’t understand the how Portland went crazy so quickly after the lockdowns started.
23March2020 Governor Brown issued first State stay at home, then 2 months later the protests and riots flared up on the death of George Floyd. Was two months all it took for Portland to go crazy? I wasn’t there by then, I was essential so kept working through the lockdowns up north. Also, it doesn’t seem that the lockdowns explain the year of rage at most everything that Portland suffered (and burning the Elk statue like idiots), far past when any other city was protesting/rioting. Honest question as you were involved, why just Portland? If “the lockdown” is the only answer that just seems like Portland is not and never will be mentally ready for the climate crisis or even the Cascadia Event. I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing Portland as I’m not, it just seems so hard to believe that two months was all it took to drive the people wild.
You mean why not Kenosha and Minneapolis and Seattle? The lockdown isn’t the only answer; there was also a heighted feeling of civic unity stemming from the pandemic. Perhaps you remember people used to come out on their porches every night and bang pots together to show support for nurses and others working on the “front lines”.
It’s easy to forget now, but things felt very different then, especially in the early days before the situation became so politicized.
The vast, vast majority of people out on the streets were far from wild. The biggest protests had no visible police presence at all, and almost everyone was remarkably well behaved. The rioters, who came at night, were a tiny, violent minority, who, sadly, drew most of the attention to themselves and their antics, much to the detriment of the cause they claimed to be supporting.
“…the street [parallel to Division] was completely filled with parked vehicles.”. That’s a good observation. One thing besides transit that’s happening on Division is a lot of commercial/multi-family development without attached parking. One bus line running in a single shared lane isn’t going to serve all the transportation demands of the area. Carless Portlanders are still an anomaly, and people of any stripe who move to Portland generally have a car.
Unintended consequences…
This is not any sort of argument, it’s a complement to your point. There are lots of places in Portland that a carless person may live, but I can’t think of one that ticks all the boxes to a degree that the average car owner would naturally say to themself “Why do I have this freakin car?”
It goes to subsidize the lifestyle of nearly every neighborhood in the city. Outside of Downtown, the Pearl, and possibly Northwest, Portland neighborhoods consume more in resources than they contribute in taxes.
Thanks Jake. I’m very familiar with Urban Renewal and TIF districts. I’m also very familiar with the economic and social designs of colonialism. I didn’t meant to say there is *not* colonialism-like dynamics going on, there certainly are. All I meant to say is, the dynamics at play are not “the colonies are paying tribute to the metro.”
That is, unfortunately, not true either. I would encourage you to look at the history of, say, New York City under Robert Moses for an extreme case. The urban core in Portland actually has multiple freeways running through it, which destroyed (and continue to sap) massive amounts of value.
As you already seem to know, the cost of suburban development patterns which most of the city still possess is incredibly expensive. In fact the subsidy is further away further from the core. Laurelhurst is one of the few areas of the city that is primarily SFH that produces high-ish tax revenue, because property values are astronomical. And consider how relatively similar services in East Portland are compared to Laurelhurst, in terms of police, fire, schools, roads, etc. Worse, absolutely, inarguably. But Laurelhurst (again, among the most expensive SFH real estate in the city) is likely at a break even property value. The fact that East Portland can get comparable (though definitely worse!) services at a fraction of the property value, over a massive area, means that money is coming from elsewhere. That is why the massive tax surplus generated from the core doesn’t go very far.
I can tell you’re interested in this stuff. I would encourage you to attend a Strong Towns PDX meeting (https://strongtownspdx.org). One of our mantras is “do the math” which means, test our assumptions and understand why what we’re seeing is the way it is. To be clear, I don’t actually disagree with your larger points and assessments- but it is important to know *why* we’re in the situation we’re in, because if we try to dig out of it using impossible assumptions, we’re not going to make any progress.
StrongTownsPDX? I’m about halfway through Charles Mahron’s most recent book, “Escaping the Housing Trap,” the scales are falling from my eyes! Something that finally unites my experience of San Diego in the 1980s with Portland today. A fantastic book.
Hi Rob and thank you for the invite, I would like to take you up on that when I can. I appreciate the solid response as I was working off of memories from awhile ago still clouded with a little classist anger I’m afraid. That article was all I could quickly find as it’s no surprise the detrimental effects that have led to the modern city would be glossed over. However, you’re clearly quite comfortable with the subject and didn’t need much theory validation.
Not to excuse housing prices, but are these the same blue collar workers that have $100k lifted pickups with modified exhaust and a Tahoe for the wife?
I think those big trucks are at least partly the result of the construction boom that resulted from the Fed screwing the real interest rate down nearly to zero after the ’09 housing crash. They kept it down for a long time, maybe a year or two too long.
When money is free everything pencils out.
Besides pickup trucks we also got a bunch of new hotels and commercial buildings stacked up downtown before the pandemic, which is why the Hilton Hotel and some similar vintage properties have already gone on the block. The shakeout in Portland commercial real estate is a thing. Maybe class A office space can be converted to apartments efficiently without going through bankruptcy, who knows?
After these little kerfuffles you tend to see some big ol trucks parked in pastures out along the highway, For Sale.
It’s very difficult. First, most office buildings have floor plates that are too deep to convert to living units efficiently–you end up with very deep spaces far from windows.
Second, Portland’s seismic regulations require budget-destroying seismic upgrades. Just because an office building was fine for top-tier law firm space and may be seismically better than 90% of the dwellings people live in here, doesn’t mean the seismic code won’t require a major upgrade.
It’s sad that there are hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty office space, with no likelihood of it being filled with offices again anytime soon (ever?) at the same time that there’s a need for housing.
He is 100 percent accurate. “None” of you “Bikers” will be biking in Cold dark November Rain. Further, Bikers don’t pay for the infrastructure, Taxes, or Fees that drivers are required to Pay. Facts.
So, just say Thank you and get out of the Way.
We work. We pay taxes. I spent a decade as a year round bike commuter, through the November rain and all the ice storms. When people don’t have cars, they bike regardless of the weather. I don’t pay a gas tax because my bike doesn’t use gas, and bike infrastructure is several orders of magnitude cheaper to build and maintain. Every highway, every parking lot, and every road wider than a single lane is a subsidy for cars. PBOT has a $600 million dollar maintenance backlog because they keep investing in cars. Don’t pretend like cars are paying their way while people keep voting against any form of revenue that would get PBOT out of dept. No tolling, no increase in parking prices, no additional gas taxes, no weight or size based registration fees, because drivers refuse to pay full price for the services they require. The fact is that bikes are cheaper, safer, more efficient, and more reliable than cars, and when they have adequate infrastructure they are faster as well. If we want to live in a fiscally viable city that isn’t $6 billion in dept, then we can’t keep investing in infrastructure built for 4,000lb luxury products that are one of the least efficient and most dangerous forms of transit ever devised. If you need a car, then it may be time to get mad at a city that made no alternatives viable.
Not everyone is under 35 and fit.i have some issues that prevent me from biking everywhere.and if you saw my car you wouldn’t be talking about luxury items.plus public transit is under supported which also forces more people into cars.restriping city streets into less capacity is easy and cheap.and doesn’t work
Check out e-bikes. The second hand market is growing and there are more and more inexpensive options.
““None” of you “Bikers” will be biking in Cold dark November Rain.”
This is just simply untrue. Many of us continue to commute in the poor weather. However, we, like people who drive cars, go out less when the weather is bad.
“Bikers don’t pay for the infrastructure, Taxes, or Fees that drivers are required to Pay.”
Simply untrue. We all pay taxes into the general fund that is used to pay for everything, including infrastructure. Bikes also do literally zero damage to the roads.
Weird that it is always the car drivers whining about rain.
I don’t see a lot of bikes in the rain,maybe they’re not as hardcore as portrayed
I see a lot, where there is good infrastructure. And, yes they are not hardcore… it’s just rain.
Hayes is 100 percent wrong.
I ride the bus, MAX, or streetcar when it rains, is dark out or cold all year.
I even ride my bike if it won’t fit on the front or in the transit vehicle.
There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
It’s just water, it’s not going to kill me.
But I know what will kill me, ding dongs like Mr Hayes (and others) who think driving is the only answer when it rains, snows, sleets, is sunny, or they need to pick their nose in public.
But the guy you said is “100 percent accurate” also seems to believe that bikers are upper middle class–meaning that presumably they’re paying taxes–and in fact are even going beyond paying taxes because they’re paying for work other people are doing–meaning generating employment.
That’s pretty much the opposite of your claim that they’re not paying their share, unless you think that all infrastructure is paid for only by taxes on drivers.
If they’re not riding in the cold, dark November rain, they’re probably not riding all winter. How are they getting around then? Are they just staying home for months, or only using transit? Not likely. Or are they driving? But if they’re driving, then they’re paying the taxes you said drivers pay.
“…Cold dark November Rain…”
Been there, done that. Also the rutted snow plowed into the ‘bike lane’ and the gravel mixed with shards of glass. Sometimes it’s June before they sweep that stuff up.
About the taxes, we work and pay taxes. Gas tax isn’t near enough to keep up the roads. I’ve been filtering car exhaust through my lungs in Portland for 30 years. You’re welcome.
“Just one more lane, bro”
Remember the 2020 election? The presidential candidate who lost still got 82,995 votes in Multnomah County or 17.9%, many of them in East Portland (and 40% overall in the state). Given that any candidate only needs to get to third place in District 1 to get a council seat, and that 40,000+ voters in EP will vote again for the guy with orange hair, we can probably assume they ain’t gonna vote Democrat for the other positions, and probably not Routh or Ender either, so why not Hayes or some other reactionary pro-car candidate?
Personally, I just think he wants to get elected. I could be wrong.
“Hayes also says he thinks we should keep the bike infrastructure we already have “clean and clear from camps, trash and overgrown vegetation” on the I-205 and Springwater paths.
When it comes to neighborhood greenways, Hayes appears to be a big fan”
I’m not feeling he is reactionary nor car centric. Just more of an average Joe.
In a few paragraphs, he seems to be trying to play both sides.
The only reason having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car is considered blue collar is because the housing where the jobs are is so expensive, forcing workers farther away. We should infill the central city so more workers can afford to live near work.
Blaming bikes for traffic is also ridiculous. Cars cause traffic, not bike lanes. If you want to reduce traffic, stop spending all of our money on highways and build a subway or sky train along Powell or Broadway. The more people we convert from drivers to bicyclists or train commuters, the better traffic will be.
We are infilling the central city. Developers are building lots of nice high price units that are no more affordable than what’s already there.
Building is expensive, and most developers won’t build housing that isn’t profitable.
The price of housing generally goes down with age, except for the very oldest units which are naturally in short supply. For this so-called “price filtering” to work we need to be continuously adding new housing units to make up for past decades of under-building. The reason we’re not building more future cheap housing in the central city is because it’s illegal.
Yep Steven you nailed it. As long as our zoning laws look like this, where the vast majority (~75%?) of the area of Portland is zoned R5, then it will severely limit the potential land available for development. There is no feasible way to build our way out of this without changing the zoning codes, particularly in inner NE and SE.
What Hayes also doesn’t get is that peripheral Portland can be further developed in a direction where people want to live and work there rather than this trope that everyone has to commute into the central city for work. The street calming, traffic taming work that PBOT is doing is a core part of this.
Of course, he either understands this already or does not want to understand it, so he can tap into some rage votes.
Yes SD. I grew up along 122nd and never really went downtown until late high school. East Portland has the opportunity to become a local hub with a lot stuff like night markets and cultural events. It has an amazing immigrant community. Unfortunately, it has very little of the infrastructure and development that allows for short trips. 122nd needs separated bike lanes and frequent median islands. It needs public squares and walkable commercial hubs (instead of mini malls) to build a sense of cohesion and place.
Both 122nd and outer Division need to be turned into “main streets” with only one traffic lane in each direction, like ODOT is currently building on outer Powell. Both stroads were 7 lanes wide when Portland annexed them – they then took away a lane on each side and allowed curbside parking, so now each is 5-lane. To its credit, PBOT is looking to redesign parts 122nd as a main street. There is strong local NA support for narrowing both stroads, but the local automobile dealers aren’t so happy.
I once met a planner in Rocky Mount NC, a small city of 50,000 that barely qualifies as an MPO. He has a major 6-lane divided stroad with too much speeding and hardly any traffic. So he asked that one lane be taken away to provide parking for local businesses and a Saturday farmer’s market. He then got a federal grant to put in a wide buffered bike lane on another set of lanes. Now he has a “main street” that has only one traffic lane in each direction, speeding is way down, and it’s now easy for pedestrians to cross anywhere, not just where there’s a signal or RFB. (Peachtree Street and Falls Road; the current ariel photos show the new configuration, but the streetview images are from “before” in 2021 and 2022.) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rocky+Mount,+NC/@35.9518151,-77.7987652,241m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x89ae811263dedc7d:0xf09baabb349601c7!8m2!3d35.9382103!4d-77.7905339!16zL20vMHA3dnQ?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MDkxNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Blah…blah…supply-side-libertarianism…blah…blah
I understand that you want developers to build more condos for you and your friends but this is not going to address the chronic low income housing crisis. To do this we need to not only legalize apartment buildings everywhere but, more importantly, we need to socialize rental housing development on a massive scale.
Simple rezoning is… “supply-side-libertarianism?” Please read again. Rezoning is just a precondition. I’m not saying we don’t need to finance affordable housing or do many other things, like what has worked in Berlin or Tokyo. I do reject any purely ideology-based decisions and support decisions based on research.
“to finance affordable housing”
Or…we could bypass the greed-based financing and the speculative real-estate market that YIMBYs worship by creating a social housing authority. Libertarian supply-siders act as if a minor technocratic policy reform will somehow fix a corrupt, speculative, and destructive private housing market that is incapable of providing sufficient housing for lower-income people (even in areas with libertarian housing policies).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/opinion/aoc-tina-smith-housing.html
How do we build more of that (relatively) affordable 1960s, 70s, and 80s era housing by changing zoning codes?
It’s sad that you believe a small difference in price that has more to do with the type of rental housing rather rather than the age of housing (e.g. 1920 1BR pass-through vs 2012 class A luxury 1 BR with open floor plan) is evidence of “filtering”.
There is no housing crisis for upwardly-mobile college-educated YIMBYs/urbanists but there is a chronic and dehumanizing crisis for low-income people that will never be addressed by relying on our crony capitalist market to build more housing for people earning <60% of MFI.
This simple isn’t the case in much of inner Portland. For example in SE Portland the vast majority of expensive rental homes are older apartments and more recently constructed homes are far more affordable (see 1960-1990s). The sudden shift to luxury housing in the 2000s has more to do with the decimation of apartment development by the housing bubble and bust and the financialization of housing development.
Yes, we should absolutely legalize apartment buildings everywhere but even more importantly we need to shift our housing market away from a corrupt greed-driven system that has helped create so much suffering and injustice (and has required repeated bailouts by the working class).
I just don’t see how we’re going to get much new housing that the working class can afford without some sort of public housing. Private developers sure aren’t building much of it, and the “wait 50 years for it to become crappy” strategy seems unlikely to work in the time frame it needs to.
Yes, it’s got to be those evil greedy old people who made wise investments for their retirements are the cause for all the suffering in Portland!!
Couldn’t possibly be those that take the wrong path in life end up suffering because of their own choices? Nah, never.
Just remember, public housing has never worked in Portland (or just about anywhere) so what’s your solution? Have the City/County/State remove all the restrictions a landlord has that drives up rent? Lower property taxes on rentals? Something else?
And no, I’m not a landlord, but I do know some, and they aren’t corrupt or greedy.
Public housing has worked in many parts of the world that haven’t systematically underinvested in it. Take Vienna, for instance. The majority of the population there lives in public housing, including relatively wealthy people that could easily afford expensive private housing.
The key question is how to prevent underinvestment over time. That’s not something we’ve proven adept at.
It is a great question. And one for which I have no answer. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that much of the housing stock that many people unironically refer to as “naturally occurring affordable housing” tends to be run down and poorly maintained houses and multi family buildings that have been neglected for decades. If renovated, that same stock can easily become unaffordable to people making less than 60% of MFI. Markets can produce a pipeline of affordable housing (through long term neglect), but it often doesn’t look any different from run down public housing, in terms of construction, materials, or amenities.
I’m generally supportive of public housing; we just need to figure out how to insulate it from our tendency to spend too much on initial implementation followed by not nearly enough on maintenance.
We know all too well what happens when you build public housing then neglect it.
You appear to be referencing notorious mid–20th century housing projects like Pruitt–Igoe that became scapegoats for problems created by poor maintenance coupled with racial segregation and white flight. In any case, whether public housing receives enough investment to succeed is a policy choice.
That’s the problem.
I see. Good housing policy is unrealistic, and the best we can hope for is waiting for boomers to die, thereby decreasing the surplus population. OK, Thanos.
In your eagerness to call me ghoulish for pointing out inevitable demographic shifts, you may have overlooked my call for more public housing. You may also have forgotten to explain your plan for creating housing in the central city that is affordable to working class folks, which is what we’re talking about.
If your best answer is to build more Class A apartments and let them filter, then you are in luck. We’re already building lots of those, and we can reconvene in 2074 to review the progress of your filtering theory.
Waiting until 2035 isn’t much better IMO.
“If your best answer is to build more Class A apartments and let them filter, then you are in luck. We’re already building lots of those”
Define “lots of”. And no, that is not my answer.
When social housing production is a large fraction of the “market” it smooths out residential real estate recessions and functions as a countercyclical stimulus.
A minimum-wage worker would have to work more than 80 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Portland, to say nothing of a “wise investment” in home ownership. I guess the folks who bought a house for 50K in the 1980s that’s now worth half a million just “chose” the right time to be born.
Respectfully, you know very little about what I believe.
I’m no market fundamentalist, but it has to be pointed out that those “far more affordable” 1960s to 1990s apartments were built by the same market forces that are somehow incapable of building cheap housing today.
The second chart merely shows changes in the amount of new construction by decade, not the cause of those changes. Yes, there’s a noticeable drop after the 2000s housing bubble, but an even larger drop after the 1981 downzoning of much of inner Southeast Portland.
Once again, the cheap 1960s–1990s housing indicated by the red and blue bars was mostly built by private, for-profit entities. Did our capitalist system just become greedy and corrupt in the last 20 years or what?
The second chart shows the PRICE bins of housing by decade which is directly relevant to your “filtering” hypothesis. My comment about the post-great-recession dominance of class A luxury apartment development was also about price bins.
I’m all for legalizing 10+ floor apartment buildings everywhere. I’m even a supporter of using zoning to discourage new development of owned single-household homes in large swathes of the inner city.
Zooming in, we can see that 1990s housing is cheaper on average than housing built in the 2000s, which is cheaper on average than housing built in the 2010s. So this chart actually demonstrates price filtering in action within just a few decades.
Contrary to your assertion that the oldest housing in inner Southeast is made up of high-priced apartments, the pre-1940 data mostly represents single-family housing, which generally costs more than an apartment. As OEA explains, these neighborhoods were already built up by the 1940s, which is why SFH is the dominant housing type.
Things I learned on BikePortland: Housing filters in less than a decade! (/s)
You are arguing that the cheapest older homes in inner SE are mostly owned single household homes???
Also, your comment is this:
“How to prove you know nothing about inner SE rental stock without saying that you know nothing about inner SE rental stock”.
I’m done with this utterly pointless conversation.
I used your own chart to show that filtering is more pronounced with older housing stock. Not that it happens quickly.
I literally said single-family homes were more expensive than apartments. I didn’t say whether the cheapest ones were owned or rented.
Your chart also neatly coincides with when we were building a lot of crappy buildings (I know because I’ve lived in several). Those buildings never commanded a premium rent because they were simply shoddy.
With the professionalization/coporatization of property management, I expect landlords to take better care of the buildings, and consequently rents to stay high. Those old buildings that are in short supply were also well built and maintained (the ones that were let go are now gone), proving that a nice building that’s taken care of does not “filter”.
But regardless, none of that nullifies my point that what’s getting built today is probably more expensive than what Will would consider “affordable for workers”.
Your experience is interesting but merely anecdotal. Yes, most newly built apartments are expensive. That’s partly a result of inadequate supply from years of under-building relative to population. Interest rates and permitting are factors, as is zoning. The 1980 Comprehensive Plan effectively outlawed new apartments in a huge area of the inner Eastside.
There are a lot of similar crappy apartment buildings around the city. What I have not noticed are all the high quality buildings we constructed in the era you claim has filtered down in value. There may be a few around, but, anecdotally, I’d be hard pressed to identify very many. High quality buildings that are well cared for generally hold their value.
But the question remains, how do we get new affordable housing in the short term if all we’re building is expensive class A housing now? And how do we stop tearing down so much of the most affordable housing stock we have to build the profitable (but expensive) new stuff?
The long term will take care of itself; at some point the boomers are going to start dying in large numbers, bringing a degree of relief to our current housing pinch caused by the two largest American generations (Millennials and Boomers) vying for the same pot of housing.
The “most affordable housing stock” you claim we are “tearing down” to build new apartments mainly consists of older single-family houses, which are not actually “affordable” to most people. If I’m wrong, show an example, or better yet, several.
Once again, the fact that older units in good repair are still expensive to rent is mainly a result of the lack of newer options. Basic supply and demand stuff.
The idea that housing affordability hinges on reducing the population by boomers “dying in large numbers” is silly. For one thing, it ignores other factors like immigration. There’s also more than a tinge of Malthusianism about it.
I wasn’t making a policy proposal, I was looking at demographics. Nothing sinister about that — economists do it all the time.
I’m just pointing out that in the future, what looks like a dire crisis today might not be. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the grim forecasts about what would happen when we ran out of oil. Looking back, it seems silly. We’ll never run out of oil. As do more recent concerns we’d run out of office space downtown.
Things change, but as futurology goes, predictions that old people will die has a pretty strong track record.
Regardless, we need to build more less-expensive housing today, and the market seems unwilling to do it. The reasons have nothing to do with zoning, even though that’s all some people l want to talk about. It’s hard to take those people seriously.
Zoning is A reason, but not the only reason. There are acres of land in the central city zoned to allow hundreds or thousands of units of housing, occupied by parking lots, yards, and small structures.
Zoning and other regulations certainly could use improvement, though.
True, that’s why I like the idea of a parking lot tax.
How do you feel about land taxes?
Isn’t a parking lot tax a kind of land tax?
Exactly! So…let’s not prioritize the least safe and least efficient mode of transportation, eh?
It’s beyond refreshing to hear a person running for local office who I feel actually has his finger on the pulse of the people ..folks who often are dismissed as a stereotyped group, or worse…folks who have have feelings,opinions, and ideas for the city we live in..but are frequently overlooked because of what I think, is that we’re not in a certain tax bracket ..this gentleman gets that….thank you sir! You will be getting my vote!
Pot, meet kettle.
Hi Temiyah,
I don’t do that. You might think I do, but you won’t find evidence of it happening here. I’m a driver and I make a very intentional choice to not frame things as “us vs them” on here because I simply do not believe in that type of binary view of things.
What are you talking about? You posted two stories by a guy saying he was oppressed by cars. One of the articles featured an illustration of a person on a bike aiming a gun at a car driver. But it was taken down, not because of the violent image, not because he was fighting with your readers in the comment section, but it was taken down due to the sexual assault accusations against him. And you already wrote an apology about him from before when he falsely accused a guy of being a cop (he was not, just an Asian guy)and you believed him. You also had an article talking about slashing people’s car tires. Remember when you had a picture of a car flipped upside down and you told your readers to come up with a funny caption?
When you switched over to be activist focused stories, all you have been doing is growing a base of people to give you money. So you write a bunch of anti car stories to rile them up, you know like Trump does with his base).
Wow OK sounds like you have some real beefs with me and some of the things that have happened on this site. You also have an interesting theory about what I’m doing here. I disagree with you and I’ll leave it at that.
You probably already know this, but you’ve got a whole hate following on a Portland subreddit. This comment’s from a back-and-forth in a Reddit thread about this article (ironic), one of whom apparently couldn’t help themselves but to bring it to you directly.
thanks Damien. I’ve been trying to track Reddit conversations more closely but haven’t seen that thread. I’ll go check it out.
Don’t waste your time. Reddit is a cesspool.
I disagree! I went over there and defended myself and explained my beliefs and folks seemed to listen. I think Reddit’s great.
I think he’s right, PBOT has a long history of over designing bike facilities and they they snuck through a lot of projects limiting auto mobility during the pandemic which no longer make sense or never made sense in the first place.
Instead of building all these new questionable capital projects PBOT and Portland in general would be better off just focusing on all the deferred maintenance that continues to grow in magnitude and scope.
How much support is he getting from special interests notably the fire department lobby why do they need a lobby???
Well I recently learned that the real reason America doesn’t have a real bicycling infrastructure is because our fire departments can’t evolve into the 21st century and why our response times are sometimes quadruple those in Asia
Gotta love it it keeps getting better
One answer, other than to push for better pay, benefits, and working conditions, is to keep fire stations open. I heard recently that firefighters have been working with residents to keep a local fire station staffed serving the Brooklyn neighborhood. Helping make the case for fully staffing fire houses seems legit to me.
The standard for response time in Portland is 5 minutes from call to arrival. I highly doubt Asian many cities are able to do the same in 1 minute and 15 seconds. If they can, my hat’s off to them.
I’ve heard of SOME reasons why bike infrastructure could conflict with emergency response times in SOME instances.
On the other hand, as one example, you could take any street with on-street parking, and replace it on one or both sides with a bike lane. Suddenly, the street would be wider for fire trucks, and the wall of parked vehicles between where they can park and the buildings they need to get to would be gone.
Even if you separated the bike lane with a low curb, fire trucks could drive right over it. And a taller barrier with breaks would be no more a barrier–and would take up no more street width–than a row of parked cars.
Blaming lack of bike infrastructure on fire departments sounds like a excuse to avoid blaming larger reasons like accommodation of cars or unwillingness to spend more.
#2 reason people suffer financially is transportation 2 wheel transportation is already displacing 1 million barrels of oil a day 4x more than electric cars
And providing freedom to those who can take advantage of it
In my neighborhood we have cars driving by at 50 mph inches off your handle bars
Subsequently converts have to be willing to risk it all for that freedom
The Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) program proves his point about the “war on cars”. Over HALF of the surface area of the IBR’s proposal (54%) is dedicated to transit, bikes, and pedestrians.
Only 46% of the bridge’s surface is dedicated to cars and freight haulers.
Since TOLLING is expected to raise between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion, to pay their “fair share” of the $7.5 billion project costs, how much will “active transportation” contribute? How much will TriMet and C-Tran pay toward the cost of the bridge?
https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/over-half-interstate-bridge-proposal-allocated-to-transit-pedestrians-and-bicyclists/
If Oregon’s recent decision to revoke tolling as a funding source for widening 217 and I-5 I’m the Rose Quarter is any indication, it is questionable if tolling will be implemented as a revenue source for the replacement of the interstate bridge. Clark county elected leaders have been adamant in their opposition to tolling. I’d suspect politicians in both states will ultimately choose to raid gas tax revenue and general funds in lieu of implementing tolling, given how much the public seems to oppose it.
Also, the interstate bridge project that is currently proposed would include freeway widening and interchange work that extends five miles into Washington. Any bike facilities and light rail would stop well short of the end of the purposed freeway projects.
Sarnia – the entire project is only five miles long, roughly 2 1/2 miles either side of the state line.
The bike facilities are shown for improvements on both sides of the river, not just the bridge itself. Go view the Community Advisory Group meeting video & maps, from last week.
Cry me a river. The reason we ‘need’ the IBR is because the interstate highway system, the vast majority of which is explicitly off limits to human powered transportation, needs a way to move an incredible amount of destructive and dirty traffic across the Columbia. We should have TOLLING sufficient to cover the entire cost to build and maintain the interstate highway system plus the opportunity costs incurred by the existence of such an ugly and lifeless road network on lots of public land. No political interest group in the US whines more about having to contribute to society than auto interests.
“Active transportation” i.e., people will pay difference between tolling and 7.5 billion dollars as well as all of the negative externalities of this monstrous freeway and all of the interchanges. Besides, the surface area of the bridge used by transit is a fraction of the entire project, which extends well beyond the bridge.
In this “war on cars”, why do you count trucks (“freight haulers”) as being on the same side of the war as cars, but transit as being on the opposite side?
BS. That hacky opinion piece is counting breakdown shoulders (which can also be used for BRT as they are on the current 205 bridge) as transit space. You know that is disingenuous at best, because breakdown shoulders are needed either way. If you have to lie and exaggerate to make your point, you probably don’t have a very good point.
The vast majority of the cost for the IBR is in the widening and rebuilding of every freeway interchange between Delta Park and SR-500. Cars are the problem.
I know I’m late to this party but I had a thought yesterday while riding in from Gateway. Within a few blocks of crossing I-205 I noticed a lot more people on bikes. More trees, calmer streets. Heck I felt my blood pressure drop.
Forget bikeability, if we’re serious about livability in East Portland we need to talk about I-205. Its basically a moat around “nice” Portland. Inner Portlanders (disclosure: I am one) have been sweeping our problems across I-205 for decades. In the 90s, 39th (now Chavez) was the edge of “nice” Portland. In the last 30 years that line has moved steadily east…until it hit the moat. The central city gentrification money that makes trees and bike lanes grow won’t spill over the moat until it becomes a lot more permeable.
When I moved to Portland in 1997, that line was at 60th; by the time I left in 2015 it had crossed 82nd. I too felt that I-205 was a dividing line, but after I moved to EP in 2007, I found that large parts of EP were in fact very bikeable, some parts were even walkable, and there has always been parts of inner Portland that were never good to either bike or walk in (and still aren’t). That said, I-205 and I-84 are definitely major barriers throughout the city (along with the rivers and even small creeks like Johnson) – might it be better to put them all into underground tree-covered culverts so we don’t have to see them?
The response should be “Vehicle deaths are at an all-time high in Portland, how are you going to work with PBOT and ODOT to reduce car violence in the city.”
We see this narrative over and over – that cycling is an elitist pastime while driving everywhere is necessary for the working classes – and it’s simply heartbreaking.
How about JM and other BP writers highlight future stories of working-class folx who get around by bike? (probably done it already?).
People, you really need to get out of your bubble. Yes, Portland has been dramatically reshaping the city in a multitude of ways and the results are really starting to have an impact on blue-collar workers who are not as engaged. They just see the congestion and their commutes made demonstrbly worse for token bike infrastructure here and there and it is frustrating. As an avid bike commuter myself, I see the value of having infrastructure that prioritizes bikes but mostly I think sensible compromises must be made. A perfect example is the greenway crossing at Burnside and 41st. The hawk signal cycles so quickly to allow ped/bike crossing it is almost embarssing to use. It can be the middle of rush hour and the traffic parts like the red sea to permit a single lone ped/cyclist and remains red to allow the very slowest person to cross with time to spare. Why is it fair to decrease the road capacity and delay other people because one mode of transport is prefered? I have no problem with making smart choices but making it annoying for people to move around thier city is not a good look and counterproductive to the main goal of transport: move the most people as safely and effecienty as possible in a limited amount of space while nurturing livable neighborhoods.
Because not all modes are equal. Some cost the government a lot more in direct maintenance costs. Indirect healthcare costs that are borne by governments and individuals alike. Some simply aren’t sustainable in an urban environment.
In short, it would be negligence not to promote the more sustainable options than the less.
Exactly. Automobiles are the worst transportation method available for this, so it makes sense to deprioritize them.
I love that signal at 41st and Burnside. We could use a lot more of them throughout the city.
I appreciate these arguments. The problem is that we have built out extensive bike infrastructure here and other cities and the people have voted and they are staying in their cars. The streets are less safe than ever. Transit is a nightmare.
The question then becomes, how miserable do you have to make driving to make bikes popular? I’d wager we’s see people simply never leave their houses, WFH and order everything online before we’d see them sitting on bikes.
Not suggesting we pave over the city for expressways but a sensible approach to road dieting would be greatly apprecaited.
For example, nine times out of ten when road capacity is reduced to accomidate bike lanes it is at the expense of through lanes instead of parking.
I think I can help.
As an avid bike commuter, you may see burnside and 41st as place for moving through as quickly as possible. The people that live there see it as the place that they live and walk.
Unfortunately, people driving and being annoyed is the clearest sign of success. How could anyone not be annoyed when they are using a machine made to go more than 100 mph on a street designed to accommodate 60 mph traffic, but signals nudge them to drive at speeds that are actually safe?
You may be surprised to learn that the actual impact of that PHB is pretty minimal during rush hour (or ever). The thing that causes rush hour traffic is cars, and the impact of individual delays like this (even many of them!) are almost entirely negated by the delays and randomness introduced by congestion.
What long signal timings do have an impact on, though, is the choice to take an alternative form of transport. Some signals have a multi-minute cycle time, and hitting a few of them wrong can easily double the time it takes a trip. This isn’t the case with a shorter cycle time so it rarely applies to drivers since collectors and arterials by definition will have quicker reds than cross streets. In other words, these cycle-time-induced-delays don’t apply to drivers on Burnside at 41st, since the time they have the red is relatively short. Or put differently- if the crossing at Burnside required a 3 minute delay for one person crossing, it very well may have a larger impact than a 30 second delay on drivers during rush hour.
The (lack of) delays are one of the few things relatively easy to model out with traffic simulations. The impact of delays (in this case due to cycle times) on mode shift are borne out in various studies (and the reasons the city should incentivize mode shift are probably obvious but Damien mentions them in his comment).
How would you feel if all of those people waiting/stopping for you were in a bus?
or riding bicycles?
Look at a different intersection NE 43rd and Sandy.
There are left turn arrows there on Sandy.
Car traffic is stopped in ALL directions on Sandy and 43rd so that a single car may turn left from Sandy to 43rd.
Is it sensible to remove the left arrow?
move the most people as safely and effecienty as possible in a limited amount of space while nurturing livable neighborhoods.
that means buses, not cars
that means bicycles, not cars
https://www.flickr.com/photos/carltonreid/6440857817/
many people who drive will not yield, or stop for someone on a bicycle or walking.
I agree, making safety a priority for people riding and riding bicycles is a priority.
It is also a priority to make bicycling more attractive than driving.
Wow. I guess my children don’t deserve a slightly faster walk to school at Burnside and 41st. Won’t someone please think of the SUV drivers trying to hold 35+mph on Burnside through my neighborhood?
Try crossing Burnside or 39th in this area at an intersection that doesn’t have a HAWK a few times and see how drivers treat you. Everyone in the neighborhood knows to detour to 41st because it is a fast, safe way to cross this sewer.
We had a Laurelhurst student get hit by a driver blowing through the HAWK at 41st and Glisan this year, breaking his leg. I don’t give a rat’s ass about driver’s feelings about delays for pedestrian crossings when this is the mayhem they cause.