Last Friday’s post about District 1 candidate Terrence Hayes’s ‘War on Cars’ campaign email racked up many good comments.
A lot of them fell into my “do you want this home-run over center or right field?” category. The post was an easy pitch for readers who can make a case for cycling, and those comments were rewarded with lots of thumb-ups and COTW nominations. A couple of them were quite insightful (and popular, like this one from “dw”).
The one I decided to choose this week, however, surprised and provoked me.
Readers might remember Rob Galanakis from a BP post and video earlier this year about a road-rage incident which happened as he was leading a bike-bus of school children. So Rob is an experienced cyclist who walks the talk.
His comment this week about “war on cars” broaches a few thorny issues: the incompleteness of PBOT’s bike network; the fact that most of the city’s high crash intersections and roads are in a part of town that often rejects attempts to calm driving; how much say should neighborhoods have over city-initiated roadway projects.
Here’s Rob:
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.
Thank you Rob. You can read Rob’s comment, and some powerful home-runs, under the original post.
Thanks for reading.
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The City of Portland is now effectively 4 neighborhoods, by law: East, West, North/NE, & parts of SEUL & Cully mixed together. Both Multnomah County and the City Auditor’s office has found in several published studies that East Portland has been subsidizing the rest of the city since annexation (1986-1992) through a higher property tax burden and, being more car-dependent with fewer alternatives, paying more in gas taxes per person, than any other part of town; downtown has received the bulk of this subsidy; inner NE Portland is the only part of town that is more-or-less in balance. The City Budget Mapping program started under Sam Adams amply demonstrated this.
East Portland has been severely under-invested by a long succession of city councils, including the present one – the creation of a distinct district for East Portland, the only one of its type in Portland, is a recognition by the city government of this pattern of under-investment. The district was created under a lot of constant pressure from the US Justice Dept, State of Oregon, and Multnomah County. This under-investment is also amply documented.
The overwhelmingly majority of bicycle infrastructure you do see in East Portland was put in by Multnomah County before annexation (and later renewed by the city) or by ODOT. The city did start to add new facilities as part of the EPIM process in 2012, including by P&R, BES, and PBOT (as well as ODOT).
I’m not sure how much more money East Portland will get after the new city council next meets and a new budget is drawn up, but between EP and NP/NE are 6 votes, half of the council. The only thing I am certain about is that downtown will no longer get a majority of city funding (up to 80% in some years).
Thanks for that.
Is the East Portland tax/spending gap a result of property tax assessment differences? Is it because cumulative assessments are higher or perhaps taxes on new development on the West side have been abated?
It seems counter intuitive that (before 2020) the commercial property downtown wouldn’t generate a lot of property tax to somewhat balance the greater surface area on the East side. Of course it’s possible that owners and developers have a lot of smart people working the system. Also I suppose local government buildings and parks aren’t taxed.
However a person feels about the new charter, geographic representation is going to change some stuff for sure.
I’m going to keep wishing for a network of bike routes that link neighborhoods together with good pavement, controlled access, signal priority, and scheduled maintenance. Add in enough tree shade to get Jim Labbe on board.
I’m underwhelmed by fragmented parochial greenways that bump around over all the little hills and corners. Minus the signs they are no better for Bike Travel than what we had 25 years ago.
https://youtu.be/fDf8CwcBdiw?si=ofVWOUU6H8PEp6kb
Looks a lot like Portland eh?
Nice images of Montreal, Ottawa, & Toronto, cities I’ve never biked in. I have biked in Minneapolis during the winter, but that was way back in 2007, and one February in Vancouver BC in 2014, plus many years of biking in North Dakota, but otherwise I’ve avoided snow and ice as much as possible, even during the rare snows here in NC. In every US state it is perfectly legal to bicycle on any city street that isn’t a freeway (if not terribly fun or particularly safe) regardless of the bicycle infrastructure, but I’m not sure about the rules in Canada. The “every intersection is a crosswalk even when unmarked” rule not only applies in Oregon, but also in NC and I suspect all the other 48 states and DC.
As bad as Portland’s bike network is, it’s wonderful compared to the city I’m currently living in, Greensboro NC pop 300,000 – fortunately the drivers here are a lot more friendly than in Portland. That said, I frequently visit cities that have rapidly improving networks such as Charlotte & Raleigh NC and Washington DC for inspiration. Atlanta is at least as bad as Portland, but they do in fact have pretty good bike and scooter ridership, lots of people walking even when it’s 95 degrees, and a great subway system – I highly recommend a visit. I’ve also biked in downtown Chicago, which is fairly safe, and downtown LA and Philadelphia which aren’t.
The tax situation in EP occurred because of the property tax freeze in 1992, thanks to an Oregon statewide referendum (Measure 5?). EP at the time was relatively well-off and inner Portland was still coming out of a recession. EP’s population eventually doubled and gained a lot of poorer residents, yet the city refused (or couldn’t afford) to invest in EP. There was a move by local residents to form a separate city (Midland and Columbia Ridge were suggested names), but the city and Gresham illegally blocked the process through annexation. This was all way back in the late 80s and early 90s, long before I became involved.
A long note on the property tax disparity between different parts of Portland. Basically, in the 1990s two separate ballot measures were passed (Measure 5 and Measure 50) which interact to create a pointlessly complicated and entirely stupid system. Measure 5 caps maximum non-school tax rates to 1%, and school rates to 0.5% and generally has less to do with why there are discrepancies between areas of the state in revenue, but still generally matters.
Measure 50 cut assessed value on all property by 10%, and limited assessment increases to 3% when it was passed in 1997. 3% hasn’t even been enough to keep up with inflation, much less with the meteoric rise in property values in Portland since the late 1990s. The net result is that places that were relatively more desirable in the late 1990s (SW and E Portland/Gresham) bear a higher than expected tax burden since their assessed values have accrued closer to their real market values. In N/NE/SE Portland, where property values were low in the late 1990s, a 3% YOY accrual on a very small assessed value means that you have places in Irvington that pay property tax on million dollar homes as if they were $250k.
But the real kicker is in the interaction between M5 and M50. Since the M5 rate cap is based on market value (which the county still tracks), places where the market and assessed value are closer to each other (SW, E Portland) are likely to undergo compression. This means that the total amount they pay to each line item on the tax bill goes down, with local option levies being reduced first, followed by special districts, schools, and other services. This means that while the disparity between taxes based on 1997 values is real and important, if you own a property under compression and vote on a local levy increase, there’s a chance you never pay it.
Anyways, I have a harder time understanding how these dynamics have affected downtown. Most of the big buildings downtown have property tax bills that are much harder to parse – like 1300 SW 5th (Wells Fargo Building) has a separate bill for the structure and the land (so it’s sort of a condo? not totally sure) but how this interacts then with M5/M50 isn’t clear to me. Evidently, just the building has had fluctuations far exceeding the 3% limit. Simpler situations like 412 SW 4th pay $44k on $1.6M assessed with $5.5M real value – indicating that downtown properties tend to have disproportionately benefited from the M5/M50 ballot measures. If that property paid tax based on the real value, it would immediately double to an $82k bill (at a 1.5% cap). I guess this is in line with the general theme – even with recent downturns in the market downtown, it’s outpaced the rest of the city enough prior to Covid that they still are benefiting from the property tax system.
The total result of all this is that we have a system that is very opaque and needlessly complex, while not providing any clear social benefit. Sure, some people get to pay less but if we want to give property tax relief to people using the 90% of the assessed value of their property in 1997* is a pretty poor way to do this.
*if you look deeper, you’ll also realize that reassessments were done on a seven year schedule (at least in Multnomah County), meaning that there is a seven year range (1990 to 1996) on which the basis for future property taxes was determined. This is seemingly random, but given the high rate of increase in property values in Portland at exactly this time means there is a high and random variation within an already bad system.
Keep in mind places like Irvington, Eastmoreland, SW Hills were very desirable in the 1990s so their assessed value is much higher. They overpay their share of property taxes while the recently gentrified areas like Boise, Alberta Etc severely underpay. East Portland overpays because it had comparably higher home values to certain areas of the inner city in the 1990s.
Everywhere in between is kind of in the middle.
Yes, that’s mentioned in my way-too-long comment. But Irvington generally is more desirable now that it was then from what I’ve seen – I certainly have looked at property tax bills from the neighborhood with $1M+ real value and like $400k assessed value.
“I’m underwhelmed by fragmented parochial greenways that bump around over all the little hills and corners. Minus the signs they are no better for Bike Travel than what we had 25 years ago.”
Exactly. We have paint and signs, and really bad surfaces over a huge swath of greenways. None of which protect us in any appreciable or practical way. It’s nice to have, but the majority of it is straight up Safety Theater™.
Looking at 2024 property tax receipts:
Getting more specific:
It does not follow that East Portland subsidizes Downtown.
See my long comment about property taxes above for more detail, but this is not a good way to understand the geographical dynamics of property taxes in Portland. East Portland subsidizes downtown in property taxes relative to their current property values, primarily as a result of the Measure 50 assessment cap. We can use the ratio of M50 value to market value (generally, but not always, equal to M5 on the property tax website) to determine this. Sampling 5 random properties in Hazelwood, I got M5/M50 ratios of 1.98, 1.84, 2.05, 2.09, and 1.93. Downtown, I got 2.68, 1.44, 2.75, 2.08, and 6.57 (that’s 323 SW Oak if you’re curious). This generally points towards downtown properties paying less than their fair share of the property tax bill – though this gap is closing as East Portland prices rise and downtown prices fall/stabilize.
It is difficult to actually determine downtown property values and relative subsidy though, especially given the current market conditions. But the larger point remains that our property tax system is so convoluted that any cursory look into who pays more or less than their fair share requires fairly in depth analysis. I don’t doubt that downtown property owners have disproportionately benefited from both the current property tax system as well as the larger dynamics within the city of Portland (most obviously demonstrated in transportation investment in the form of a very downtown radial light rail system), but it’s less clear to me how good or bad this is. It’s easy to rail on downtown landed interests, and I often do, but Portland has historically benefited from a strong core and most people you talk to feel some kind of shame about the state of the core these days (even if many are optimistic about recent positive trends).
The dynamics between centralizing and decentralizing forces in Portland (as anywhere) are complex, but I think it’s fair to say that at least pre-Covid that Portland leaned towards a local tax and investment system that benefited downtown more than the fringe. That said, other dynamics somewhat outside of local control (cultural norms about automotive and home ownership, plus the associated funding structures) have firmly decentralized the area. This tends to be things like increased local infrastructure costs in less dense areas being socialized into costs that we all pay for (like how Washington County pays for most of its roads via general fund allocations and the state gas tax fund).
I think we’re talking about different things here. You are rightfully pointing out inequitable tax burden but that doesn’t negate the fact that most neighborhoods do not net enough in income to pay for their needs. As a city, we depend on downtown to fund things.
Here is a map of the amount of property tax divided by the acres. Looking at this, it seems entirely appropriate to me that we would spend more money on downtown. It’s one of the few neighborhoods where you can actually get a positive return on investing public dollars.
What are the boundaries of downtown in your source? Portland’s downtown is roughly a mile square (about 640 acres) and a lot of that is tax exempt.
Yep that looks right. It’s shocking how productive downtown is even with all the tax exempt land and parking lots.
Wow, great memory! I was trying to verbalize in another post what you are discussing here and it didn’t come out as coherently as this. I remembered that EP was essentially colonized through annexation, but had a hard time finding any specific information in the short time of open source searching I had and my memory didn’t have a lot of specifics left in it. This is great stuff and good for people to know how the dynamics of today were shaped.
It’s not so much that it was “colonized” as it was that MultCo couldn’t afford to provide services to Mid County and the EPA had to force Mid County to join a local sewer system so that their aging septic tanks stopped contaminating the ground water. Portland was told that it had to provide sewer, police, and fire to Mid County because MultCo was no longer willing to. Columbia Ridge would have been the largest incorporated community in the country that was entirely on septic.
To be sure, parts of Lents have been in the city since 1913 and 1920, and most of Pleasant Valley was annexed in the 1960s.
As City Slicker mentioned below, this assessment doesn’t follow available numbers. I’d be very interested to see the studies you reference. There may be specific vectors along which EP “subsidizes” the rest of Portland- for example, rural drivers ‘subsidize’ urban drivers via the Gas Tax because they need to drive more, and some of those tax dollars are spent not on rural roads (this came up recently during ODOT revenue discussions). *But* there is a massive subsidy of overall tax dollars from urban areas to rural areas.
That’s just in the actual budget, it doesn’t include the things not in the budget, like the incredible land opportunity cost of the urban freeways and arterials designed to speed cars into and out of the core, which generate no taxes and historically injure downtowns. That is, downtowns were a lot healthier in every way before freeways obliterated large portions of them. Freeways drain people out of downtown and destroy land values, rather than provide a way for suburbanites to get in. “What would the financial productivity of this area be without highways” would skew downtown *even higher* and EP *even lower*.
I’m also not saying the tax burden is fair- as you said, because of state property tax laws, EP pays a proportional higher tax rate, which is unjust. But the levels are wildly different. In the more suburban areas of EP, you’d probably need to quadruple tax rates to pay for their services and infrastructure. Is it fair someone downtown with a $1m property pays $10k in property taxes (1%) while someone in EP with a $500k property pays the same $10k (2%)? No, I don’t think so! But the person paying 1% is paying for their infrastructure and services, while the person paying 2% is not coming close.
Further, there are fundamental issues of accounting the city doesn’t reckon with that will skew its analysis. The city has racked up so much deferred maintenance on infrastructure, but this isn’t reflected in accounting. If PBOT were a private entity it would be totally insolvent, unable to make good on its liabilities. If an investor discovered it treats unsellable, depreciating property like roads as an ‘asset’ for accounting purposes, instead of a liability, their executives would be jailed for fraud. “The city should spend more on the least financially productive areas while it is already insolvent” seems like a losing proposition but it’s what we’re saying when we say EP is underinvested.
In case it’s not clear, I’m not blaming EP or East Portlanders. We didn’t build enough housing in neighborhoods like mine, which forced sprawl. We caused this problem and deserve criticism, not EP. My words here are just about (skewed) financial productivity and sustainability.
EP does not produce enough value to fund its infrastructure. Downtown does. You can create a lens to find underinvestment here, based on how you want to do the analysis. I’d be really curious to see what the referenced analysis looks like.
See my other comments on this subject for more detail, but East Portland does subsidize downtown in the sense that they pay relatively higher rates of property tax (where rate is defined as the tax paid / market value). There are other ways in which downtown is subsidized as well – primarily through its natural location as the center of the region (transportation investments funnel both car and transit traffic towards downtown).
This is true of the entire city though – not just EP. And owing to M5/M50 interactions, is most acute in central east Portland as that is the area where assessed values are most out of skew with market values. Our local government is systematically underfunded by reliance on property taxes and a property tax system that can only ever grow up 3% a year (in reality, it’s less than this since not all parts of the region are appreciating in value). It might be most acute in East Portland (since it has the largest “infrastructure deficit” to person ratio), but I don’t think it’s worth it to fight over that. We need to fund parts of the city that need it most. Does the need in Downtown for yet another task force and tax break outweigh the need for a safe place to cross the road on outer Stark? I don’t think so.
This may be true in some sense, but lack of building housing in inner Portland neighborhoods did not “force” the sprawl in East Portland. When most East Portland neighborhoods were built, the inner Portland neighborhoods were not desirable to the middle class. It wouldn’t have mattered much if more housing was technically legal in inner Portland when East Portland was developing, the social perception of that housing would have been negative. Restrictive zoning did not cause the “doughnut” city orientation that almost every US city had in the mid 20th century (when East Portland was urbanizing), it was a complex array of social and economic forces. While more housing in inner Portland would be good for a wide variety of reasons, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the lack of apartments in a neighborhood like North Tabor is a reason for East Portland’s urbanization.
Looking holistically at the city, it’s difficult to say that there’s any place that needs more investment than East Portland. Lacking sidewalks, safe crossings, and other basic pedestrian services it’s not surprising how car-centered the transportation network is. Answering how those upgrades should be paid for is less easy, though I would personally favor a special district or bond in East Portland to cover something like half the cost while the city covers the rest. It seems more likely that it will happen via TIF district, but I think this has the perverse effect of the rest of the city paying for service upgrades they don’t directly benefit from (an issue with TIF more broadly since it effectively defunds property tax revenue on the whole to benefit one district). If we consider the history of East Portland’s annexation, there’s a clear promise from the city that they will upgrade services that was not fully met (so the city ought to pay part of it), but also some of the cost of those services (like sidewalks) are traditionally borne by property owners (so they ought to pay for part of it too).
Could you say more about this? I’ve been trying to chase down the origin of East Portland expectations about what becoming part of Portland would mean and your comment seems to get directly at that. What promises were made and not kept?
Here is a blog post that highlights the specific verbiage in the 1983 Measure A which led to annexation of the mid-county area by the city: https://blog.oregonlegalresearch.com/resolution-a-regarding-incorporated-and-unincorporated-cities-in-multnomah-county/
I’m not a legal guy, but generally it states that the county will phase out services while the city phases them in. It specifically names parks, land use planning, and police though as others have mentioned the sewer is really why the city was forced to act by the EPA (more on that here: https://www.portlandmercury.com/General/2014/09/24/13629549/the-forgotten-portland). I don’t think that sidewalks are specifically named anywhere, but if I think that it’s reasonable to interpret “urban services” as “similar levels of urban investment as the rest of the city”. I’m sure that’s not really how what is literally meant, but that’s the impression it gives anyways
I found this post from the Parkrose NA to be illustrative of the general dynamics at play as well: https://www.parkrosecommunityarchive.org/about-parkrose
Big thanks to Blumdrew for insightful historical perspective on how we got here. I found in interesting and useful to read. Also thanks for the links!
Thank you for sharing these sources!
From Resolution A, the final WHEREAS statement and the THEREFORE clause:
This suggests to me the understanding here was “urban level services” were already considered to be in place for the part of Mid-County being incorporated by Portland and Gresham.
The Mercury article you link to points at a more limited interpretation of what was intended—not that they are necessarily an authority on the matter:
From the Parkrose History website, annexation is not described as welcome:
The Parkrose article then makes the same shift I think the East Portland narrative as a whole has made in intervening decades since annexation:
Becoming part of the city was first described as a “dismay to many local community members” because they liked things the way they were, more or less; it’s “peripheral” nature (as well as the associated quality of it infrastructure) was seen as an asset. Then as the community has become more diverse it is considered to be “underserved”.
I’m not blind to the way that parts of East Portland have built up without without infrastructure you’d see accompany similar developments in other parts of Portland (mostly because it’s already in place, built by private development). But I’m not seeing a smoking gun, the why behind so much talk of broken promises and disinvestment (the withdrawal or removal of investment), both of which seem ahistorical.
It also makes me wonder what the conversation and stories are like for East Portland’s geographic twin, separated at municipal birth: Rockwood and its annexation to Gresham at the same time. Infrastructure-wise 162nd/174th Ave may as well be a mirror.
Are the stories the same, too?
Rockwood is twinned with Portland’s Glenfair NA, they were both part of the same Multnomah County Neighborhood District (MCND); Wilkes in Portland has a twin in Gresham also called Wilkes; same with Centennial. There was in fact a Parkrose MCND that got divided into the current Parkrose, Russell, Argay, and Parkrose Heights NAs; the Hazelwood MCND was divided into the present Hazelwood NA, Mill Park NA, and parts went to Montevilla NA in Southeast Uplift; the only intact MCND is Powellhurst-Gilbert, which is currently the largest NA in Portland with over 30,000 residents – parts of it overlap with Centennial, Pleasant Valley, and Lents.
Very little of EP is served by the Portland Public School District outside of Lents, just some small parts of Powellhurst-Gilbert and Hazelwood – the Parkrose PSD serves the old Parkrose MCND plus Sumner and small parts of Cully (and the tiny City of Maywood Park); David Douglas PSD serves most of Hazelwood, Mill Park, and Powellhurst-Gilbert (and it has the largest HS in the state); Centennial PSD serves the vast majority of both Centennial NAs in Portland and in Gresham; Reynolds PSD is in Troutdale but serves residents in Wilkes, Glenfair, Rockwood, and small parts of Hazelwood, Centennial, and Russell. I’m not sure which PSD Woodland Park is in.
Gresham has been more proactive than Portland in trying to integrate their annexed areas, but even their results have been limited, with Rockwood having much higher poverty and crime rates. Portland and Gresham police work together quite well along their common borders, in cooperation with the Rosewood Initiative.
I think the current historical framing is rooted in something that is a loose coagulation of all of the factors you are touching on. There is no smoking gun, there’s just a vague sense of dissatisfaction that has been exploited by politicians throughout the years. I am trying to find a source on this still, but I recall reading that Vera Katz successfully leveraged that sentiment in her mayoral run against Earl Blumenauer in the early 1990s. And Jessica Vega Pederson caught some flack for moving to the West Hills after framing herself as an East Portlander.
I suppose that isn’t very compelling if you want a specific historical source, but you aren’t likely to find one. But I’m still generally of the opinion that the city hasn’t done enough to integrate and invest in the parts of the city annexed since the 1980s. I still think that a combination of city-wide and local bonds should be issued to build sidewalks, make safer roads, and do all the sort of things required to make East Portland at least as safe to walk in as the rest of the city. But that’s less to do with a history of disinvestment and more to do with a feeling that it sucks that a big part of the city is basically impossible to comfortably walk in.
And conservatives have identified the area as one they feel affinity for that also has a population in which historically underserved groups are overrepresented. So it gives them a chance to wield the ‘equity’ sword in defense of people that they can vibe with and against their political foes.
I agree. We should fix the roads in EP because it will make the city nicer. Even if it’s not ‘fair’ based on some formula involving property values and tax revenues. I believe that EP residents will appreciate nice walkable and bikeable streets when they are built despite what may get said during campaign season.
Thanks Andrew for the insightful comments. I don’t disagree with most of them (that I knew about, a lot of it is new facts for me). Some I disagree with but isn’t worth debating over in comments. One assertion I think is incorrect though and then one larger point.
As I mentioned in my comments, this “funneling traffic downtown is good for downtown” is a fiction. It creates far less productive land use (freeways, parking), and generally drains people, especially high-income earners, from the core, who can instead live further away and commute in. This phenomenon can be seen, for example, in many hollowed-out rust belt cities that have actually gained metro population, and urban jobs, but the residents in these jobs no longer live in the city proper (here’s an example). The downfall of American downtowns started only when we gained the ability to ‘funnel people downdown,’ and the reasons are well known. Am I missing something?
On a larger point, there is a difference between what we see as ‘tax fairness.’ You seem to define it as “everyone should be paying the same property tax rate.” I define it as something like “someone’s property tax rate should be tied to the cost of service delivery.”
It’s worth thinking through the implication of “everyone pays the same rate”: the more “efficient” (let’s say, service cost divided by property value) areas subsidize the less efficient ones. This would end up acting as a subsidy from downtown to suburban areas and incentivize building in the least efficient areas.
If “fair” is “you pay for what you use”, we’d be incentivizing more efficient development- further development on the most valuable land, lower cost patterns everywhere, etc. I believe this is a reasonable, and healthier, baseline definition of “fair.”
(To be clear, I don’t believe the current system is fair, which is no surprise, but I believe the arguments about fairness-as-same-rate misses the bigger picture, which is that even in such a scenario we haven’t solved anything)
The argument against “pay for what you use” is very similar to arguments that tolling or gas taxes is regressive. Which all of them are. There are solutions to all of these problems that can make them more equitable. In some cases maybe we end up with a more equitable outcome (like a carbon tax!), but even if not- what’s the alternative? We are afraid of negative impacts on equity, and instead, we don’t curb harmful behaviors (fossil fuel consumption, driving, suburban development patterns) at all? And when the city is dead broke (or the planet is baking), do we think we’ll have equitable outcomes then? Unless we can fix the city’s finances, the poorer people in this city are going to have a way worse time it than an “unfair” property tax burden.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Rob.
On the note of downtowns, land values, and transportation infrastructure I think you are correct in identifying that freeways allow for decentralization, but also that historically Portland’s central business district has relied on a combination of freeways, parking, transit, and cycling as a means of getting workers into jobs. The centrality of downtown Portland within the transportation network – including freeways – acts as a subsidy for downtown. If you are an employer who wants to maximizes convenience in the entirety of the metro region, then downtown Portland is the most natural choice because it’s in the middle of the area geographically and in terms of the network.
It’s obviously not all roses, but I would posit that part of why Portland’s downtown remained much stronger than Cleveland in the post-highway building, pre Covid years was that most so-called Rust Belt cities had much more concerted efforts to decentralize their regions in conjunction with freeway building – and generally more of the planned freeway network got built in a less central way. Generally, areas around freeway interchanges are strong nodes for regional access. In the Portland region, there are 13 (5 in Clark County), 4 of which are in or around downtown. Cleveland has 19 or 20 – just two of which are in or around its downtown. This is all to say that it’s complicated, and freeways brought both immense challenges and economic opportunity (in the social setting where decentralization and suburbanization were considered to be positives).
This is kind of how property taxes originally functioned in Oregon, with a minor caveat that it was still at the county level rather than property level. In the pre M5/M50 days, Oregon had a system where taxes were levied based on the total budget of the service districts and the total assessed value of property. A primary reason for the tax revolt of the 80s and 90s was a result of declining tax base for commercial properties (owing to race to the bottom policies aiming at attracting employers). Thus, residential properties had to pick up the slack and rates continually increased.
But I would push back on the idea that if we fixed our property taxes to be “normal” (i.e., flat rate based on an assessed value that at least sniffs at reality) that we wouldn’t have solved anything. Our local governments are existentially underfunded and its clearly causing serious problems in how the government functions. Solving that is a good idea! And I’m of the opinion that the “normal” property tax would be a reasonable thing to start with. Sure, we can talk endlessly about even better systems (like a split-rate land value tax, or a progressive structure, or a pay-what-you-use structure) but it also has to work politically. Your system as described would raise taxes on all single family homes (people very likely to vote and be politically engaged) while lowering them on multi family homes (likely to be owned by larger corporations, or occupied by renters who are less likely to see savings passed on to them).
Yes, but we can and should fix the problems with the cities finances without shifting the burden onto those who have the least ability to pay. It’s not just that it’s a political non-starter to do something like this, it would be financially ruinous to poorer homeowners and renters in East Portland. And that’s not even considering second order effects. If we shifted to a pay-what-you-take property tax model, the most likely response from the market would be increased prices in central Portland (further exacerbating current trends) and depressing prices in East Portland.
Completely agree. Given PBOTs limited budget and political capital, we should be building out the close in biking network first, where there is strong demand and community support for it. Then continue to build out to the east so that the network is always complete and connected as it expands.
Roger Geller of PBOT advocated for such a plan for many years, probably still does. The problem of course is Portland’s hang-up over “equity”, the concept that poorer and more BIPOC communities ought to get more investment first, including of bicycling infrastructure (EP has more BIPOC than any other part of the city, by far, the highest rate in the state in fact, as well as Youth, Immigrants & Refugees, and Urban Republicans.)
“The problem of course is Portland’s hang-up over “equity”, the concept that poorer and more BIPOC communities ought to get more investment first, including of bicycling infrastructure.”
“The only thing I am certain about is that downtown will no longer get a majority of city funding (up to 80% in some years).”
Both are your words from this post’s comment section. Has there been a hang up over equity resulting in more and disproportionate investment in East Portland? Or is downtown still raking in a lion’s share of resources for investment? Both? Look like some folks up-thread have started addressing this.
What I’m aware of is at least a half a billion dollars in investments touching every single significant street in East Portland since EPIM was completed (this + 82nd Ave). I honestly don’t know how this compares to the scale of investment in other parts of town. But it’s certainly more significant than what was going on in the three previous decades (and likely the ones before that where MultCo was in charge).
What’s more, equity is about more than investment. It’s about outcomes. At bottom, when working properly, the transportation system is delivering the ability for people to reach the things they need to live safe, happy, and fulfilled lives – balanced against the externalities of such a system. Asking and answering what needs to happen in East Portland to realize that end is much more complex than demanding East Portland have the same trinkets and baubles as inner Portland – perhaps a caricature of some advocate positions, but I’ve heard enough variations of “we want what the rest of Portland has” that I think it faithfully represents a main thrust of East Portland advocacy.
Dollar value and type of investment are far easier to latch onto than figuring out what East Portland actually wants and needs – a pattern area that has much more in common with Gresham and Beaverton than it does with Portland east of 205, and, as you note, is much more politically diverse. Despite this, the conversation seems about as nuanced as “Other parts of Portland have X. No fair! East Portland should have X too! East Portland doesn’t have X because of historical disinvestment by Portland. You owe us!” Then a responsive project goes in (say, Division or Glisan) and is frequently unpopular with the denizens it purportedly serves – seen as inappropriate for the physical and cultural context of this part of town, expressed in rhetoric like Hayes’ that I imagine has a lot of local resonance.
I don’t have many answers other than perhaps suggesting that the call (and response) for some kind of parity/equity/equality/attention/love/respect/valuation needs to come in more nuanced flavors to allow in additional light, air, and perspective. East Portland is unique and deserves unique and context-sensitive attention.
Oddly enough, I completely agree with you. There is in fact a lot of complaints about not having this or that amenity, particularly community centers – there’s only one in all of EP – and county libraries.
I’ve heard people complain about not having Benson Bubblers, totally unaware that they were donated to the city by a private individual.
Yeah, I’ve heard that too. There may be one in Lents Park.
One frequent complaint we got was a lack of the blue city bike staple racks, and not just from local residents either. We tried to get the city to put them in (2009-14) throughout EP, but they wouldn’t do most areas because they couldn’t get a rack on a city public sidewalk within 50 feet of a building entrance – firstly because EP being so suburban, it was rare to have a building entrance so close to the sidewalk and not have a huge parking lot in between – and secondly so much of EP actually lacked any sort of sidewalks – and thirdly, where there were sidewalks, the width was so narrow that the rack would block ADA users (along with the nearby telephone poles, city sign posts, and city fire hydrants). We did try a bike corral program, one or two of which might still exist, but that didn’t work very well either. So bicyclists still have to lock bikes on trees, city sign posts, and so on.
What is fundamentally wrong with Hayes and the petty criminals that have endorsed him is their formula of dumbing down fairly complex problems into slogans that appeal to reactionary voters. The result is “plans that fail miserably;” a specialty of Gonzalez and the PPB. Maybe he is simple-minded enough to believe what he says, or maybe he doesn’t care and just wants to take advantage of a knowledge gap in public understanding.
The core problem with East Portland and to some extent every city’s problem is the spatial distribution of people and resources. The way Portland has grown is not anywhere close to how anyone living in it today would have rationally chosen. But now that we have many of the puzzle pieces dumped onto the table, it is the responsibility of city government to arrange everything in a way that is beneficial and functional for everyone. The short term, clumsy fix for this mess has been overbuilding transportation. All the things we need are scattered, so we deal with it by moving as fast as possible from thing to thing.
Unfortunately, transportation is a huge waste of resources. Building it, using it, and maintaining it burns up time, money, space and well-being. The lack of resources and rational design in East Portland would seem to many like it can be fixed with more roads and more cars. But this only makes sense if synapses stop firing immediately after this one lonely idea plops out. A poorly designed region with deserts for everything except for single family housing and 5 parking spaces for every car is a drag on everything it touches.
The idea that investing in east Portland means dependency on getting everything from central Portland and all the requisite time sitting in a car is ridiculous. Hayes has no idea what is talking about.
OMSI to 205 is 20-25 minutes on an e-bike for god’s sake.
I agree. Instead of a lack of investment just in EP and Southwest, why not have the city deliberately abandon and rip out major city streets citywide, a sort-of urban triage, equally in all districts including downtown, to create an urban road network we all can afford? Y’all can replace them nice stroads with gravel and dirt trails, potholes, and accidental diverters, and really get car users to move at 20 mph (and make the mountain bike folks very very happy). Maybe create a whole network of urban mountain bike and hiking trails down Division, Burnside, Broadway, 82nd, 122nd, and Hawthorne, and divide the city into small manageable paved districts, with special narrow one-car-lane trail/critter bridges that allow car drivers to connect between districts?
This seems meant tongue in cheek, but I think this treatment could be applied to the vast majority of local streets. The city can’t afford to maintain them and shouldn’t try. Depave (or let it happen), narrow them up, regreen, and find natural ways to manage stormwater. The major streets stay paved and sidewalked—as they are in East Portland, as they are in inner Portland.
I’m not the originator of this idea, by the way – it’s a guy in Portland Planning who suggested it decades ago who will remain nameless (he still works there). His point was that because Portland has such tiny 200′ blocks, which work great in a medium-density environment like some the inner-inner parts of Portland, Central East Side or the Pearl District for example, but not so good in low-density areas where it costs too much to maintain them, nor anywhere you need to build giant high-rise buildings that support subway station use.
This would be the best plot twist ever. The mountain bikers, who have spent years if not decades struggling for a couple trails, end up with the whole city. The only problem with this is that Portland would become a world-wide destination and everyone currently living here who owns property would become millionaires.
That’s fresh. Tongue -in-cheek but with an idea at the heart of it.
What we’ve got now is what some folks call “car sewers” and a huge private investment in personal motor vehicles. That dog is gonna eat until the cars are no longer operable, whether beyond repair, fuel obsolescent, or illegal due to manifest undebatable outright climate catastrophe.*
While we’re accommodating private motor vehicles, let’s have:
-some streets optimized for car movement at 25 mph average speed, with traffic circles at half mile intervals and limited access otherwise, and signal priority for transit and ped crossings.
-steets optimized for transit, local delivery, and human power, with private motor vehicles limited by automatic bollards.
-streets optimized for local use, themed as either school routes, natural surface trails, walkable pavers, etc.
See: plaid design
Since there’s all kinds of private ownership in place this would be tricky to do. It could be done incrementally by designing a template and constraining any movement away from the template while rewarding any movement toward the template with variances and favorable financing.
That’s a big ask and a big investment. Until a full plaid street layout is on the table, could we at least have neighborhoods that are permeable but not crossable by private motor vehicles? –so that a mv operator who gets off the collector streets has to make three turns out of line to go a half mile, constrained by automatic bollards.
Division Street below 82nd Ave should be a transit priority street, with private motor vehicles turned out every 10 blocks. Sure, you’d have to figure out delivery trucks, nobody wants to kill retail.
*for example, tidal level in the Willamette comes up 20 feet to the top of the wall.
The Plaid Design as you call it is very similar to what has existed in Vancouver’s West Side near Stanley Park for at least 30 years now, so there’s already a regional model, and some elements in my old neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch near NE 28th put in by PBOT in the 80s, but it’s largely a model most common in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The City could use PCEF funds to pay for many of the improvements, while I think the feds are still subsidizing traffic circles and roundabouts. There’s a particular army in the Middle East that is famous for ripping out city streets of their enemies, pavement and all, you might be able to hire them for cheap if they ever end their costly wars.
I don’t think that army seeks to improve the flow of anything. Doesn’t seem like we’d want to go that way…in about a minute we’ll know more about how this plays out.
“…Hayes and the petty criminals that have endorsed him…”
Possibly I should know what the heck you’re talking about, but I don’t. Without context within your comment it feels like a slur. What are you referring to?