Sometimes questions are more revealing than answers, and Steve Novick, City Council candidate from District 3, posed a good one at last Wednesday’s Bike Happy Hour. “We have seen this really unfortunate drop off in bicycling as a percentage of trips over the past nine years . . . So my question is: What should we focus on to get ridership back up?” And then he continued with a long series of possible reasons which showed his command of transportation issues.
145 of you — so far — have answered him.
But amid his questions, Novick also slipped in some thoughts about increasing the percentage of Portland Clean Energy Benefits Fund (PCEF) money going to transportation, and suggested redirecting some of that money toward building out complete networks.
One commenter, SD, picked up on the PCEF angle and wrote,
The way to mobilize resources from PCEF and other sources around climate and equity is to center a core tenet that is already a reality of the city for most people and needs to be applied to every decision. “Make Portland a city where you don’t need a car for most trips.” Every decision should start with, “does this decision increase car dependency or decrease car dependency?”
That caused me to sit up straight. Anyone (me) who has ever dug deep into PBOT documentation knows that PBOT is an anti-racist organization. This means that PBOT views all its actions through a, “Will it advance equity and address structural racism?” lens. SD seemed to me to be suggesting that a similar rubric regarding car trips might be useful.
Here’s SD’s full comment:
Asking people who bike “What can we do to get more people biking?” has generated a lot of great responses. Many of them are frequently covered on this site and in the comments. Foremost — let’s fully execute greenways and protected lanes. We have tried to create a secret invisible bike network using passive aggressive implementation, but it is not safe because of drivers.
However, the question that Novick is actually asking is how to make a viable, enjoyable, sustainable, equitable transportation system politically expedient? What big change will mobilize support and dispel the haters? The answer to this question is that Portlanders are not going to stand up en masse and fight for dramatic changes to a transportation system that they are heavily invested in, even though it is killing them. This is even more the case since the most immediate deaths are people in poverty.
A strong coalition of support for the best transportation system has to be established within city government, first. I listened to Novick’s interview on OPB along with other candidates, and there were many candidates that said “bikes and transit” were important to them. We have heard this for decades. But when it came down to it, they compromised, they folded, they implemented half measures, because the political juice they got from “bikes” in that moment didn’t stand up to the political juice they got from whoever else was yelling at them.
A decade ago, Portland had a strong vision and identity. A decade later, it is still there, but obscured by self-hatred and weak leadership that was installed by wealthy individuals whose fortunes depend on car-commuters.
The way to mobilize resources from PCEF and other sources around climate and equity is to center a core tenet that is already a reality of the city for most people and needs to be applied to every decision. “Make Portland a city where you don’t need a car for most trips.” Every decision should start with, “does this decision increase car dependency or decrease car dependency?” Part of this is just people waking up and realizing that it is already true. The other part is building infrastructure. The other part is looking to specific demographics, like seniors, and providing car-free living services that take the place of cars.
Thank you SD. Do I need to say that there are many, many strong comments in this thread? Steve Novick commented (pinned at top) that he was “awestruck by the number and thoughtfulness of the comments.” He’s going to try to respond to them, but my understanding is that he will be pretty busy through November 5th.
Thanks for reading.
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The problem with this kind of logic is that it’s possible to have high SUV mode share while still creating a traffic system that is not killing them (see many Swedish [3.1 deaths/100k] and British cities [3.2 deaths/100k] for example).
I agree!
Let’s tax the rich (a lot) and middle class (also a lot) and build hundreds of thousands of social housing units in inner Portland!
This is the equivalent of saying does every decision should start with how can we tax the living #$%@ out of the upper classes to build a better Portland.
Portland is already taxing the rich: they are the only ones paying millions for the “supportive housing services” (homeless services) tax and the pre-school tax. Portlanders thought those taxes were worth having but not worth paying themselves.
As a result, high earners are leaving Portland in large numbers, and since they are the same people who run businesses, they are also moving their businesses from Portland to lower-tax ClackCo and WashCo and to areas outside the Portland metro.
I myself am not a high earner but I’m looking to leave Portland as soon as I can. I just got my property tax bill, which has DOUBLED since I’ve lived in Portland.
Look out in coming years for local gov’t to come begging for funding. Oh – I guess it has started already (Mapps at PBOT etc).
Taxing the rich sounds great but taxing works only if everyone steps up to pay taxes.
Fred, there is no free lunch when it comes to a humane, moral, and socially cohesive society.
Another loan/home owner who has seen their equity $$$$ hockey-stick up is complaining about their property tax rent control.
Citation needed. Comparing 2023 ACS 1 year estimates to 2022 ACS 1 year estimates for the city of Portland and you’ll see that the share of households earning $200k/year or more went from 14.3% (+/- 1.1%) in 2022 to 16.6% (+/- 1.1%) in 2023. Hardly evidence of high earners leaving Portland in large numbers.
Citation needed. Why would someone even do this? Businesses typically don’t move within a region because of personal tax arbitrage. They do move within regions due to corporate tax and other race-to-the-bottom incentives, but I’m under the impression that Portland is doing just fine on retaining large businesses, and Oregon has very low corporate taxation rates.
Property tax increases are capped at 3% per year in Oregon*, unless your house was reassessed due to significant renovations, this would mean that you’ve lived in Portland for like 24 years. In the same time, property values in Portland have gone from ~$102k to ~$325k (per the St. Louis FRED), a 3x increase. If you have an asset that has tripled in value while the tax you pay on it has only doubled, you’ve gotten a screaming deal – potentially at the expense of the funding of your local government.
*assuming that the local rate is stable near the cap of 1.5%, which is more or less true for most of Portland. If you happened to buy your house immediately before a large levy or bond, the actual time between your property tax bill doubling could be somewhat less than 24 years. But even then, it’s still on the order of 20 years.
Nor is it evidence of not. Wages have been going up and the stock market has been going bonkers, so there are a lot of folks with more income than they had previously; it could be that high income folks are leaving at a high rate and are replaced in the statistics by those slightly below them on the income scale.
Perhaps; but it’s hard to pay your tax bill with the unrealized equity in your house. Folks earning enough will be ok, but those on a fixed income, like retirees, can be priced out of their homes even as the value of those houses climbs.
Which is an excellent example of Gentrification.
As you mention equity in a home is only realized once the home is sold and then that realized gain is often not enough to purchase another home due to increased costs so off they go to somewhere else to make room for the wealthier folks. Unreal.
Property tax increases are an abomination and only result in increased gentrification as values rise.
Taking out a home equity loan to access the new equity doesn’t really help either as then you just have more debt and are still on a fixed income or still barely making it.
So to be clear, the proportion of higher income earners being greater in 2023 than 2022 is somehow not evidence of high earners not leaving? What else could it possibly be evidence of? Sure wages are up, but I’m talking about nominal income anyways (since that’s the determining factor for paying the various taxes on high earners) so it’s a moot point. I could imagine that every household making $200k+ left Portland between 2022 and 2023, but if they were replaced by a larger number of different households making $200k+ who care?
Sure, and there should be policy that addresses this, like specifically giving property tax freezes to those who are unable to pay increasing rates. But you’ll excuse me if I think that the problem of someone selling an extremely valuable asset because it has appreciated in value too much to be not a very interesting one to consider
Just what I said; if 10% of high earners leave every year, and 12% of almost high earners become high earners, then the number of high earners could grow even as they leave in large numbers.
I’m not saying that is what’s happening, only that it’s consistent with the observations.
You should probably discuss it with someone who’s facing that situation to see if it’s a problem worth considering. This is actually a fairly common problem, not some weird edge case I dreamed up (and there are government programs that can help).
If “old” high earners leave, and they are replaced by “new” higher earners does that matter? It certainly wouldn’t demonstrate that high earners hate Portland as Fred is saying in the original comment.
And I’m not saying it’s not a real problem, just that it’s one with an obvious set of solutions centered around targeted relief based on ability to pay. It’s just not very interesting to me, since they are people who by definition own an extremely valuable asset. I’d be more interested in exploring policy solutions that help working class people actually find stable housing
A more precise way of looking into this would be to ask how many taxpayers had to file to pay the preschool tax. And then compare the numbers by year.
I heard on the campaign trail (and I’m not fact-checking) that there were 1,000 fewer pre-school filers than the previous year. I don’t remember the details. You two might want to look into them.
I should also address your “who cares” comment: if what you described is happening, that means that everyone earning over $200k is in a hurry to leave. So what, you say — they’re always being replaced by other folks. But if we have an economic downturn, they might not be as quickly replaced, leaving us with fewer $200k earners, leading to the preschool and Metro housing programs collapse.
It’s generally considered bad policy to drive out those who are disproportionately paying the bill for everyone else. This is also not some weird edge case I invented, but is one of the reasons why most European countries no longer assess a wealth tax.
But you have presented no evidence of your hypothesis, just that it’s technically support by the math. Which, sure, it is technically possible that high wage earners are super mobile and constantly coming in and out of Portland. I find that to be exceedingly hard to believe, and you have presented no evidence for it.
There are reasons why an income tax on high earners present a challenge to stable funding. Mostly that very high income earners, who represent a larger share of the total revenue, have highly variable taxable incomes related more to capital gains/property than normal wage stuff. Evidently, this dynamic is part of why the pre school for all tax got such bad press for “sitting on money” – it’s very difficult to project this stuff, and it was made worse by Covid pessimism around the economy
Yes, that’s right. You asked what other explanations would be consistent with the data, and I offered one.
Here is some data that might help illuminate what’s happening:
https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/07/10/metro-and-multnomah-county-fear-city-tax-collectors-arent-closely-tracking-the-regions-two-biggest-taxes
That Willamette Weekly piece is deliberately misleading. The figures being used to show a 20% decline are referring to numbers from an unpublished chart quoted in this older piece, and that is referencing only households with income greater than $500,000. That is not “the number of people earning enough to pay the tax” – which the older piece puts at ~8% of the population. It also mentions a 9% decrease in total filings, but is using data that the county considered to be incomplete and subject to change as late filings continued to roll in. Maybe the late filings won’t explain the whole thing, but it would be nice to get correctly sourced and updated data instead of a purposefully misleading number.
I find a 9% decrease in the face of a 20% increase in number of households earning $200k/year or more to be suspect enough to not really trust any specific conclusions coming from the reporting on incomplete 2022 TY data. That’s not to say the tax hasn’t caused some small issues relating to tax flight, just that the reporting around it from the WW utterly fails to meaningfully address it and instead prefers to make false conclusions without actually presenting any sources.
Really? They had the intention to mislead?
I sounds like you agree there has likely been tax flight, and the main point of contention is which subjective and non-quantitative adjectives to apply to it.
I really like to find areas of agreement, so I’m satisfied with this.
Assessed value increase is capped at 3%
Unless you pull a permit for say a panel upgrade to accommodate an electric car or something like that. Then they can snap it up much more in a single year.
But I broadly agree, property tax growth is modest vs the growth in value of the home. It’s just prudent to understand that it can and does go up more than 3% in any given year based on the effective tax rate on the assessed value and reassessment events like remodeling/upgrading systems.
The assessed value increase cap, coupled with the rate cap, functions as a 3% cap on growth. Though this is made more complicated by the rate cap being calculated from the “real market value” (which in reality is another fake number calculated by the county, more in line with a traditional property tax system’s assessed value), I do not think any part of Portland is all that far off from the 1.5% max rate.
If you have a specific document from the state or county about how reassessments are handled, I’d be keen to see it. But I’m under the impression that small renovations (maybe below $20k) never trigger a reassessment, while larger ones (or any kind of conversion to more intensive use) do. But that how those reassessments are calculated also has some serious qualifications
I might be missing your point, so forgive the confusion if so.
I’m saying the 3% cap is only for the assessed value but the taxes paid can and do increase at a higher rate for many properties.
Take this place for example:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2410-SE-47th-Ave-Portland-OR-97206/53989104_zpid/
There have been no exception events in the last 20 years but tax has increased by about 4% on average (and much more in some years) than the 3% increase in assessed value. That’s all I’m saying, that I hear about the 3% cap as if it’s rare or impossible w/o an exception event to see it increase more but this was just 2nd home I checked on zillow today. A 3% per year increase for 20 years starting at $1780 is $3215 but the taxes in 2023 were $4135, over 4.3% per year and now over $900 per year more expensive. It makes a significant difference.
Again, if that’s what you’re saying, that it’s 3% cap plus up to 1.5% on top, then I apologize for the confusion. I just hear the 3% cap a lot but in practice it seems to be higher and varies quite a bit each year.
With the exception events, the triggering criteria is a bit opaque in my option. I think they look at permits and then make some sort of calculation based on their guess to what you are really doing with the property.
The issue is they are just guessing based on what they think the “value” of the improvement is not the real cost or the actual work done. You can dispute it but since people have quite a bit of work done that does not require a permit but can still be assessed if you let the county assessor in to your home, people are reluctant to do so. If you aren’t relocating outlets or plumbing fixtures, a kitchen remodel that raises the value of your home by $25k or more might not be known to the assessor but since you invited them in they now can make that assessed value, and thus taxes paid, jump up even more. At least that’s my understanding.
https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_308.149
https://www.multco.us/assessment-taxation/property-assessment-faqs#Exception
$18.5k in a year and $45k over 5 years is the limit right now, it was lower before, see the statutes link $10 and $25k, respectively.
Long story short – you are correct that 3% is only the cap if property tax rates are fixed, but it’s still a little more complex than that (especially outside of places with more modest growth rates).
It’s all very confusing. Here’s how it works as I understand it:
So for a property in an inner Portland neighborhood that has gentrified since the 1990s, there is likely to be a huge gulf between AV and RMV. In these cases, compression is almost certainly not going to happen, and the growth of the property tax rate is not necessarily bounded. This means that when local option levies, or bonds, or other measures pass, the year over year change can be fairly significantly more than 3%. But that’s still just one year, and unless measures are continually added as old ones expire, then the growth rate will still be capped near 3% in the long term.
Even though Portland has the reputation as always approving new measures and bonds, the thing that actually matters is if it is more willing to approve measures and bonds than it was say 20 years ago (since those all expire). In neighborhoods unaffected by the 1.5% cap and compression (most neighborhoods in the central city), I see average growth rates of 3.5% to 4% in actual tax bills over the past 17 years (last year I can see online through Mult Co) – suggesting that we are moderately more tax happy than we were in the years preceding.
But it’s all highly variable, and changes depending on what school district, flood control district, soil and water district, and more that a specific property is in. And I still think the 3% number is a useful rule of thumb for considering long periods of time, since that is the rate of change of the value that is being taxed.
Evidently, I am of the opinion that part of the reason for the ever increasing tide of local option levies and bonds is that the structure of the property tax system requires it. Since property taxes are the primary funding source of local governments, and since the tax base growth is capped, the only option left is to increase the rate. In times of high inflation, this means nominally increasing tax rates just to keep the lights on – not a good strategy for a stable local government.
And still, even if tax bills grow by more than 3% a year, the increase in tax rate generally has not kept up with the increase in property values. Home values have had about a 5% annual increase in the same 17 years where property taxes have increased by 3.5% to 4% (this is slightly beside the point)
Thanks for the rundown!
Speaking of geographic differences the ratio of RMV to taxes paid, this is older data but the map is very telling:
https://projects.oregonlive.com/taxes/property/map/
I believe it is the assessed value increase that is capped at a maximum of 3% per year. In the 15 years I’ve been in my house voters have added several levies and bonds that have been added to the bill based on the assessed value. These are what have driven the significant increases in property taxes for homeowners and I would suspect increases in rent for renters.
The screaming deal is for the folks that have bought high dollar properties in areas that have gentrified since 1997 because homes are not reassessed when they sell. Unless there have been renovations that trigger a reassessment, their property taxes are probably lower than in areas that have seen declines since 1997 (looking at properties east of 205).
It’s not a screaming deal when property taxes go up faster than your income and you can no longer afford to stay in your home. You might make a bunch when you sell, but where are you going to live?
Yes, it is just on assessed value but the annualized growth rates in property tax bills are still on the order of 3 to 4% over the past 10 to 15 years (see my comment in thread above).
Property taxes can be and are passed through to renters, but generally market conditions are more deterministic of rent increases (along with direct regulation).
This is true, and a hugely bad side effect of M5/M50. But it’s worth saying that there are very few, if any, parts of Portland that have seen any real decline in value since 1997. East and SW Portland were relatively more desirable then, but properties there are still more valuable now than they were then in absolute terms.
In a place you can afford with all the cash you just got from selling a very valuable asset. Maybe you’d even have the chance to rent a place, that’s all most people I know might be able to afford anyways. I do not think it’s good to price people out of their homes via property taxes, but I also think there are far larger housing problems to tackle, and that our property tax system is so horribly stupid that it should be reformed along entirely different lines for obvious reasons. Any reform can and should account for the dynamics you are describing though.
This IS Portlanders paying for it themselves. Where do you think the money comes from that the rich have? It’s not like they materialized money out of thin air.
If high earners do leave Portland in large numbers (doubtful), then that should also lower housing costs. The only thing that is making me feel like leaving Portland is how expensive housing here is!
As everyone who has studied economics knows, the economy is a fixed size, so if one person has more, it necessarily means someone else has less.
Most rich people get their money from schemes like “salami slicing”, where hourly employee’s paychecks are rounded down to the nearest cent, and the fractional cents are covertly diverted into secret accounts.
Only rubes think rich people get their money through legitimate means.
Going to need a citation on this “salami slicing” 🙂
There’s got to be one somewhere … 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo
The important thing is that whatever it is its not stealing 🙂
That’s a strange way to describe “rent-seeking” — making money by doing nothing other than owning assets.
I didn’t make up the name — google it.
Curious as to where you’re gonna find it a whole lot cheaper, maybe Tampa, Ft. Meyers or Asheville? Low pay Arkansas? Rural Oregon/Wash isnt that cheap really.
Your housing costs seem unlikely to go down as they’re high all over the world. We actually have it pretty good if not great in the Northwest in terms of rent as a percentage of median income. If we succeed in showing all the business owners the door than you or your friends won’t find a job when next you are forced to look.
Rent for my one bedroom here in South Goa India, is 715 per month and the median income is around 3500 per year.
Rents in Southern England are about the same as Portland and the median wage is half.
Europe is going downhill fast in terms of income and costs are high there; salaries are low, low, low in China, India, Africa, Brazil, Indonesia Thailand, Mexico. Wages in Columbia, Venezuela, Peru are almost lower than India.
Where is this magical land of economic and social justice?
First, I didn’t say I was planning to leave, I said the cost was the only thing that would make me feel like it. I’m one of those idiots that can work remotely. My point is that cost of housing is the biggest pain point for me here. It’s a ridiculous fraction of my income.
Second, there are places all over the country that are less expensive to live in. You must be joking. I’ve looked, un-seriously, at places in, for example, Cleaveland which has lots of housing that is comparatively inexpensive. Same with Minneapolis/St. Paul. And the cycling is not even too bad in either of those places!
It’s true, if I had to live at the place I work, I would be more limited. I don’t know what kinds of work is in various cities, so that is a definite consideration.
As someone who grew up in and recently visited Cleveland, I can tell you that cycling there is terrible with the one exception of the Metroparks “Emerald Necklace”. If you want to cycle as transportation, and not recreation it’s awful.
Must be nice to live off the sweat of others and not contribute any of your own to the betterment of society.
That has been a thing since at least the Middle Ages, actually.
(There were fewer economic tiers then, but really the psychology is the same.)
Human nature is a very, very tough thing to correct for, even with the best of intentions.
Firstly, PBOT can’t even put a few simple sentences together to explain what they do that makes any kind of sense to the average person.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is a community partner in shaping a livable city. We plan, build, manage and maintain an effective and safe transportation system that provides people and businesses access and mobility. We keep Portland moving. — I’m not sure how building & maintaining a road system that lends itself to street racing, casual speeding and prioritizes the public storage and movement of private automobiles over everything else makes a city “livable”.
Secondly,. “car dependency”, which has been mostly created by the automobile, oil industry is more a cultural/lifestyle thing. I suspect some folks are car dependent, but I think more folks make choices to buy. own and drive a car.
Thirdly, even if PBOT does care about DEI, climate change, etc., at the end of the day they’re a transportation department and the movement of people and goods is what they’re all about.
I don’t have any evidence, but I suspect no one at PBOT actually cares if people ride bikes or not. If the do, they probably don’t have any power in the organization to do anything. I think PBOT’s only real interest in bicycling is around safety due to the public response when people riding bikes and/or walking get murdered on the street by an automobile, truck or bus.
Lastly, it’s the politicians who oversee & manage PBOT, who make PBOT care about bicycling as a mode of transportation and other things like climate change.
I’ve heard this from many city engineers in other cities:
“The purpose of a curbside bike lane or parking lane is to keep cars and trucks from hitting the curb and from damaging the edge of the road, which on many streets is the most expensive and the weakest part of the road. The fact that bicycle users might use this lane is secondary. The purpose of a buffered bike lane is to reduce the number of traffic lanes and long-term future street maintenance costs. The buffered bike lanes themselves allow us to defer street sweepings by allowing debris to accumulate. Both lane types allow us to narrow up car travel lanes to 10 feet to reduce traffic speeds to 35 mph, for our civic leadership to boast about how “bike friendly” our community is compared with similar sized cities, and to attract potential new businesses.”
Ask them about curb-protected intersections and/or bike lanes and they usually find all kinds of excuses to do nothing.
I want to be very clear and specific about this because understanding how things actually work in the real world is the first step to change.
Cars are cultural/lifestyle phenomena that have been around now for a century or so and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Last time I checked, PBOT is a department of transportation and not a department of culture & lifestyle.
PBOT cannot move grocery stores closer to where people live or build more affordable and dense housing so people will choose to walk or bike to places they want to go.
If and it’s a really big IF in my mind that PBOT cares one iota about how many trips are taken by car vs other transportation modes, it’s most likely due to public pressure and political directive.
Anyway, I don’t have any actual solutions to offer, but pipe dreaming about a transportation department viewing their purpose on some question that isn’t quantifiable and isn’t the purpose of their agency is just more social media “hopey changey” waste of time that doesn’t change the reality we live in.
On the other hand, car dependency is quantifiable, people at PBOT do care about these things, the question of car dependency is for the people setting the political directives.
PBOT is still heavily dependent on gas tax revenue and parking revenue – the more people drive gasoline cars and park any type of car downtown, the more revenue PBOT receives. To put it another way, the less people drive and use alternative modes, the less revenue PBOT gets.
Precisely, which is why PBOC, and ODOC need to align their funding mechanisms with their new focus on transportation.
Car-dependency is a decent metric, but I think it’s really just downstream of safety. And not just actual safety, but subjective safety.
The Dutch have really got the three types of safety—Actual, Subjective, and Social down to a science. In fact, basically all the comments in the Steve Novick post can be summarized with this blog post: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2008/09/three-types-of-safety.html?m=1
Thanks for posting the link. I like this bit the most: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that subjective safety is a concern only for inexperienced cyclists. No-one suffers from cycling being pleasant. Steps to increase the subjective and social safety of cyclists lead to a better cycling experience for all.” (emphasis mine) Seems like several commenters would do well to heed this advice.
Cities are highly dynamic. Responding to changing global and local circumstances while building resiliency is the biggest challenge that faces Portland’s new city government. The recent major shifts in Portland’s economy and day to day operations created by remote work is destabilizing, but opens a path for Portland to fully realize it’s identity of becoming “a city-lover’s city.” There is no other city in the US that can compete with Portland for being the best city to live in if electeds can get on the same page.
The biggest struggle for many US cities is that they are used as garbage cans by adjacent suburbs. Wealthier people create exclusive clean and quiet places to live with low car traffic by concentrating their dirty work in the urban center. Suburbs initially provided a way for people with resources to separate themselves from people in poverty. Personal cars then compounded this divide because they require a tremendous amount of dedicated space to be fully operational and require significant resources to purchase and maintain. Portland’s current “downtown” is built on the model that it is a destination for the people and cars that live in the suburbs. The urban residents of Portland live in the piles of car excrement created by this arrangement. And, the people that have gotten rich off of this economy have invested heavily in keeping people running on the car commuter hamster wheel.
The “downtown as destination” bubble has burst. It was unsustainable, because it sucked the life out of people and also was inevitably vulnerable to ancient technologies, like the internet. The beloved small business economy that grew up around commuter culture has also suffered, but was never as robust as it could have been with a dense residential downtown core that “never sleeps” or at least doesn’t go home at 4:15 pm and only shows up five days a week. Of course, the unimaginative dinosaurs and their PBA henchmen want to use Portland city money and political capital to save their withering portfolios and the beloved urban wasteland they created. But, for those of us that aren’t crying over our hundred dollar ounces of neat bourbon, this is a moment that Portland can fully realize its true identity.
Portland’s unique strength is being the city for people who want to live outside the US, but still live in the US. Major cities around the world are courting digital nomads and others who work from home but want to live in a vibrant city. Apartments are the new office spaces. Oregon has the second highest remote work percentage in the US. Portland could capitalize off of its reputation and identity and commit to being an exciting, livable city, reinvesting in a sustainable economic engine of residents and enhancing its draw for tourism. But first, it has to clean up the urban core.
Much like cities at the turn of the twentieth century had to invest in programs to remove piles and piles of horse manure and even neglected horse carcasses, Portland needs to remove the transportation waste and relics created by personal vehicles; redundant roads, parking lots, unnecessary eyesores like urban highways spoiling the places that people need to live. Fortunately, this new city and urban transportation dynamic will not worsen socioeconomic disparities. Unlike the flight from urban areas that was previously based on racism and classism, where suburbs like Lake Oswego and Vancouver fought public transit as a means maintaining class separation, the urban core and its residential density would thrive off of people who live in lower income suburbs having cheap transportation access.
“Does this decision increase car dependency or decrease car dependency?”
Does this decision leave us wallowing in transportation excrement? Does this decision divide us into haves and have nots, who can afford quiet, clean spaces or are forced to suffer the toxic effects of car traffic and infrastructure? Does this decision obligate people to send the money that could be spent on a local food truck burrito to Exxon, Ford, ODOT and GEICO? Does this decision obligate the city to waste resources cleaning up dead cars, arresting drunk drivers, and repairing damaged roads when it could be investing in the people who live here?
I like this vision of the future (depending on some implementation details). I think ultimately, we need federal changes (or something more exotic) to solve housing, but in the mean time your comment sounds like a good direction. I think the other major thing missing is more *affordable* housing in the city. Maybe there is no way to retrofit office buildings to housing (although I’m still skeptical) but whatever the means, we need to be building more housing as close to downtown as possible. And replacing single family homes in the close in neighborhoods with multi-family units of some sort (be it apartments, or something else). Because as you say, if Portland isn’t going to be a work destination (great!), it needs to be a place where people live!