Planetizen, the Los Angeles-based US planners’ website, ran some of our material on HB 2007 for a nationwide and international audience of planners and policy experts. The comments were very interesting.
Jeff Joslin, Director of Current Planning at San Francisco Planning Department, wrote:
Since this is a national forum and not a local op-ed, I thought I’d shed light on one aspect.
The reviews the bill would obviate are not onerous, and there’s no data to support the case that eliminating them would result in more housing faster or meaningfully reduce the cost of housing (and increasingly true as projects scale up and the cost of review is spread across multiple units). This is because Oregon – since the 70s, has had in place a requirement that ALL discretionary reviews (even the largest and most complex in the land) be complete within 120 days of an application being complete, including any local appeal. This is remarkably streamlined by any measure, and provides a level of certainty that is readily incorporated into any project budget.
If this legislative effort was genuinely about the affordable housing it feigns to address, exceptions to certain types of reviews would be a carve-out rather than universal. Such is not the case. It is a jaded, opportunistic effort by certain forces (with a local and a national agenda) to wave the “housing crisis” banner and use it to significantly erode land use controls in the one state and city where they’ve been most effective (and which have served as a replicable model elsewhere). By bringing down a cornerstone of Portland and Oregon’s systems, the strategy can be applied throughout the land.
The problem is a genuine one, and the solution needs to be as well; not the cynical hijacking of the affordable housing issue to suit other agendas. This legislative effort is not that solution.
June Weenen, an advocate of “Georgist” land value tax policy based in the UK, wrote:
Affordability issues have zero to do with the supply side. A 100% tax on the rental value of land would half average selling prices and rental incomes while raising the disposable incomes of working households by thousands of dollars. Sorted.
It would also allow the market to allocate immovable property at optimal efficiency eliminating excessive vacancy and under occupation.
Sure, more building is always needed to put people where the economy requires and give them the living space they need. But until the demand side is sorted out first, then a dysfunctional market cannot know what to supply or where.
This is the kind of focus on a broader set of tools and strategies that we think is so badly needed. (See more on Georgist policy and “Land Value Tax” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)
Closer to home, Ethan Seltzer, Professor of Urban Planning at Portland State, made a rather shocking comment in criticism of our piece:
When livability gets equated with faux tudor bungalows hyped up as historic, you know you’re in trouble.
From this it appears that Professor Seltzer believes that Portland’s classic bungalow neighborhoods (full of “faux” houses, apparently) are entitled to no historic protection, and we should be free to demolish them at will — anyone, at any time, for any reason. Let’s demolish them all then!
I must say I find it a sad day when Portland and Oregon are willing to sell out their own livable legacy, on so slender a foundation of evidence and sloppy thinking.
The more housing we build in the city, the more expensive it becomes. The minds behind HB 2007 say it’s because we’re not building fast enough.
Is it even possible to build faster than we are now in Portland? Is there any evidence that any city ever built its way into lower housing costs?
Just as more drugs are not the solution to a drug addiction, more construction doesn’t appear to be the solution to our affordability crisis.