Keeping People Out of Oregon

“We want you to visit our state,” said Tom McCall, Oregon’s best-known governor, “but for heaven’s sake, don’t move here.” To “preserve Oregon,” he signed the 1973 law that led to the urban-growth boundaries that confine nearly all development to less than 1-1/4 percent of the state. McCall never admitted it, but by making housing expensive, this effectively discourages people from moving here.

Today, Oregon leaders must be chagrinned by the fact that Washington has outplanned Oregon. The Johnny-come-latelys up north didn’t pass their growth-management law until almost two decades after Oregon, yet Seattle housing today is considerably more expensive than Portland’s. According to Zillow, the median Seattle-area home is worth almost $100,000 more than one in the Portland area.

In an apparent effort to prevent a flood of Washingtonians from moving into more affordable Oregon, Portland and Oregon elected officials have passed numerous laws and ordinances that will make Oregon housing even less affordable than it was before — all in the name of affordable housing, of course. These include affordable housing mandates that require homebuilders to increase new home prices to pay for the below-cost homes they are required to provide, increasing property taxes to pay for affordable housing, and requiring landlords who raise rents to pay the moving costs of any tenant who moves out.

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Under the new law, landlords won’t be allowed to evict tenants who have lived in a place for a year “without cause.” This is to prevent landlords from evicting people so they can raise the rent by more than the law allows. But given a choice between renting a property to short-termers on Airbnb or renting to someone who, if they stay a year, can’t ever be evicted, many property owners will go the short-term route. Of course, that will just lead people to claim that Airbnb is making housing expensive when in fact it is the laws and regulations they supported that are pushing prices up.

The only way to truly restore Oregon’s housing affordability is to abolish the growth restrictions that prevent affordable, low-rise suburban development. Politicians who talk about making housing affordable without abolishing these restrictions aren’t really serious about affordability.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

10 Responses to Keeping People Out of Oregon

  1. paul says:

    The policy may also force Oregonians out of Oregon. I know of two Californians who retired, sold their house in California, and moved to Oregon. As one explained, she could get a better house with a garden in the Willamette valley for less than the equity in her house in California. She was pleased that she could also live on the edge of the urban limit line with great view out of her back garden and no worries about anyone building on it! I wonder how many Californians are moving to Oregon and displacing Oregonians?

  2. MJ says:

    As every economist knows, rent control makes housing more expensive by discouraging people from offering more rental housing.

    It also reduces the quality of the housing stock by reducing the revenue streams that landlords can draw upon to finance needed repairs and improvements. This effect takes a bit longer to play out, but it has been observed in places like NYC, where rent control has been in place for some time.

    Tom McCall may eventually get just what he asked for.

  3. Frank says:

    “In an apparent effort to prevent a flood of Washingtonians from moving into more affordable Oregon, Portland and Oregon elected officials have…”

    Given that median family income in Seattle is $14k higher than in Portland, and given that state income tax in Portland is 10%, cheaper housing prices don’t seem so affordable after all as a family making the median $100k in Seattle would be taking home $77k in Portland. That $23k a year works out to $1k a month, which can be put toward housing.

  4. Frank says:

    Correction. Works out to $2k a month.

  5. prk166 says:

    No need to extend the wall when you make living too expensive except for the rich.

    Anyway, a bit on the age old problem of ( futile ) price controls.

    https://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/venezuela-inflation-price-controls-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html#644db0145827

    One of the key reasons why it is important to keep inflation in check is that it inevitably leads to price controls–a cure that is often worse than the disease. Venezuela is only the latest in a long line of countries that have tried and failed to cure inflation with such methods.

    Perhaps the earliest case in which a government tried to use price controls to prevent inflation occurred in late imperial Rome. By the end of the third century it had clearly reached a crisis. The state could no longer obtain sufficient resources because heavy impositions had destroyed the economic base of taxation. The historian Lactantius, who lived from 240 to 320, tells us that the problem was a bloated welfare state:

  6. AThomas says:

    I think there has always been an elitist, and in certain instance racist and classist bent to these regs. Even extending things to much of environmentalism a huge chunk of the narrative is ” we the enlightened class (who already happen to have our property) want to protect mother nature (keep things for ourselves and keep everyone out). Its clear that despite there being no real shortage of land etc they still push for this. Also, when you get the administrative class, i.e. planners, in the situation you also get some administrative rent seeking since you can keep your six figure job so long as you keep making up new excuses to control people and take their money and property for no reason. However, getting back tot he elitism, the desire to exclude non group members along with the desire to resist change is very fundamental to how we have evolved kinship groups and we are sort of hard wired to think that way. The problem is that modern society to function has to over come these petty bigotries and look at the larger picture. Honestly it saddens me that people who are otherwise not bigots push for these things.

  7. Tom Lane says:

    It was not just Tom McCall … the brain behind the OR GMA was Dr. Arthur Christian (Chris) Nelson, who has served a long academic career and is currently professor at the University of Arizona- Tucson. Nelson believed that housing located next to a farmland harmed the plants, and decreased the farms value. I have yet to find any evidence that this could be true. How would an apple orchard outside of Medford be damaged by an adjacent housing development? How would grass seed farms or filberts next to housing on the Portland boundary be harmed by houses? As Randal O’Toole knows, this is being discussed over another email group with the great east coast version of Randal O’Toole … the one and only Martin Harris Jr. I will report back….

  8. Tom Lane says:

    Oregon public beurocrats love to distort the truth in order to stop growth. For instance, Eugene is not building housing in its South Willamette Valley plan since the houses will, among other things, block views. I’ll give them that one. Yes, building anything will block a view. However, If they would get rid of the UGB and things were spread out, then the impact on the view would be much less.

    John VanLandingham, attorney in Eugene, formerly on the LCDC and who wrote the letter to Bend telling them they could not expand their UGB, says that Portland has no extra land to develop.

    That isn’t true … the Urban growth boundary can be extended over grass seed farms in all directions (N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E) except towards Vancouver Washington (NE).

    Indeed, Metropolitan Portland could go all the way up Highway 30, to just across the river from Longview.

    The context of this lie was the interviewer asking VanLandingham if goal 10 resulted in homelessness.

    I had no more than 2 minutes and listened to the aforementioned comment at 56 minutes and 35 seconds where you can hear a few minutes of discussion. I will listen to more later.

    Keep in mind this guy is an attorney just like Richard Whitman and Bruce McPherson, so when attorneys are appointed to public positions, they know how to present false facts to advance their own anti growth agendas.

    Meanwhile, Maricopa County and Salt Lake City have no UGBs and no housing crisis.

    If the Portland Urban growth boundary called Metro was extended sufficiently, then new building Lots at the fringe would be much cheaper than anything close to downtown.

    John VanLandingham: Interview, “People and the Land: Oregon Statewide Planning Goal 10” (2017)

    https://youtu.be/SRnk0nZYffk

  9. ARThomas says:

    Tom: I watched a couple parts of the you tube clip you posted. It honestly seems like this guy is just a paycheck collector. The other thing I noticed with him and the others is that they never even question the UGB. Its like a fundamental assumption in their minds that cannot be challenged. (even though it should)

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