Infill Won’t Make Housing Affordable

The Portland Planning Commission has approved a plan to rezone almost all of the city’s single-family neighborhoods to quadruple the current densities. Planners claimed that this would make housing more affordable by allowing the construction of tens of thousands of new triplexes or fourplexes in the next few years.

Internal documents, however reveal that the planners’ own projections are that this change will lead to fewer than 4,000 new housing units. Moreover, most of those units will be in poor neighborhoods, resulting in the displacement of low-income families by people who can afford to live in new, higher-cost housing.

Fourplexes won’t solve housing affordability problems because Portland’s urban-growth boundary makes land prices high. Quadrupling densities won’t help if the land itself costs four times as much as in urban areas that don’t have growth boundaries.

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That doesn’t mean statewide rent control, recently imposed by the legislature, which has already resulted in a backlash against renters. Nor does it mean eliminating single-family zoning, as another bill in the state legislature proposes to do.

So long as the government doesn’t create an artificial land shortage, single-family housing is simultaneously the most affordable and most desired) housing there is. Housing affordability problems won’t be solved by building more expensive and less desirable homes. Oregon’s housing will never become affordable until the state gives up its irrational urban-growth boundaries.

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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.

3 Responses to Infill Won’t Make Housing Affordable

  1. LazyReader says:

    Portland will never be happy til they’ve driven out every last family from town……………..

  2. prk166 says:

    If it’s anything like the Minneapolis plan, the issue isn’t the potential units built but what it’ll cost to build those units. While there is a _SMALL_ cost decrease to having more units on the same land, there are offsetting cost increases to putting more units on that lot especially with an existing structure.

    And how soon will these 4,000 units be built? Even if they give it 100% go today, any projects would have to get through the same set of byzantine regulatory hoops and hurdles as before. And construction dealing with an existing strucutre is much more labor intensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 40 – 50% more expensive per square foot to retrofit a house into a triplex than the per unit than new construction like the complex at their union station. We’re an incredibly wealthy nation. Our labor is anything but cheap.

    I’m not sure how long they’d expect an extra 4,000 units. scraping a single SFH on a city lot to put in a single quad isn’t the sort of thing that attracts investors with deep pockets. It’s going to take time to attract the capital And there are’t going to be many small builders out there able or willing to take those risks.

    A metro the population of Portland probably has something like 350,000, maybe 400,000 rental units. If it takes 5 years to build 4,000 — and I doubt it’ll be anything like that — it could help a bit. But it’s more likely to take a few decades to hit that 4,000. And in a metro the size of Portland, that will have zero affect.

  3. mimizhusband says:

    what depresses me is that so few see the reality and the solutions presented here. What gives me hope regarding such matters is that the Antiplanner exists at all

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