When former Portland police chief Tom Potter became the city’s mayor in 2005, he immediately announced “VisionPDX,” an effort to “create a vision for Portland for the next 20 years.” Since the previous mayor, who grew up in Brooklyn NY, seemed determined to impose her Brooklynesque vision on Portland with or without their consent, many Portlanders jumped at the opportunity to submit comments to Potter’s visioning program.
In all, the city received 13,000 responses to its questionaires about a vision for Portland, and they don’t offer much comfort to those who praise Portland’s goal of becoming a compact city. Unfortunately, VisionPDX hasn’t yet posted either the answers to the questionaires or its analysis of them on its web page.
But news reports indicate that the analysis finds that “many Portlanders are deeply worried the city is moving backward” and in particular that it “is becoming unaffordable.”
“A lot of people are concerned that the city is catering to the interests of big money over the common interests of people,” says the report. “They feel that PDC is driven by the developers’ interests, not the community’s.” PDC is the Portland Development Commission, Portland’s urban-renewal agency.
With regard to the high-density developments popping up all over Portland, “the ratio of negative to positive comments was very high.”
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Portlanders clearly see that the city is subsidizing high-priced condos that make developers rich while doing little or nothing for the average family that can only afford a home in the $100,000 to $200,000 range.
So far, VisionPDX have spent $1.2 million to find this out. I would think they could have learned as much by simply looking at the election returns or talking to any ten people on the street. Of course, the fact that voluntary responses to a questionaire do not produce a statistically valid sample gives politicians an out to ignore the results.
Coming to a city near you? (Click on the picture to see a larger version.)
No doubt some will blame many of the negative comments on people such as blogger Jack Bogdanski, who recently posted the above faux movie poster on his blog. I wish I had his sense of humor!
While it’s true that the developers made money, PDC isn’t doing what they’re doing in order to “cater to the interests of big money”. Remember that the developers didn’t want to build as dense as PDC wanted. Only the subsidies made it profitable for them. PDC is doing what they’re doing because, like all technocrats, they know best and if the people don’t want it, the people are wrong. I have no doubt that the politicians involved will take no effort to correct the idea that it’s all the developer’s fault. It isn’t as if the planners over at PDC are at any risk of losing their jobs. Bureaucrats are forever. Besides, as long as you implement policies that make housing unaffordable and gridlock auto travel, you can ask for even more tax money to subsidize “low income” housing and public transport. Cause pain, extort money; one hand washes the other.
Aynrandgirl,
In general, you are right. But some developers, for idealistic reasons or whatever, have specialized in building high-density, New Urban developments — and specialized in getting tax subsidies for those developments.
There is a clear cabal in Portland that includes Homer Williams, Joe Weston, Tom Walsh, and a few other developers who are getting most of the subsidies and doing most of these developments. After Neil Goldschmidt exercised his political muscle on behalf of these developers for nearly a decade and a half, it is unclear whether Portland is promoting these developments because the city really believes they are good or because the developers are running the show.
It is good microecon to remember that parceling down to the smallest unit gives you the highest ROI on a sf basis. Having high FARs on top of that means that, if you can get and carry the paper, you make lots of money per sf if there aren’t onerous bureaucratic delays on top of your parcel. If one looks north to Vancouver BC, those developers building the point-towers get the loan and carry the paper to make the money on those towers. Parcel value per sf is always highest in the CBD for a reason.
DS