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Goal: To build stable, healthy, mixed income communities that reflect our population as a whole and support people in staying in their communities through all life’s changes.
1) Reduce Land Use Barriers
- Multi-family housing requirement in zoning to encourage "deconcentration" of wealth, i.e. integration of various income levels.
- Minimum density requirements (in order to make MF housing requirement work)
- Mixed-use and higher-density zoning in city, regional, and town centers and along transit corridors.
- Allow PUD’s by right and with minimal extra review
- Allow accessory dwelling units and up to 4-plexes by right in all single-family neighborhoods.
- Weed out zoning conflicts, and disincentives for innovative and affordable housing (i.e. set-back requirements vs. density requirements)
- Reduce off-street parking requirements in SF zones and for MF housing when studies show less is needed (elderly, poor, etc.) as well as on transit corridors.
2) Create Proactive Land Use Connected Requirements
- No Net Loss Housing Policies
- At the city zoning level to preserve capacity
- No net affordable housing impact for zoning changes (if request for zoning change would eliminate affordable housings must be required to replace it)
- Inclusionary Zoning
- Linkage Fees — as part of permit approval for business expansion or new commercial/industrial development require payment into an affordable housing fund.
3) Protect Existing Affordable Housing
- Replacement Ordinances for rental housing
- Condo Conversion Ordinances
- Tax abatements for elderly and disabled and other low-income homeowners to keep them in their homes.
- Tax abatements for owners of rental housing that keep their rents affordable.
4) Rework the Financial Incentives
- Tax-abatements previously targeted to stimulate investment should be modified to prevent displacement. For example, 10 year tax abatements for anyone buying a home in a "distressed area" now fuels displacements in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Change to be means-tested and target outreach to current residents facing displacement from their neighborhood.
- Urban Renewal/Redevelopment: This program creates huge tax-payer/government investments, and generally increases the value of land and improvements the public doesn’t own. So, in return the public should receive:
- Racial impact statement
- Residents registry
- Affordable housing inventory and no net loss commitment, at minimum
- Strong citizen-based committee that makes spending decisions
- Permanent affordability for all new subsidized housing in the district (to ensure continued access)
5) Cost Reduction Strategies
- Many codes are too complex — simplify and streamline
- Slow permitting processes are costly
- Zoning variance procedures are even more costly — allow more flexibility in the code and speed the processing for affordable housing
6) Provide Government Funding for Affordable Housing
- Tax and fee waivers (even deferring SDCs until permanent financing or sale can significantly reduce costs)
- Dedicated funding source
- Government Investment Tax (taxes rapid increase in land value created by government spending/policy, i.e. spending on transit or other improvements, rezoning, bringing into the urbanizable area, etc.)
- Linkage fees
- Dedicate more CDBG funds
- General fund allocations — one time and/or on-going
- Fund preservation as well as new construction/rehab/reuse
- Look for creative ways to KEEP people in their homes — displacement is extremely expensive in both human and monetary costs.
- Emphasize permanent housing (not shelters)
7) Require Permanent Affordability for Subsidized Housing
- VERY important when trying to control growth and make use of more limited land supply.
- Only way in this economy to create STABLE mixed-income communities is to remove some of the land from the speculative market, so property values going through the roof don’t make all housing in the area unaffordable.
- Not just for rental housing: Community Land Trusts do this for homeownership, creating shared equity models that give the homeowner an equity stake and a home of their own but also preserve a stock of affordable homeownership opportunities for the long run.
8) Work Regionally
- Can’t solve this problem one neighborhood or one jurisdiction at a time — too many of the decisions that affect what can be done are made outside of the local government (e.g. transportation spending)
- The higher tax-base communities than can better afford to provide funds needed to create affordable housing are those with the least existing affordable housing.
- Jobs-housing balance is an important strategy for decreasing commute time, reducing pollution, increasing community focus (if we live and work in the same community), and mixing incomes to create healthier neighborhoods and jurisdictions.
- Cannot deconcentrate poverty without deconcentrating wealth. Must begin to create policies and plans that do both.
Portland’s Model for Working Regionally:
- Fair share approach
- Create a sense of everybody doing it — fairness, peer pressure
- Require a way to bring all jurisdictions into the dialogue — long process, but worth it
- Create regional resources that add value (e.g. data, best practices, legal help, funding)
- Create regional mandates for tools that work best regionally and must be used across the board to be really effective (Inclusionary Zoning is an example)
- Mandate complete communities in newly urbanizing area
- Require plans for how housing needs of ALL residents of the region will be met in these new areas as part of concept plans for areas applying to be inside the UGB.
- When UGB is expanded, newly added land increases in value by 500%, and there will be large government investments to make it urbanizable. Should be quid pro quo from landowner such as Inclusionary Zoning commitment. This will only work if MANDATORY and region-wide.
While significant progress has been made, this approach has not been completely adopted in the Portland region yet. The first four bullets have widespread support and should be reflected in policies adopted by Metro Council in the year 2000. There is significant resistance to adoption of the last two tools, and they may not be adopted any time soon.
[back to Fair Growth Symposium]
Author and Copyright Information
Copyright 2001 by Author
Tasha Harmon is the executive director of the Community Development Network—the association of nonprofit housing developers in Multnomah County (the county that includes Portland, Oregon). She spent five years as the executive director of the Center for Popular Economics, and worked on affordable housing issues in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Texas before relocating to Portland, Oregon six years ago. Ms. Harmon has a Master’s in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is on the Board of the Coalition for a Livable Future, a six–year-old association of 55 nonprofit organizations promoting a compact, equitable, and sustainable future for the Portland metropolitan region. She also serves on the board of the Portland Community Land Trust. She is the author of "Who Pays the Price for Regional Planning? How to Link Growth Management and Affordable Housing," which appeared in the newsletter of the Planners Network, March/April 1998.
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