I saw the comments on your reddit post, and was pleasantly surprised by how in-touch-with-reality the majority of people seemed to be.
I've never been one of those cuckoo bananas people who questions election integrity, but it actually has me wondering this time around. If most of the electorate doesn't seem to be communist dipshits... how did all of the crazy people sweep the city council elections?
IMHO - The election results in Portland were a product of gerrymandering. If you look at any map of election results in the last 8ish years you'll find pockets of Portland where the communists/radicals congregate and they were carved out two districts.
Another problem is that these analysts fail to understand one of the most important sources of decent rental housing: widows and retirees.
When people age out of work, or become disabled, or lose a working-age spouse, they must seek income from whatever property they've accumulated to that point.
These people care about their properties and the people who rent them. They have the most direct connection to both, and the most to lose if the relationship sours, because they usually manage the property themselves (they can't afford to outsource management), and they don't own scores of properties so are hard hit if they have to find new tenants. And they may be sharing living space.
I rented from such people when I was younger. Now I am one of those people--a disabled widow who lost her working-age husband.
And I can tell you precisely what gets in the way of my being able to supply the kind of full-house or most-of-a-house rental that Portland needs.
PUNITIVE ZONING/FEES: There's zero hope of creating an "ADU" type space in my Portland home. The cost of permits alone is beyond what I'd hope to earn for several years. Not to mention the fact that Portland would force me to rent to literally anyone, and pay them to move if they turned out to be drug-gobbling Antifa sh*ts who were terrifying to live with.
CAREFUL-WHAT-YOU-WISH-FOR MARKET FORCES: While everyone's favorite solution to Portland's political problems was "Just move!" My now dead husband and I spent YEARS looking for ways to keep our Portland home affordable for ourselves. ADU was out (see above), so we looked for something we could afford throughout the state. Not just to rent out, but to move ourselves and aging parents. Preferably without losing our Portland home, so we could keep it as a nice, working-class rental, that nice, younger versions of ourselves could rent or lease. The stress of finding out that, between rising interest rates, the spreading price differential between Portland and the communities that "Just leave!" had already fled to (mid Willamette, Clackamas and Columbia Counties), and the crushing expense of marketing a Portland home for sale or rent (realtor's commission, staging, marketing, to compete with all the other empty houses--and yes despite what Portland claims there are a lot of them)--that stress took my husband away from me.
Now I really can't afford it here. And I have far less to shop with.
I ended up buying an extreme fixer in my small home town. It was the only property I could find in my price range, in Oregon, that wasn't obviously meth and fentanyl contaminated. I was related to the owner, and knew that the squalor was only from disability and alcohol.
And yes, you're not going to like this: I can't afford to put in a fancy central heating and A/C system. No one in that community can. Not even most of the owner occupied crowd.
Why? Pick your problem: Scarce building materials because we still have to rebuild the next town over (Phoenix) because our governor turned down tanker planes and let it burn so she could make a point about "climate." Expensive building materials because the pandemic was used as an excuse to let materials rot in the Port of Los Angeles while politicians forced US manufacturing and US trucking out of work. An almost nonexistent small-town labor force because mills are shut and most working-age males are strung out. Losses because you end up having no choice but to hire the guy who has a past but at least is clean and sober now and he decides not to be clean and sober any more and just walks off with your money and now you have to pay a second person for the same job that you already paid for.
So yeah, if I'm going to survive and make minimum wage from this place I can't put in central heating. But at least the house will have insulation, cadet heaters, and a whole-house fan. Which is more than it had before, and more than most houses in the neighborhood have.
And through it all my Portland property taxes keep going up. Every year I'm charged A LOT more for the privilege of porch pirates and grocery store stabbings and carjackings and sh*t-smeared sidewalks and emergency personnel that don't show up for ten hours when your family's trapped inside a smoldering building, but no one publicizes your story because you're not Julia Louis-Dreyfus (I'm actually very sorry she lost her home, and wish her the best, but you get my point).
And, after two years of hardship and losses, I hope to still be standing after the depressing ordeal. But it'll only be sheer desperation and rage holding me up. How many others in my demographic survive the ordeal?
That's not a rhetorical question for me. My husband did not survive it. Attrition is very real.
Because no amount of struggle or hard work ever seems to get people in this state to understand where low-cost, well-maintained, homey rentals come from, and how hard this state is making it for the demographic of people who traditionally supplied them.
Only policies to punish Evil Landlords(TM). Policies that in the end will probably knock down my single-family home and replace it with a SMART City four-story sh*t condo with 15% occupancy like all the other sh*t condos the city's knocked down single-family housing in my neighborhood to build. Policies that actively serve to game the system against pretty much every normal person's interest.
The crater this has left in my life is indescribable.
Let the advice to "just move!" commence in 3...2...1...
The best thing they could do is convert from property to land value taxation which incentivizes housing development on underutilized properties and discourages speculative investment (i.e. "pump and dump"). You don't end up with blight at the end of the cycle. It especially makes sense when you have urban growth boundaries constraining the land supply.
NIKE, NIKE, NIKE. Are they still the largest private employer in Oregon? (I'm guessing, Yes.) But NIKE's share price has fallen by 28% in the past year. Ouch. The brand is suffering. It's too tied up in the past. Think: Michael Jordan. The cool kids don't know who he is (wait, I'll ask my Dad, or Granddad). Meanwhile the cool kids are wearing 'On' shoes. On is only 10 years old, but ranks #4 in global market capitalization. NIKE is still #1, but things are changing. Plus there's the PRC China problem. The PRC is making aggressive moves in Taiwanese waters, ditto for the Philippines. What happens to NIKE's manufacturing & sales if the PRC takes action to invade Taiwan? Seems unrealistic to expect little Vietnam to pick up the assembly lines. Perhaps India could? Is NIKE being proactive in seeking alternatives to the PRC? The Oregon business community should be asking questions.
I saw the comments on your reddit post, and was pleasantly surprised by how in-touch-with-reality the majority of people seemed to be.
I've never been one of those cuckoo bananas people who questions election integrity, but it actually has me wondering this time around. If most of the electorate doesn't seem to be communist dipshits... how did all of the crazy people sweep the city council elections?
IMHO - The election results in Portland were a product of gerrymandering. If you look at any map of election results in the last 8ish years you'll find pockets of Portland where the communists/radicals congregate and they were carved out two districts.
The leading cause of homelessness is excessive government regulation.
It's its.
Careful, you'll become my editor, and nobody wants that job.
You really should write a piece on the growing proliferation of F-bombs in casual conversation (with women in the lead). Fascinating.
Another problem is that these analysts fail to understand one of the most important sources of decent rental housing: widows and retirees.
When people age out of work, or become disabled, or lose a working-age spouse, they must seek income from whatever property they've accumulated to that point.
These people care about their properties and the people who rent them. They have the most direct connection to both, and the most to lose if the relationship sours, because they usually manage the property themselves (they can't afford to outsource management), and they don't own scores of properties so are hard hit if they have to find new tenants. And they may be sharing living space.
I rented from such people when I was younger. Now I am one of those people--a disabled widow who lost her working-age husband.
And I can tell you precisely what gets in the way of my being able to supply the kind of full-house or most-of-a-house rental that Portland needs.
PUNITIVE ZONING/FEES: There's zero hope of creating an "ADU" type space in my Portland home. The cost of permits alone is beyond what I'd hope to earn for several years. Not to mention the fact that Portland would force me to rent to literally anyone, and pay them to move if they turned out to be drug-gobbling Antifa sh*ts who were terrifying to live with.
CAREFUL-WHAT-YOU-WISH-FOR MARKET FORCES: While everyone's favorite solution to Portland's political problems was "Just move!" My now dead husband and I spent YEARS looking for ways to keep our Portland home affordable for ourselves. ADU was out (see above), so we looked for something we could afford throughout the state. Not just to rent out, but to move ourselves and aging parents. Preferably without losing our Portland home, so we could keep it as a nice, working-class rental, that nice, younger versions of ourselves could rent or lease. The stress of finding out that, between rising interest rates, the spreading price differential between Portland and the communities that "Just leave!" had already fled to (mid Willamette, Clackamas and Columbia Counties), and the crushing expense of marketing a Portland home for sale or rent (realtor's commission, staging, marketing, to compete with all the other empty houses--and yes despite what Portland claims there are a lot of them)--that stress took my husband away from me.
Now I really can't afford it here. And I have far less to shop with.
I ended up buying an extreme fixer in my small home town. It was the only property I could find in my price range, in Oregon, that wasn't obviously meth and fentanyl contaminated. I was related to the owner, and knew that the squalor was only from disability and alcohol.
And yes, you're not going to like this: I can't afford to put in a fancy central heating and A/C system. No one in that community can. Not even most of the owner occupied crowd.
Why? Pick your problem: Scarce building materials because we still have to rebuild the next town over (Phoenix) because our governor turned down tanker planes and let it burn so she could make a point about "climate." Expensive building materials because the pandemic was used as an excuse to let materials rot in the Port of Los Angeles while politicians forced US manufacturing and US trucking out of work. An almost nonexistent small-town labor force because mills are shut and most working-age males are strung out. Losses because you end up having no choice but to hire the guy who has a past but at least is clean and sober now and he decides not to be clean and sober any more and just walks off with your money and now you have to pay a second person for the same job that you already paid for.
So yeah, if I'm going to survive and make minimum wage from this place I can't put in central heating. But at least the house will have insulation, cadet heaters, and a whole-house fan. Which is more than it had before, and more than most houses in the neighborhood have.
And through it all my Portland property taxes keep going up. Every year I'm charged A LOT more for the privilege of porch pirates and grocery store stabbings and carjackings and sh*t-smeared sidewalks and emergency personnel that don't show up for ten hours when your family's trapped inside a smoldering building, but no one publicizes your story because you're not Julia Louis-Dreyfus (I'm actually very sorry she lost her home, and wish her the best, but you get my point).
And, after two years of hardship and losses, I hope to still be standing after the depressing ordeal. But it'll only be sheer desperation and rage holding me up. How many others in my demographic survive the ordeal?
That's not a rhetorical question for me. My husband did not survive it. Attrition is very real.
Because no amount of struggle or hard work ever seems to get people in this state to understand where low-cost, well-maintained, homey rentals come from, and how hard this state is making it for the demographic of people who traditionally supplied them.
Only policies to punish Evil Landlords(TM). Policies that in the end will probably knock down my single-family home and replace it with a SMART City four-story sh*t condo with 15% occupancy like all the other sh*t condos the city's knocked down single-family housing in my neighborhood to build. Policies that actively serve to game the system against pretty much every normal person's interest.
The crater this has left in my life is indescribable.
Let the advice to "just move!" commence in 3...2...1...
The best thing they could do is convert from property to land value taxation which incentivizes housing development on underutilized properties and discourages speculative investment (i.e. "pump and dump"). You don't end up with blight at the end of the cycle. It especially makes sense when you have urban growth boundaries constraining the land supply.
NIKE, NIKE, NIKE. Are they still the largest private employer in Oregon? (I'm guessing, Yes.) But NIKE's share price has fallen by 28% in the past year. Ouch. The brand is suffering. It's too tied up in the past. Think: Michael Jordan. The cool kids don't know who he is (wait, I'll ask my Dad, or Granddad). Meanwhile the cool kids are wearing 'On' shoes. On is only 10 years old, but ranks #4 in global market capitalization. NIKE is still #1, but things are changing. Plus there's the PRC China problem. The PRC is making aggressive moves in Taiwanese waters, ditto for the Philippines. What happens to NIKE's manufacturing & sales if the PRC takes action to invade Taiwan? Seems unrealistic to expect little Vietnam to pick up the assembly lines. Perhaps India could? Is NIKE being proactive in seeking alternatives to the PRC? The Oregon business community should be asking questions.