A retrospective of the 2014 paper "Density At Any Cost"
I suppose it's really frustrating for people new to Portland to look around and see this city in such an ongoing crisis all the time, with bad news after bad news. Homelessness, cops, schools, the governor, now even PSU students! Whatever direction this city goes it manages to hit a crisis. Worse still, any glimmer of hope produced by the political machine and their media cronies end up resulting in virtually nothing changing.
Bleak outlook, crisis, no solution, bleak outlook.
Why is this? The city, county, and state government are run by a bunch of corrupt fuckwits with really dumb ideas, and there hasn't been a genuine change in political power for coming on 40 years.
Why does nothing change for the better? Well, in part it's because a crisis means there is money to be made by a small few. The worse the crisis gets the more money that becomes available. When roads get worse somehow PBOT gets more money, when homelessness gets worse the homeless advocates get more money, when schools get worse the schools get more money, when graffiti gets bad the graffiti clean-up crews get more money. This creates a financial incentive to make everything worse, and if your job is to "fix it" you get a promotion, more staff & money if you don't actually fix it.
But honestly, I don't want to give our regional bureaucrats too much credit, most are simply too incompetent to see this bad feedback loop for what it is. They're not working hard to make things worse, they're just sitting back on their asses and getting promoted.
Could there be an alternatives? Yes: your fire the people who didn't fix it with the resources given, rather than giving them more money, but that's uncouth in Portland, because so many political appointments and people running the show have little fiefdoms of political favors.
It's fair to look around and see that it all seems completely helpless across the city and we're out of good ideas on how to fix it.
One has to wonder: is there anyone who knows what caused all of these problems or how to fix it?
Yes, there are plenty of very smart people, a ignored and hated class of intellectuals, journalists, and academics, who are completely aware of the problems we're experiencing now, forecasted these problems before they happened, and have ample ways to resolve the issues ahead of us. Mostly by repealing the dumb fucking policies that got us here.
I'd like to label this group of rejected people the Cassandra Class. In Greek mythology Cassandra was a princess who was given the ability to see the future by the god Apollo, and yet also cursed that no one would ever believe her prophecies.
As an example of this Cassandra Class is Dr. Gerard Mildner. He's from PSU's Center for Real Estate and has dutifully recorded the policies related to our disaster of a housing policy, cutting out the noxious horseshit from the lunatics, and has been very accurate and insightful for long past a decade. You see, where the city is at with housing policy (where everything is fucked) is not by mere accident, but through really bad ideas enacted as policy by worthless government bureaucrats at Metro, the Counties, City of Portland, and the State. Many of these policies were intentionally enacted by dumb people wrapped up in a dumb ideology, thinking these were immaculate big brain plans from the smartest people.
I can't say I agree with Dr. Mildner on absolutely everything he's ever written, but let us consider his 2014 paper:
"Density At Any Cost"
This paper was a prophecy so shocking and vile that Metro took the time to repudiate it, Portland Commissioners denounced it, fellows at PSU disparaged him.
Imagine you write a paper and the government labels it "misinformation." "The report, titled "Density at Any Cost," said that the region's current land use planning policies will make it unaffordable to live in the Portland region." When government vehemently opposes an opinion from an accredited professional it's probably worth understanding that opinion because the opinion is likely just embarrassing to the government's own interest, they wouldn't deny something if there was no sense of truth to it.
What did Dr. Mildner warn us about 10 years ago? That Metro was going to create the situation we're in today. You see, Metro's core job is to manage the Urban Growth Boundary. The UGB is a relatively simple policy where urban growth is meant to be constrained to prevent sprawl, but by artificially constraining buildable land it could create a price bubble - so this policy evenly balances out the artificial constraint on land with a requirement that Metro must keep a 20-year supply of buildable land. The lynch pin of success for the Urban Growth Boundary is not about constraining development, but instead forecasting it's inevitable expansion.
Metro began doing forecasts of the 20-year buildable supply with a new model. The model that Metro adopted, called Metroscope, completely ignores people's economic choices, presuming that you'll ALWAYS prefer to live and work in the metro area no matter what it costs. That people have no preference at all for any lifestyle their housing offers: that you would see no difference in an apartment in the middle of the city or single family home in the suburbs. It's all the same according to Metro.
Metro completely pulled from their ass an "unbelievable" goal of constructing way less single family homes going into the future. They presumed that 64% of new construction would be multi-family, instead of the historic trend of 15%-30%, or a more reasonable bench mark of 40%. Metro assumed in 2014 that City of Portland will absorb 60% of new housing construction needs, of which 92% would be multi-family.
That Metro's plan will cause rent to more than double. (Dr. Mildner wrongly predicted the rate of climb, as it's been much more dramatic, he thought rent in 2035 for an individual would be just $765/month, whereas today in 2024 it's likely near $800-$1,000)
That housing costs will increase dramatically, "An increase of 148% over 20 years would mean a median house price of $719,000 in 2035." (today it's at $525k)
This rising housing cost would make us one of the most expensive Cities in the country, and yet we don't have any industry to match that cost of living increase, and Metro has no concern about jacking up cost of living while there's no industry increasing our wages to match.
Low income household and new home buyers will be fucked the hardest, and even for existing homeowners they won't get any financial gains until they leave Portland behind by selling their home. Basically if you buy a home here in 2002, sell it in 2016, you might see on paper huge increases in value (suppose home value went up 300%), but all the same, whatever next home you want to buy in Portland also increased 300%. You're not increasing wealth 300%, you're increasing buying/selling costs across the whole marketplace - you can't realize your actual 300% increase in wealth until you move to a new city that didn't increase housing prices by 300%.
Metro banked on a hollow promise from the Richard Florida school of faux-economics that everyone would sell their cars, and while transit usage would dramatically increase, somehow cost to utilize transit would decrease 18% less on transit. No one predicted the dramatic increase in Work From Home and how that would impact transit and commuting. Either way, TriMet had fares increase from $2.40 in 2012 to $2.80 today, ridership in 2019 was the same as 2006 despite billions spent on "improving" the system, and those "improvements" caused system costs to soar from $392m/yr in 2014 to $647m/yr in 2023). Metro was promising that these transit costs would decrease, somehow.
This whole plan by Metro depends upon billions of dollars in subsidies for private developers - tax-payer subsidies that the public will never see the benefit of thanks to the legal limits on increases to property taxes. The City of Portland will experience a financial crisis funding apartments that don't increase our tax base. You see, we pay taxes based upon the "assessed value" which is capped by Oregon law from increasing more than 3% each year unless there's a substantial change to the property - if Metro drops $10 million improving your neighborhood your property taxes can't increase more than 3%. Though if you sell your home and move out of Portland you pocket the money caused by this urban renewal bubble.
Everything Metro is doing is more of an aspirational plan than a pragmatic policy to manage the larger city's growth responsibly. Most of this plan is based on climate change concepts about carbon emissions that were shortsighted and won't pan out. The best way to actually tackle strategic carbon emission reduction would come from building new energy efficient single family homes that people will actually want to live in. Instead, once all of this Metro plan is in full swing, people will relocated to other states with more severe weather (hello, Austin!) and due to geography their new homes output much more carbon emissions thanks to more HVAC energy needs. If our society earnestly wanted to reduce carbon emissions then a primary goal would be to get huge portions of the population to move to mild climates like Portland, which means attracting people to Portland through low cost housing and good jobs.
This last point is particularly salient. It's simple and predictable economics that if we jack up the price to live in Blue States, working class and middle class people will opt to live elsewhere. And no doubt, South Carolina, Florida, Texas (all places with a population boom) - red states not enacting climate change policies. If you want to win this climate change battle you have to make places that enact better climate change policies more attractive. If you could live in a place with affordable homes, great schools, safe communities, clean streets, friendly people - then taxes on the middle class to service "climate change" are a secondary consideration.
To really illustrate this: very few people would care about Portland's Clean Energy Fund if the business community was booming. Yet we let the tweakers and the violent mentally ill convicts run amok, we refuse to build infrastructure people want to use, we refuse to build houses that people want to buy - so bye bye businesses, bye bye clean energy funding, bye bye to the dream of a climate change utopia. If Climate Change is really the number one issue, convincing people to live in places with climate change friendly policies (and milder climates) ought to be high on the priority list - but it's about as high on the list as getting elected members of Congress and Taylor Swift to stop using private jets. Climate doomers clearly have fuckall idea what they're doing or why - very much illustrated by the same college kids today thinking that taking over a college library helps someone in Palestine. That level of cognitive reasoning. If activists today had actual legitimacy and urgency underlying their motivations they would have more effort into measured outcomes - instead their lack of effectiveness is very telling about the legitimacy of their motivation.
Here we are today 10 years later.
It takes $160,000/yr in annual salary to buy a median home in Portland. More than the $140k/yr that the new City Commissioners will make, more than the County Commissioners make.
All of this could have been avoided by merely listening to people who aren't political hacks with jobs in Urban Planning departments.
And while it wasn't covered in 2014 paper there's many the subsequent prophecies of housing prices that weren't detailed in this paper but were well understood: higher housing prices means higher rent, higher rent means more homeless. Higher housing prices means people will move further away from the urban core and this will cause traffic congestion because the workers can't access mass transit even if they wanted to. Most people have long forgotten that prior to 2019 one of the biggest concerns for residents was traffic problems, the root of the traffic problem is our Urban Growth Boundary. The UGB also created enormous amounts of sprawl, it was just hidden outside the eyes of hapless Urban Planning dingbats at PSU - for example, North Plains is doubling it's size - that's sprawl - to accommodate people that would happily buy a home in North Bethany if they could afford one. Benton County, Oregon has roughly 50,000 workers, and 15% of them were commuting 85 miles to Portland on a regular basis. If you figure that's approximately 7,000 vehicles - that alone is enough to fill out a 3-lane highway for 1 hour - and that's how you get I-5 to be a clusterfuck. If you don't want traffic problems, it's got to make economic sense to have people live and work closer to the city, but because Metro broke housing prices, at least 15% of Corvallis's workforce can't afford to live in Portland but has to work here.
All of the problems and follies we're experiencing are thanks to hapless fools in government. A broken bankrupt ideology has captivated this city, and it's been unchecked in political growth thanks to the dominance of a single political party. Like a pathogen, these terrible ideas coming out of Urban Studies departments, all of them creating self-referencing circles of success for their Big Brain ideas, like San Francisco points to Portland for success, Portland points to Boston for success, Boston points to San Francisco - a big circle jerk of city planners pretending their ideas were successful. Local media goes to these "experts" in Metro to hear fake statistics based upon bad plans, and the media then informs the public how wonderful our political leaders are.
The public looks around, sees the crisis in their own eyes, and forms a bleak outlook.