PlanGreen

"Where there is no vision, there is no hope" George Washington Carver I have long railed against what I call Downtown Portland’s Treeless Asphalt Deserts. Besides their daily assault on the health and well-being of downtown residents, try walking past a series of them on SW 12th Ave or SW Main Street when it’s 105 degrees and smoky. Encouraged by my Portland State University Site Design class instructor, I re-designed one of these deserts: …...

Vision for Housing Justice – DOWNTOWN! - PlanGreen By being a highly visible model in downtown Portland, our vision for an Etta Cooperative will help to educate people—both Portlanders and visitors—that we are not stuck with the housing system we have.

My latest blog--mostly completed on July 4! Comments appreciated on the blog site...

HOUSING JUSTICE IS CLIMATE JUSTICE - PlanGreen Speak out against this long-entrenched, but highly inequitable system to say that our present housing policy is NOT what we want as Americans! Join me in calling for the Social Housing Development Authority proposed by the group from NYU Gallatin!

Is This What It Means To Be An American? If we acquiesce to a system that creates such glaring inequality, we are saying YES! Instead we could pursue a Social Housing Development Authority at the federal level. I hope those maintaining HOUSING JUSTICE IS CLIMATE JUSTICE will embrace this concept and promote it with policymakers. Independence Day is usually a time when I see historical reviews examining where we've come from and analyzing where we may be going. ...

HOUSING JUSTICE IS CLIMATE JUSTICE - PlanGreen Speak out against this long-entrenched, but highly inequitable system to say that our present housing policy is NOT what we want as Americans! Join me in calling for the Social Housing Development Authority proposed by the group from NYU Gallatin!

If you have any idea how much we spend each year subsidizing the mortgage banking system--a system that makes housing into a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit, you will find $5 Billion for the entire nation less than equitable. ,

The Skanner News - HUD Earmarks $5 Billion to Help the Homeless HUD’s most recent Point-in-Time count, which outreach workers and volunteers conducted in January, show that 17 out of every 10,000 people in America experienced homelessness on a single night in 2019. The report revealed that 567,715 people are homeless and represent a cross-section of America .....

I hope some of you will join me in asking some questions about housing justice as a part of climate justice. There was a great session at Noon today, May 28 on OPBTOL, where Reimagine Oregon BIPOC leaders made that point--amongst others. CNU Cascadia, Portland: Neighbors Welcome, Edward Hill, Katrina Holland, Renea Perry, Rukaiyah Adams, Camille Annette Cortes, Colin Cortes, Cole Reed

If we are to stave off the worst impacts of climate change we must enact bold climate policy to reduce emissions, invest in renewables, and create clean energy jobs.

Join us and Sen. Senator Ron Wyden to discuss how we get there: https://bit.ly/3fGMdev

Brave New US Housing Policy PLACE Initiative Presentation

Brave New US Housing Policy PLACE Initiative Presentation - PlanGreen Brave New US Housing Policy PLACE Initiative Presentation Leave a reply Loading... Taking too long? Reload document | Open in new tab Share this:Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to ema...

Please join me at the URBAN THINKERS CAMPUS (UN affiliated) starting Monday, May 17. https://placeinitiative.org/2021-urban-thinkers-campus/

I will be speaking on why we need to make systemic change to US housing policy if we are to have better urbanism. Portland: Neighbors Welcome Sightline Institute Sunrise Movement PDX OurClimate CNU Cascadia. Please forward this to your members and others you know. This is a BIPOC youth-led organization.

2021 PLACE Initiative Climate Summit – PLACE Initiative 2021 PLACE Initiative Climate Summit Electric cars and solar panels won’t be enough. The effort to combat Climate Change hinges upon good urbanism – the key ingredient to reduce demand for energy and to allow us to meet our GHG emission reduction goals by 2050.  Urbanism is the force multiplier...

I first published this PlanGreen article the same day that Alan Durning published an article on the same theme on Sightline's site: February 12, 2021.
I hope you will go to PlanGreen's blog to read it as the formatting is better here: https://plangreen.net/brave-new-u-s-housing-policy/

To expedite building market rate housing, as well as more public housing, that is affordable to BIPOC communities and to young people, we need to lobby for TAX POLICY CHANGES that will shift our perceptions about “the American Dream”–away from homeownership and towards security, equity and legacy for all.

HOUSING DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A COMMODITY

For the last few years, as long as the issue was housing, I could be found on Fridays at the Q&A microphone at Portland City Club Friday Forum. I would ask: How can you square promotion of homeownership as a means of wealth building and reform of our housing system?

An example of a Portland City Club Friday Forum recent ad for a housing forum. This one was 11-15-19. Image from XRAY-FM.

Wealth building depends upon housing being a commodity to be bought and sold for a profit. Rather, don’t we need to see housing as a social good that all have the right to access? If I could get away with a few extra seconds, I might add: The Community Land Trust, as it was originally conceived, is a NEW MODEL OF LAND TENURE that provides security, equity and legacy, but doesn’t promote housing as a commodity. Isn’t that what we need to be moving quickly toward?

Young people at this 2016 Bernie rally showed
great enthusiasm to transform healthcare.
We need to repeat that for HOUSING in 2021-2022!
Photo by PlanGreen

Housing has not gone away as an issue, but you wouldn’t know it from the last two cycles of Presidential debates, which had almost no questions of any substance about housing. As a supporter of Bernie Sanders in 2016, I became irritated with my candidate when he virtually sidestepped local Portland TV reporter Laurel Porter’s question to him about housing affordability and homelessness. I had been attempting to get him to awaken his Millennial base to the idea that we did not necessarily need to continue the current system of housing. I tried hard to get my blog Housing Affordability: Put a Bern on It to members of his campaign and to the candidate himself, but seemingly without success. Since Bernie was Mayor of Burlington, VT when the largest Community Land Trust in the nation was started, he understands the potential of this new system of land tenure. He even told the CLT at an annual meeting that helping to get them federal funding was the best thing he had ever done as Mayor.

OREGONIANS NEW OPPORTUNITY

Sen Ron Wyden at Forest Grove Town Hall (with two reporters shown taking notes) lays out his tax reform priorities. They don't yet include HOUSING! Photo by Pamplin Media.
Sen Ron Wyden at Forest Grove Town Hall lays out his tax reform priorities. They don’t yet include HOUSING! Photo by Pamplin Media.

Now, young people in Oregon find themselves in a potentially powerful position. Having been part of the nationwide push for structural reform during the last election through groups like Portland: Neighbors Welcome, Sunrise PDX, and NextUp they find that their Senior Senator, Ron Wyden, has become the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Peter Wong in a Jan. 21 article in the Portland Tribune lists the priorities for Tax Code reform that Senator Wyden laid out at a January Town Hall in Forest Grove. OR. Corporate Taxes, Capital Gains, Energy, Health Care, and Infrastructure are priority areas, but HOUSING is not one of those priority areas—even though it is probably the largest expenditure in most Americans’ budget.

Image of front cover of Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing by Diane Lind.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that we, as Wyden’s constituents, shouldn’t try to plant the seed for profound change to US housing policy. Wyden is up for election next year. That’s great for us in getting his ear. But we need to accept that he is not likely go where I suggest below until after he is re-elected. I loved the suggestions from Diana Lind’s Brave New Home:Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing because they match so nicely to my own. Lind began her book after the birth of her son because she felt isolated and disconnected in her own single family row house–and this was before COVID-19. She is Executive Director for the Arts + Business Council for Greater Philadelphia which hardly makes her seem like a radical.

I’d seen other authors question the mortgage interest deduction (MID) before (e.g., Matthew Desmond in Evicted and Richard Florida in The New Urban Crisis), but I believe Lind goes further when she questions the entire assumption that homeownership does or should present a path to wealth building for most Americans. She wonders why the government would continue its subsidization of homeownership when so many homes have now been bought up by multinational companies like Blackstone and affiliates. She also questions such a subsidy even though the mortgage interest deduction is one of the country’s largest regressive tax loopholes and even though student debt has changed the landscape of housing choices for young people. Lind travels the country exploring what people are doing for alternatives.

WE BUY UGLY HOUSES.COM HomeVestors: America’s #1 Home Buyer. Photo by Mary Vogel/PlanGreen taken in east Portland, OR

Any system that pushes housing as an investment (hence a commodity) is bound to attract those who are ready to game the system. It should be no surprise that we see hedge funds, REITs and institutional investors buying up single-family housing and developing portfolios of thousands of properties. They comb sites like Zillow and the MLIS to find, renovate and flip undervalued properties. They buy billboards and post signs on lampposts. Their size allows them to fix prices and this price-fixing becomes a primary reason for skyrocketing housing costs. Yet in Portland, and I believe elsewhere, these companies often face less resistance than new construction or redevelopment—even though they are likely to be bigger contributors to gentrification.

POTENTIAL ASKS TO SENATE FINANCE COMMITTEE

Borrowing from some of the federal policy suggestions in Lind’s book, I’ve come up with these broad directives that will need to be further fleshed out to be actionable:

Actively transition our policies away from homeownership and single-family homes.
Investigate how best to subsidize people, rather than their property.
Regulate landlords and buyers who own hundreds to thousands of properties, while finding ways to leverage their scale for good.
Rethink zoning that privileges single family homes
Rethink the variety of ways the federal government incentivizes and rewards single family housing—e.g., IRS, FHA, VA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
I’m suggesting to housing advocacy groups I belong to in Oregon and think tanks I support (Sightline and Oregon Center for Public Policy) to seek to ally with some of the most progressive DC-based think tanks working on housing affordability to recommend new federal tax policy. We might also explore our connections to members of the coalition that got the “Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) Act” (H.R. 4351) passed in the US House in 2020 and help them to get an even stronger bill passed in the US Senate in 2021. See the National Low Income Housing Coalition site to get further info.

DC THINK TANK CONTACTS

To help with further fleshing out the directives above we might approach DC-based think tanks such as:

Institute for Policy Studies’ Chuck Collins: Program on Inequality and the Common Good
Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center. In 2017 William Gale wrote It’s time to gut the mortgage interest deduction. But what happened in 2017 was only a reduction not a gutting.
Urban Institute’s Ellen Seidman who wrote Revisiting Housing Finance and Margery Austin Turner who played a major role in a PBS Newshour Weekend special on Desegregating Connecticut.
SHIFTING PUBLIC OPINION

Evicted website https://www.evictedbook.com screen shot. Without a Home Everything Else Falls Apart.
To get op-eds in major papers and magazines that will help to shift public opinion, team up with well-known authors such as:

Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City )
Richard Florida (The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It
Diana Lind (Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing)

Locally, we might team up with Sightline Institute Founder and Executive Director, Alan Durning who just authored The Problem With US Housing Policy Is That It’s Not About Housing. Durning begins: Here, I sketch the hidden reality of federal US housing policies: they are about real estate appreciation, not housing. And I spell out how they polarize wealth, exacerbate racial inequality, cut productivity and job creation, speed climate change, and exaggerate the ups and the downs of the business cycle. He plans to next address how we might form a left-right coalition to shift federal policy.

THE BUDGET AS A MORAL DOCUMENT

Photo of US flag flying at US Capitol from Oregon Center for Public Policy blog. Pop-out says In 2021 Oregon can free up money to invest in Oregonians by disconnecting from wasteful federal tax breaks.
Image from OCPP.org/agenda links to their Disconnect from Wasteful Federal Tax Breaks blog.

Many of us–especially in my Boomer generation–find it difficult to rethink long-held assumptions and perhaps to give up some financial privileges. Some of the most introspective among us–such as those in Portland’s Interfaith Alliance on Poverty have been exploring the root cause of poverty and homelessness for the several years.

Chair, Les Wardenaar, has an eloquent “Commentary On The Budget As A Moral Document” in the January 2021 issue of the Alliance newsletter showing that he has given some deep thought to the Alliance’s series on the topic over the last few months.. He especially cites OCPP Executive Director Alejandro Queral’s presentation (Oct 2020) on the Oregon tax structure and the benefits that many of us gain from it at the obvious expense of those with lower income. That prompted him to ask himself the question: “how much of my personal finance and with it my lifestyle am I willing to sacrifice to make the system more just?” Wardenaar goes on to conclude:

As one of my Alliance friends put it, “The Budget as a Moral Document” ultimately demonstrates that we—as Portlanders, as Oregonians, as Americans– are deliberately choosing to perpetuate social and economic injustice. We choose to force people to live on the streets. We choose to provide a sub-standard education for many of our children, thus impacting their chances of lifting themselves up. We choose to put “people of color” into a chasm of inequity that only a small minority could ever climb out of. And we make those choices year after year after year.

Many more in the Boomer generation are even more fearful–without being quite so introspective and soul searching as those in the Alliance. Some reinforce each others fears in neighborhood associations where they attempt to block change.

HOUSING JUSTICE: CLIMATE JUSTICE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

Housing Justice is Climate Justice is a meme embraced by BIPOC advocates in Oregon and many supporters such as those in Portland: Neighbors Welcome, Sunrise PDX, and NextUp

What if, rather than bemoan the change to our single-family neighborhoods, we embraced it instead? Ever larger American homes have become a huge factor in climate change at the same time they have led to increased loneliness. And public health officials are recognizing that loneliness is the new smoking or worse–equivalent to 15 ci******es a day! As homes have become bigger they have led to increased emissions from heating and cooling, more furniture and appliances to fill the space and more fossil fuel to travel further distances–all with a carbon cost. “Why isn’t there a more robust public conversation about how living differently–more affordably, more communally, and more simply–could strengthen our society, economy, and health?” asks Lind.

Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing could be around the corner–we first need to permit it, fund it and build it! And the fearful may then want to get on board.

Although most of us feel that we have our hands full just to focus on local housing policy–or state housing policy at best, I’m suggesting that some of us need to take advantage of the incredible opportunity we have in Oregon to get an equitable housing policy at the federal level. It needs to be a policy that will expedite building market rate and public housing that is affordable and available to BIPOC communities and to young people. That will happen only when we shift our perceptions about “the American Dream” away from homeownership and towards security, equity and legacy for all.

Brave New U.S. Housing Policy - PlanGreen To expedite building market rate and public housing that is affordable and available to BIPOC communities and to young people, we need to lobby for tax changes that will shift our perceptions about "the American Dream"--away from homeownership and towards security, equity and legacy for all.

City Observatory, run by Portland-based economist Joe Cortright, calls this article a MUST READ in its March 5 newsletter. https://www.sightline.org/2021/02/25/the-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-housing-policy/

They write: If we’re ever going to seriously work on making housing more affordable, we’ve got to confront local land use policies that restrict the supply of housing and drive up rents, and as Durning points out, we’ve also got to re-think the tax treatment of homes and mortgages. As Durning says:
. . in an affordability-first housing economy, it’s a good bet that housing policy would stop subsidizing mortgage borrowing, property taxes, capital gains, ownership over renting, and the financialized mortgage industry.
P.S. Be sure to read Durning's previous article in the series, "The Problem with US Housing Policy..." as well

The Contradiction at the Heart of Housing Policy - Sightline Institute Is a new left-right realignment possible?

Please see my question on Lynn's page as well.

02-26-2021 STATE OF THE REGION Metro has taken on big challenges in recent years. Over the next decade and beyond, how will it develop solutions that address shared interests and needs acr...

PLANGREEN has been busy with CNU colleagues across North America creating an initiative to get the Biden Administration to prioritize URBANISM in its response to CLIMATE CHANGE. I hope you will JOIN US and watch this site for changes over the next few weeks. This is our soft launch to get your input.

Climate Change & Urbanism – PLACE Initiative Climate Change & Urbanism Urbanism is the discipline that focuses on the planning, design, and governance of the built environment, its natural environment context, and the human communities within which people live, work, learn, share, and play. Our towns, villages, and cities need our help. We are...