Portland: Still the Model for Unaffordability
19th November 2016
Looks like the whitest city in America just can’t get it right.
The Census Bureau estimates that the city of Portland is growing by more than 10,000 people a year while the Portland urban area is growing by more than 40,000 people a year, or more than 100 people a day. Despite, or more likely because of, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on growth planning, the region is doing a very poor job of producing the housing those people need to live in.
Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, brags that not only is the region following most of the advice recently offered by the White House for making housing more affordable, it actually pioneered several of the techniques. Yet according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Portland-area housing prices are currently growing at 13 percent per year.
Perhaps that’s because ‘most of the advice recently offered by the White House’ is just a load of crap?
That’s my guess, what’s your guess?