From Sightline Daily – The Portland Plan: Down with McMansions, Up with Abundant Housing Options
This article combines and adapts three articles by the Portland for Everyone coalition’s Michael Andersen. See the originals on this blog, and learn more about the group here. Portland’s approach shares similarities with the Seattle Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda recommendation to allow small duplexes and triplexes in single-family zones without letting property owners erect buildings larger than currently zoned.
Every month, Portland’s most beloved neighborhoods are moving further beyond the reach of typical homebuyers. …
But the really odd thing is that on this lot, replacing one middle-class family with one rich one is just about the only thing a landowner is legally allowed to do.
When a city gets more desirable but isn’t allowed to add more places for people to sleep, this is what happens: the old homes don’t stay affordable. They just get priced up and up and up. …
There’s another possibility here: the city might decide to shrink the size of new homes but not make small multiplexes legal.
If that were to happen, it wouldn’t stop developers and landlords from finding ways to make a profit. It would mean that the only way they could make a profit is by replacing poor folks with middle-income folks and middle-income folks with rich folks.
It’s not clear in this article what the land-housing value differentiation is in Portland. In Vancouver land is very steeply priced, and about 75% of it is RS zoned where a significant portion of development on large and small lots are equally controlled by a 0.7 FSR. That means a McPalace can be built on large lots, whereas the spatial equivalent of a large chicken shack remains the only legal alternative for small lots, short of grandfathering in all those ancient 110-year homes on small lots.
The above article addresses methods to carve up existing homes but, with one exception, leaves the lot area alone. So it can be assumed accessory dwellings are either subject to the Oregon version of strata title due to all the party walls, or they are rented out. How would one promote freehold attached single-family dwellings in Portland?
Nonetheless, capping the allowable floor area at 2,500 ft2 across the board seems to be quite a progressive idea in Portland’s version of RS zoning. Most houses in my neighbourhood top out at 2,000 ft2, often less. Yet most houses have kids that were born and grew up there. The large suburban backyard is not affordable in Vancouver. I don’t see that a necessarily a bad thing with all the families continuing to invest closer in, and offer a vote of confidence in the inner city neighbourhood rings.
It’s not clear in this article what the land-housing value differentiation is in Portland. In Vancouver land is very steeply priced, and about 75% of it is RS zoned where a significant portion of development on large and small lots are equally controlled by a 0.7 FSR. That means a McPalace can be built on large lots, whereas the spatial equivalent of a large chicken shack remains the only legal alternative for small lots, short of grandfathering in all those ancient 110-year homes on small lots.
The above article addresses methods to carve up existing homes but, with one exception, leaves the lot area alone. So it can be assumed accessory dwellings are either subject to the Oregon version of strata title due to all the party walls, or they are rented out. How would one promote freehold attached single-family dwellings in Portland?
This seems to be the situation all across the country. Similar things are happening in Detroit which I write about.
“Property tax records show the alarming spread, over the last four years, of homes valued at $400,000 or more—enough to make them unaffordable to 59 percent of Portlanders, according to the latest Census estimates.”
With our homes priced more than 3x that, I find it interesting how the warning bells seem to be going off more strongly there than here.
Just like NYC has a threshold of 3% apartment vacancy to declare a ‘Housing Emergency’ … and we’re at ~0.3%
I know we’ve got the whole laid-back-west-coast thing going on, but at some point, even chill people gotta get concerned, right?