Had this been distributed as unrestricted grants to each state in proportion to population, this would have plugged 49% of the budget gap for ODOT. In just one week.
Caveat emptor, napkin math, etc.
You’re telling me this for the first time
"In this case, it was a matter of high interest rates and lenders’ demands that the developer put up substantial equity of its own to access financing for the project."
Hundreds of you rallied and marched this past Saturday! Now, it's time to mobilize for a strike! 🪧
Please head to the picket lines tomorrow (Wednesday, March 11th) at 10:30am (all campuses) when Portland Community College Staff and Faculty plan to WALK OUT!
💙Info: www.pccstrike.com
Who wore it better
We love to Go by Transit
It’s going to be a wet week out on our roads. Stay safe and consider taking transit to work. It’s sustainable, safe and pushes back against fossil fuel dependence.
Did you read this story? It includes quotes from defenders and critics of the tax, most notably Andrew Hoan. It includes a table of the county data with a citation, as well as quotes from the county economist on that data. It’s good journalism.
I also think if you're going to go that hard in an editorial, you should have basic command over the facts yourself rather than rely upon a selective application of spurious correlates that confirm your priors.
I seem to recall that recently a local blogger or alt publication made the case that you can't have any economy deniers in government. Fortunately for us we have many elected officials and rank and file employees who understand how positive early childhood education and care is on the economy.
Great reporting and a good opportunity to reup for the public that my office has produced a series of reports, documents and letters that makes the economic case for why it's such a crucial program, while debunking claims or intimations that the tax was driving people out of the county.
All of it. It's restricted by the Set Aside Policy. Which can be amended, and would need to be to support things that are being contemplated in the social housing study. I think we need to have that conversation.
Excellent morning for a bike ride into work. A little wet but nothing good gear can’t solve. Far better than sitting in traffic imo
ACTION ALERT: Support an Inner Eastside for All! We need your written testimony to support a resolution that would speed up the re-legalization of building apartments in Portland's high opportunity and amenity-rich Inner Neighborhoods! portlandneighborswelcome.org/ie4a-resolut...
It just means that there are both restrictions on use and preexisting plans for their use. So, Council could take those funds in a new direction but it would conditioned on legal appropriateness and whether we want to undo some plans underway.
Addendum: There is $4.8MM in uncommitted TIF resources available to support housing production from the River District TIF. I think the Parcel 6 project at Broadway Corrider is a prime candidate for that money. More to come on that.
Anyway, it was a rich discussion and necessary reset. I want to acknowledge the tremendous efforts of the staff at the Portland Housing Bureau, who pour their souls into this work. We are richer as a city for them.
Throughout, I suggested that we should approach gap financing as a lender with a stake rather than a grant maker. We can support capital stacks with low-cost revolving loan capital, which keeps some skin in the game for the city and plants a seed for future yield.
I think it's important to act now to inject this capital into the market so we can make hay while the sun shines.
We are in a housing crisis, but we also have opportunities to engage in cost-efficient market acquisition and conversion to some kind of "social housing." Today I discussed this in the context of facilitating conversion of apt buildings to limited equity coops, but it's an open set of possibilities.
For Tier 2: There's roughly $30.4MM available to consider appropriating differently that currently planned in the housing bureau. While these funds are not committed, they are held in contingency as out-year resources for affordable housing production. We should pull that work forward imo.
E.g., rental assistance is critical for keeping people housed or rapidly rehousing them. It's a demand-side lifeline. But, we can also do supply-side interventions like buying down the balance sheet costs of affordable providers to lower rents or expand capacity. We should do both.
Under Tier 1: I suggested that we divide this between four buckets: 1) rental assistance ($9MM), 2) eviction defense ($1.9MM), 3) rent buydowns ($8.8MM, 4) additional flexible programming ($1MM).
This approach blends both demand and supply side interventions for renter stabilization
We offered that we should think of approaching our decision-making process in a two-tiered approach:
Tier 1: Immediate action / spending of renter services funds.
Tier 2: Consideration of the remaining balance for strategic investments appropriate for one-time use of funds.
We wanted the proposal framework to refocus the conversation on distinguishing between fund types subject to a range of council discretion. Of the $106MM, only $20.7M is subject to full council discretion without taking away from previously planned uses. The remaining funds have limited discretion.
Now that I have some desk time, I'm going to expand this into a brief thread to lay out the basics of the proposal that we discussed today for spending this unbudgeted housing money.
For those of you following on with the unbudgeted housing funds work session, we have been talking in reference to a one-pager* that mine and @councilormorillo.bsky.social offices developed ahead of this session. Here's that link.
* it's two sided
That’s a huge problem, yes
