When that postcard arrived in my mailbox, I did a quick read on it. Two sentences jumped out at me: “The ordinance, if approved, is subject to referendum,” and “The adoption of the Plan may affect property tax rates.” Terrific. Something new to fight about — and the first public hearing is the day after Election Day.
Housing isn’t supposed to be a guaranteed investment. It’s supposed to be a place to live. Just because one generation made a killing on the real estate market doesn’t mean every generation is now entitled to the same.
Oct 15, 2022·edited Oct 16, 2022Liked by Richard Cheverton, Pamela Fitzsimmons
" 'Permanently affordable homeownership' means homeownership opportunities which prescribe affordability for subsequent buyers of the property or home, in contrast with homeownership opportunities which proscribe no additional affordability beyond the first purchaser."
Because my mind is still reeling from what Portland's benevolent hyper-ultra-woke planners have in store for Cully, for the time being I'll limit my comment to a paradox that hit me between the eyes like a rake handle when I stepped on the text quoted above.
On the one hand, the city's planning apparatchiks, BIPOC activists, media and elected officials treat "gentification" as if it were a race crime only slightly less heinous than slavery and Jim Crow. Perhaps elsewhere pundits have recognized the vilification of gentrification for the low-grade (for now) taxpayer funded, class war against the middle and upper middle classes that it is. Not so in Portland, where progressives universally lament the fall of historically black (and redlined) neighborhoods to white interlopers. That's all in the past now, since real estate in the Alberta neighborhood today fetches about the same as a nice house in Portland Heights would have 25 years ago. But memories of "displacement" and its consequences are long.
Let's examine one of the primary grievances of gentrification's progressive foes. A brief hypothetical will help explain it:
If Geoffrey and Arabella Trustfunder hadn't come along in 1993 and snapped up Grandma's beautiful Old-Portland-style house with its big maple tree off Alberta, the house might have passed tax-free to her heirs, say a granddaughter. Today, that granddaughter and her husband might decide to downsize now that they're empty-nesters. Meeting with their realtor,® they learn that the house grandma bought for $15,000 in 1970 is worth a cool $625,000! The For Sale sign is up before the end of the day.
There's a term for what happened in the preceding scenario. The house appreciated by $610,000 in 52 years. When the sale closes, the net proceeds will constitute what racial justice advocates call "generational wealth." The granddaughter didn't earn the $625,000 that was just deposited in her account. Neither did she buy the house. The money came to her from past generations of her family.
BIPOC generational wealth is so important to the city of Portland that it has a program that is meant to help people like the granddaughter in our scenario stay in their houses. A success story is even featured on the city's web site:
"Miranda Monroe’s grandparents lived in their NE Portland home for 60 years before Miranda and her sister inherited the home in 2014. Although not fully prepared to take over the maintenance of the home, Miranda understood the importance of keeping the family legacy going and her grandparent’s home was a big part of that history."
“My grandmother left it for us to be able to connect with each other—to be able to have GENERATIONAL WEALTH, and to have something to pass on to our children. My four-year-old son didn't get to meet her, but he thinks he can feel her presence in the house—he even creeps around as if we have to be quiet!” (Emphasis added)
And how is it that your tax dollars and mine are helping Miranda preserve her generational wealth?
The city tells us:
"To prevent displacement of longtime N/NE Portland homeowners, PHB supports home retention through a number of programs and resources, including 0% interest loans and grants, to help low-and moderate-income homeowners, seniors, and people with disabilities make the repairs and accessibility modifications to continue living safely in their homes."
"Struggling to pay for the repairs and hoping to avoid costly fines, Miranda was relieved to learn that she qualified for PHB’s Lead Paint Abatement Program as well as a Home Repair Loan."
Now, let's imagine that Miranda's good friend Patty, who's heard about Miranda's good fortune, goes looking for an affordable property that might give her grandchildren a nice nest egg 50 years hence. It happens all the time all over Portland, though what's affordable to some might be out of reach of others.
Be that as it may, let's hope that Patty has a responsible realtor® who understands her needs, and that the terms of "Permanently Affordable Homeownership" in Cully's TIF zone are clearly and conspicuously disclosed. Otherwise, I would not want to be in the room when Patty learns that "Prosper" Portland put a permanent cap on the sales price of her permanently affordable house and that neither she nor any of her children or grandchildren will be ever be able to enjoy the kind generational wealth that just fell into Miranda's lap.
I sure hope I've misunderstood what Prosper Portland's magnanimous social engineers are planning for Cully. Assuming I'm more or less right, it would not surprise me if, when confronted with the terrible paradox of unequal outcomes, a planner would smile and call it equity in action.
I am grazing through Sam Knight's book , The Premonitions Bureau.
It suffers from a few structural problems and at times its focus, is, uh, unfocussed. It is certainly worth the bother of scanning though.
Near its end it discusses the great post-war problem of the English in warehousing the mentally unstable or unwell. I bring it up here because the author discusses it in the terms of the time and what used to be the normal way to discuss a national problem (issue, to you): it is a national problem, a common or shared problem. It is not a matter to be balknized or politicized to gain one group or another favor, power, and money.
Fianlly, The dreadful Enoch Powell makes an appearance as he seeks to make matters better for all. As usual he is articulate, good humored, effective and largely right.
Oct 15, 2022·edited Oct 15, 2022Liked by Richard Cheverton
Ever since Great Society initiatives began their now-sizable contribution to the modern degradation of America, particularly harming the black community, the offertory chorus of urban victimhood alternates between Ghettoized In Substandard Conditions, How Could You!, and OUR Special Neighborhood, How Dare You! Meanwhile, that bureaucratic leviathan of a Plan is both complex and vapid, like Scientology or Unification Church tracts. All the better cover for those who distribute the system’s spoils and truly write social policy, behind the scenes.
Didn't the hipster-Portlandia inrush of young adults already displace many Albina residents who relocated to the much less convenient far Eastside? Didn't something similar happen to those citizens' grandparents after the Vanport Flood?
The Dallas Fed published a study two or three years ago about a broader phenomenon of prosperous young people buying out close-in homeowners and replacing their modest houses with fancier digs. The same effect has been observed in Nashville, where a mostly black neighborhood of small houses near downtown has been almost totally replaced by tall apartment buildings known locally as "skinnies."
If the plan is to build "permanent affordable housing" and fence the remaining poor into their own special ghettos amid many big commercial buildings, I'm not sure I'd be gratified if I were a person of color.
When that postcard arrived in my mailbox, I did a quick read on it. Two sentences jumped out at me: “The ordinance, if approved, is subject to referendum,” and “The adoption of the Plan may affect property tax rates.” Terrific. Something new to fight about — and the first public hearing is the day after Election Day.
Housing isn’t supposed to be a guaranteed investment. It’s supposed to be a place to live. Just because one generation made a killing on the real estate market doesn’t mean every generation is now entitled to the same.
" 'Permanently affordable homeownership' means homeownership opportunities which prescribe affordability for subsequent buyers of the property or home, in contrast with homeownership opportunities which proscribe no additional affordability beyond the first purchaser."
Because my mind is still reeling from what Portland's benevolent hyper-ultra-woke planners have in store for Cully, for the time being I'll limit my comment to a paradox that hit me between the eyes like a rake handle when I stepped on the text quoted above.
On the one hand, the city's planning apparatchiks, BIPOC activists, media and elected officials treat "gentification" as if it were a race crime only slightly less heinous than slavery and Jim Crow. Perhaps elsewhere pundits have recognized the vilification of gentrification for the low-grade (for now) taxpayer funded, class war against the middle and upper middle classes that it is. Not so in Portland, where progressives universally lament the fall of historically black (and redlined) neighborhoods to white interlopers. That's all in the past now, since real estate in the Alberta neighborhood today fetches about the same as a nice house in Portland Heights would have 25 years ago. But memories of "displacement" and its consequences are long.
Let's examine one of the primary grievances of gentrification's progressive foes. A brief hypothetical will help explain it:
If Geoffrey and Arabella Trustfunder hadn't come along in 1993 and snapped up Grandma's beautiful Old-Portland-style house with its big maple tree off Alberta, the house might have passed tax-free to her heirs, say a granddaughter. Today, that granddaughter and her husband might decide to downsize now that they're empty-nesters. Meeting with their realtor,® they learn that the house grandma bought for $15,000 in 1970 is worth a cool $625,000! The For Sale sign is up before the end of the day.
There's a term for what happened in the preceding scenario. The house appreciated by $610,000 in 52 years. When the sale closes, the net proceeds will constitute what racial justice advocates call "generational wealth." The granddaughter didn't earn the $625,000 that was just deposited in her account. Neither did she buy the house. The money came to her from past generations of her family.
BIPOC generational wealth is so important to the city of Portland that it has a program that is meant to help people like the granddaughter in our scenario stay in their houses. A success story is even featured on the city's web site:
"Miranda Monroe’s grandparents lived in their NE Portland home for 60 years before Miranda and her sister inherited the home in 2014. Although not fully prepared to take over the maintenance of the home, Miranda understood the importance of keeping the family legacy going and her grandparent’s home was a big part of that history."
“My grandmother left it for us to be able to connect with each other—to be able to have GENERATIONAL WEALTH, and to have something to pass on to our children. My four-year-old son didn't get to meet her, but he thinks he can feel her presence in the house—he even creeps around as if we have to be quiet!” (Emphasis added)
And how is it that your tax dollars and mine are helping Miranda preserve her generational wealth?
The city tells us:
"To prevent displacement of longtime N/NE Portland homeowners, PHB supports home retention through a number of programs and resources, including 0% interest loans and grants, to help low-and moderate-income homeowners, seniors, and people with disabilities make the repairs and accessibility modifications to continue living safely in their homes."
"Struggling to pay for the repairs and hoping to avoid costly fines, Miranda was relieved to learn that she qualified for PHB’s Lead Paint Abatement Program as well as a Home Repair Loan."
https://www.portland.gov/phb/nnehousing/news/2022/9/7/saving-my-grandparents-north-portland-home
Now, let's imagine that Miranda's good friend Patty, who's heard about Miranda's good fortune, goes looking for an affordable property that might give her grandchildren a nice nest egg 50 years hence. It happens all the time all over Portland, though what's affordable to some might be out of reach of others.
Be that as it may, let's hope that Patty has a responsible realtor® who understands her needs, and that the terms of "Permanently Affordable Homeownership" in Cully's TIF zone are clearly and conspicuously disclosed. Otherwise, I would not want to be in the room when Patty learns that "Prosper" Portland put a permanent cap on the sales price of her permanently affordable house and that neither she nor any of her children or grandchildren will be ever be able to enjoy the kind generational wealth that just fell into Miranda's lap.
I sure hope I've misunderstood what Prosper Portland's magnanimous social engineers are planning for Cully. Assuming I'm more or less right, it would not surprise me if, when confronted with the terrible paradox of unequal outcomes, a planner would smile and call it equity in action.
I am grazing through Sam Knight's book , The Premonitions Bureau.
It suffers from a few structural problems and at times its focus, is, uh, unfocussed. It is certainly worth the bother of scanning though.
Near its end it discusses the great post-war problem of the English in warehousing the mentally unstable or unwell. I bring it up here because the author discusses it in the terms of the time and what used to be the normal way to discuss a national problem (issue, to you): it is a national problem, a common or shared problem. It is not a matter to be balknized or politicized to gain one group or another favor, power, and money.
Fianlly, The dreadful Enoch Powell makes an appearance as he seeks to make matters better for all. As usual he is articulate, good humored, effective and largely right.
Ever since Great Society initiatives began their now-sizable contribution to the modern degradation of America, particularly harming the black community, the offertory chorus of urban victimhood alternates between Ghettoized In Substandard Conditions, How Could You!, and OUR Special Neighborhood, How Dare You! Meanwhile, that bureaucratic leviathan of a Plan is both complex and vapid, like Scientology or Unification Church tracts. All the better cover for those who distribute the system’s spoils and truly write social policy, behind the scenes.
Didn't the hipster-Portlandia inrush of young adults already displace many Albina residents who relocated to the much less convenient far Eastside? Didn't something similar happen to those citizens' grandparents after the Vanport Flood?
The Dallas Fed published a study two or three years ago about a broader phenomenon of prosperous young people buying out close-in homeowners and replacing their modest houses with fancier digs. The same effect has been observed in Nashville, where a mostly black neighborhood of small houses near downtown has been almost totally replaced by tall apartment buildings known locally as "skinnies."
If the plan is to build "permanent affordable housing" and fence the remaining poor into their own special ghettos amid many big commercial buildings, I'm not sure I'd be gratified if I were a person of color.