Required Reading

Tyler Bump, one of the city planners at the BPS who played a pivotal role in the Residential Infill Project presenting data... I mean withholding and misrepresenting vital displacement impacts from the Committee and the public... now works for ECONorthwest as a Project Director. As a matter of fact, he went DIRECTLY there within weeks of the Planning and Sustainability Commission's final 5-4 vote on RIP in mid-March.

The same ECONorthwest that authored this 2001 publicly funded, Metro-sponsored blueprint for gentrification, economic disparity, and the crisis of Affordability we currently find ourselves in.. . discussing what was at that time the conundrum of planners "looking ahead to encourage the metropolitan area to be a metropolis it is not quite ready to be" but developers weren't building that dense metropolis even though zoning was way ahead of the market and allowed for much greater density.

So Congratulations on your promotion to the private sector Mr. Bump, and your continued complicity in lining the pockets of rent profiteers by exacerbating a manufactured crisis of Affordability and irreparable harm. We see what you did.

The report states that developers weren't building denser because it wasn't profitable enough yet. Specifically, because land values weren't high enough, land was not scarece enough, and that the profit margins on higher-density development are more compelling when land costs are higher, allowing developers to achieve much higher maximum rents.

So ECONorthwest laid out a variety of ways in which planners could increase the speculative value of the land through artificial constraints and regulations to limit opportunities for substitution. They even explicitly recommend choking off investment outside the central core by restricting and raising the costs of development while providing a variety of discounts, waivers, and incentives to developers inside the core. [This explains the food deserts, economic disparity, and lack of amenities east of 82nd.]

• "Allowing higher density will not achieve much more in the Metro region, since higher densities are already allowed. Financial or permitting incentives have a higher possibility of increasing density in Urban Centers."

• "Market conditions and public policy have not made land scarce enough, have not made central locations superior enough in terms of transportation or amenity, and have not seen demand great enough to cause land values to rise fast enough in Urban Centers that rents can be demanded that make high density profitable without public assistance".

• "To increase land prices in the region that will support higher density, it is not enough to constrain the land supply. People must be willing to live and work in the region, and must be willing to pay higher prices to do so."

• "If the public sector wants the private sector to build more densely it must do something to affect demand and supply conditions so that land prices increase"

• "Following are the policies that are the most effective ways to increase density in Urban Centers. They may not necessarily be the most efficient from an economic perspective, nor the most equitable from a societal one."

• "Because higher achievable rents are needed to justify the higher land prices that support higher densities, rent-related costs to residents and businesses must be higher in real terms to offset the higher costs."