Portland mayor "Streetcar" Charlie announced that the city has a "homeless emergency" and will spend $20 million to solve it. Multnomah County chair Deborah Kafoury promised to kick in another $10 million. In view of the fact that Streetcar's been claiming that there's no money for road maintenance, I wondered where he miraculously found this pot of cash. Fortunately, I ran across the answer:
City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees housing, told assembled reporters that the city and county also plan to deploy $60 million—mostly existing urban-renewal dollars—to building new affordable housing units.
That new construction is badly needed. As WW reported in this morning's edition, low vacancies have sent a wave of rent hikes eastward, disproportionately hitting the poorest neighborhoods in the city.
Saltzman also discussed the dedicating lodging taxes on operators of Airbnb and other short-term rentals to affordable housing. As WW reported this spring, those rentals operate with little regulation, draining the city's housing stock.
Housing advocates last year called for dedicating taxes on Airbnb to affordable housing. The proposal didn't get traction in City Hall, but sources tell WW the plan now has three votes—including the mayor.
This is in addition to the nearly $1 billion already spent to "solve the problem", to say nothing of the additional $300 million+ given to developers for "affordable housing".:
According to the former Auditor at the City in her 2013 report - the City gave away over $305 million to developers to solve the Affordable Housing crisis. Free money. IF the price of each of these units was on the order of $200,000 -- that money should have created, just in the last few years since 2010, nearly 1600 affordable units.
But according to prior reports on Home Forward project costs - each unit was closer to $440,000. Maybe we should stop the insanity of waste?
They seem unable to grasp the fact that you cannot help those who don't want to be helped.
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