Emery South Waterfront Apartments
Portland's South Waterfront features high-end condos and apartments but only 209 units of affordable housing.
Portland officials want to dramatically decrease their goals for construction of affordable housing in the heavily subsidized South Waterfront District.
The city is already failing to develop the affordable housing it pledged in 2003, with just one low-income project among the high-end condos that tower above the Willamette River.
Now, rather than attempting to meet decade-old city goals, officials for the Portland Housing Bureau want to lower the bar.
City officials have recommended decreasing South Waterfront affordable housing construction to 434 units, a 25 percent reduction from the original target of 582.
To date, just 209 affordable units have been built.
The shortfall parallels Portland's track record in another urban renewal area, the River District, where The Oregonian recently found that developers would need to build 1,300 more affordable units to hit city targets.
Traci Manning, director of the Portland Housing Bureau, said officials are being pragmatic about the amount of affordable housing that can be built at the South Waterfront with public money.
"It feels like a realistic way to tell the community..., 'Here's what we can do,'" Manning said.
But given the lack of success so far, affordable housing advocates say it is maddening that city officials would roll back expectations.
"We don't think they should start backing down," said Debbie Aiona, the action chairwoman for the League of Women Voters of Portland.
Modest commitments
The recommendation to curtail goals for affordable housing comes as city leaders prepare to chart development of the South Waterfront for the next decade.
The City Council created the North Macadam urban renewal area in 1999 to fund up to $289 million worth of redevelopment work.
The area south of downtown has transformed since then thanks to public investments that include a streetcar line, a new light-rail connection, an aerial tram and city parks.
City officials are now negotiating development agreements with the largest landholder in the South Waterfront District, the Zidell family, and Portland State University. The city is expected to spend tens of millions of dollars subsidizing development of Zidell and Portland State University properties.
In turn, development of Zidell's 33 acres is expected to help the city set aside $31 million to $40 million to pay for new affordable housing units in the area.
The City Council always had set modest commitments to deliver affordable housing in the neighborhood.
Portland's overarching housing policy calls for large redevelopment projects such as the South Waterfront to accommodate households with a mixture of incomes matching the whole city's. That aspiration calls for a big share of units with rents affordable to low- and moderate-income residents.
Replicating the city's income distribution when the South Waterfront started would have required 1,422 of the first 3,000 apartments and condos built to be affordable housing.
The City Council in 2003 adopted a goal to build less than half that amount, 582 units, for people or families earning up to 80 percent of the region's median income.
In explaining the decision, the city commissioner in charge of housing at the time, Erik Sten, cited competing priorities for city money in the initial phases of South Waterfront construction.
But the city would "build towards reaching those goals in the second 3,000" units, Sten said during the 2003 meeting where City Council adopted its housing strategy.
The second 3,000
A decade later, officials at the Portland Housing Bureau say they have no idea how many new units have actually been built.
A 2011 memo from a city task force to the Housing Bureau said that 2,576 new units had been built, most of them expensive condos. But a Housing Bureau spokeswoman said in an email that she couldn't speculate on the accuracy of that figure or what it might be currently.
Regardless of what's been built so far, city planning documents continue to call for a second wave of thousands of new housing units to be built after the initial 3,000.
That moment, a period Sten once envisioned as the city's chance to catch up to its affordability goals, is at hand.
But rather than amplifying efforts to produce affordable housing, officials have recommended shrinking the target.
In an Oct. 28 memo, the Housing Bureau recommended slashing its initial goal of 582 affordable units in the South Waterfront to 434 total. The new target would focus only on people earning up to 60 percent of the region's median income, with no specific goal recommended for people earning between 61 percent and 80 percent of the median.
With 209 units already built at the Gray's Landing project, which opened in 2012 with a $28.7 million investment from the city, Portland would need only 225 more affordable units to meet the new, more modest goal.
Manning said she's confident the city can hit that target.
Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Housing Bureau, is supportive of the recommendation to scale back goals.
The affordable housing recommendations are expected to head to the City Council for review in December as part of a broad package of amendments to urban renewal districts proposed by Mayor Charlie Hales.
-- Brad Schmidt