The Tax Abatements and other planning tricks are coming home to roost in the
way of high housing prices…and a void…where the money for schools would
have been.
Portland City Commissioner Erik Sten affirms yet again (memo here) that in their zeal to build up the downtown of Portland with condos, light rail, tax abatements and street cars, there isn’t enough money for the other parts of town.
When you essentially pay people to move to the area (via abatements to developers) and then finance with tax increment financing which takes the cream off the top of property taxes that would otherwise go for schools, fire and police, what do you expect? Did you expect ‘the little people’ not to notice after awhile?
TAO and Don Mc Intire have been telling you for YEARS–AT LEAST A DECADE–this would be the impact. You didn’t listen because he’s a right wing wacko? He was right about the unfunded Police and Fire retirement and disability fund, too, wasn’t he?
Sten is calling for the River District Urban Renewal District to hopscotch all the way to outer southeast so they can use those funds to help build utopia in the southeast area. In other words he wants to complicate a problem already caused by urban renewal financing by making the urban renewal district larger…to mitigate the
problem caused by the urban renewal district in the first place.
Sten is in favor of the city taking over the schools…he’s said this
before…and to pay the poor to come to Portland or to stay in Portland
because their planning has forced them out.
“The intense attention rightly focused on maintaining a healthy downtown—let’s not forget how unprecedented and novel Portland’s original successes were in this regard—has yielded such a robust engine of real estate development that its side effects have grown into problems of considerable scale.
In sum, the prosperity of the past decade has been uneven. Some of the central city’s successes have come at the expense of Outer East Portland. That kind of dynamic undermines support for urban renewal in general. We need to take major steps to begin to acknowledge that we are all one city. We share the responsibility to solve our problems, and we should create a new kind of urban renewal strategy to match.”