Portland State Magazine Spring 2016

20 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE SPRING 2016 THE TIMES they are a changin’, and for Portlanders, it’s getting worrisome. In the last two years, the city’s population has spiked upward. Rents are through the roof. Lower-income neighborhoods that were decaying 30 years ago are now the city’s new hotspots, and the people who would like to live there are getting priced out. Residents of Portland’s tonier neighborhoods are fighting the demolition of older homes on their streets. Even if the homes that replace them fit well with the others, they are viewed as changing the neighborhood’s character. And by implication, no change is good. All of this is contributing to a level of homelessness in Portland that city leaders have declared as a crisis. Ethan Seltzer, PSU professor of urban studies and planning, says the rapid pace of change in Portland—and society as a whole—presents some interesting challenges for those who are planning the city’s future. That will include a new mayor, who will be elected this year. Seltzer and his colleagues at PSU’s College of Urban and Public Affairs have their collective fingers on Portland’s pulse, and while they may not have the answers to Portland’s growing pains, they can frame the political discussion and point to the things we ought to be talking about. Population growth get used to it Last summer, PSU’s Center for Population Research announced that Oregon’s population had breached the 4 million mark for the first time ever. The Portland metro area, which includes Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties, has about 1,743,385 residents—almost 100,000 more than lived here just five years ago. Portland, grew at an average of 1.4 percent a year from 1990 to 2010, slept during the Great Recession, and then grew by 1.9 percent in 2014 to a total of 613,335 people. That, Seltzer says, is getting long-time residents to harken back to a mythical Golden Age of Portland that is now lost because so many people want to live here. “What’s happening in Portland is simply a rate of growth that we’re unfamiliar with,” Seltzer says, noting that people from outside the area have always gravitated to Portland, and that recent growth— averaged over time—isn’t all that unusual. “Well over half the people who live here were not born here. This is a place that is continually new,” he says. Where are people going to live? The desire to live here is making the Portland metro area more expensive. According to Gerard Mildner, head of PSU’s Center for Real Estate, apartment rents and home prices in the region have reached new historic highs, even after accounting for the 30 percent decline in prices following the Great Recession. In fact the increase in Portland home prices from 2014 to 2015 was the biggest in the country, according to “CNN Money.” The median home price in Portland is now $351,700—up 17 percent over last year. Portland rents were much lower than the national average prior to 2009. Now they’re higher, hovering around $1,275 for a typical one-bedroom apartment. Mildner says Portland rents rose more than 35 percent from July 2008 to October 2015 compared to a national average of less than 20 percent. At this rate, he says the average apartment rent in Portland will be only slightly less expensive than San Francisco by the year 2035. The growing population is pushing apartment construction in Multnomah County to an all-time high. In Portland, 4,675 new apartments are set to be completed this year, adding to the 3,349 units built in 2015 and 2,866 built the year before that. But while apartments are going up all over, the metro region is building 20 percent fewer single-family homes than in the period from 1990 to 2007, Mildner says. Rising rents for lower-income Portlanders in neighborhoods where buildings are being torn down to make room for more upscale housing—a process known as gentrification—are pushing them to move out to the fringes of east Multnomah County. A study by “Governing” magazine showed that Portland gentrified more than any of the 50 cities on its list between 2000 and 2015. It showed that 58 percent of Portland’s low-income neighborhoods—all located in north, northeast and southeast Portland—gentrified during that period, measured by the rise in home values and percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees. wr i t t e n b y j ohn k i rk land More people, more cars, higher rents. What are we to do? G rowing Portland’s