tion among all the forces in the city, hut it can be done. We have no choice. For without a strong housing stock, Portland can not long remain a livable city. —City Commissioner Margaret Strachan The purpose of Portland's housing programs has not simply been to provide decent housing for our citizens, but also to keep our city livable and affordable for all groups so that we do not just become a city of the very rich and the very poor, so that our schools can remain open and our tax base can stay solid. The city of Portland contains 160,000 housing units. Of these, over 25,000 are substandard. In the best of years we have seen approximately 2,000 housing units rehabbed. At that rate it would take us 12 years to eliminate our substandard housing units. But every year, another couple of thousand housing units reach the end of their useful lives. We've been doing little better than keeping even. On July 1,1981 the City Council created the Office of Housing Policy (OHP) under the auspices of Commissioner Strachan. The new OHP has responsibility for the development, refinement and implementation of city housing policy; coordination of all city housing programs and projects; development of an annual housing management plan; and staffing the new Housing Advisory Committee. It also serves as the principal liaison to all federal, state and local housing-related agencies, and coordinates collection, analysis and dissemination of housing and population-related information. The cost and quality of a home are determined by the type of land it stands on and the materials, energy and financing that go into building it. In the last year, concern over rising interest rates has obscured the fact that inflation has struck all housing resources. In a prize-winning June 1981 essay for the California Affordable Housing Competition, Tom Bender, a former RAIN editor, makes an important distinction between the economic costs of housing (the labor, energy and materials put into construction of a house), and the monetary costs (finance structures, government policies and traditions of the housing market) that increase housing costs many fold. He proposes a system of "durability incentives" which, by improving the economic productivity of housing construction, could lead to an eventual 80-90 percent reduction in the economic cost of housing. After all, "the longer a building lasts, the less it costs per year it's used." Once again we see the tremendous role government can play in expanding opportunities for affordable housing. Bender also proposes sweat-equity housing grants (rather than transfer payments); a no-interest revolving loan fund (which would reduce the total purchase cost of a home 65-75 percent by eliminating finance charges); community housing exchanges ("through virtual elimination of realtor's fees, this service would realize savings over a person's life of 25-50 percent of the sales price of a home"); and renter's equity (a mechanism that "would allow for 60-80 percent of a person's rent payment to accumulate ownership equity for them rather than for investors"). Bruce Stokes is right on target when he says "building better housing for all Cooperatively financed row-houses, S.E. Oak St. 53 David Brown
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