- Low rental unit inventory has caused prices to skyrocket
- Low single-family home sales inventory has caused prices to skyrocket
- Outside profiteers seeing the price increases have come into the market to buy properties to make a quick buck, further driving up prices
- Wall Street hedge funds are buying up entire city blocks and evicting tenants, doing bare-bones "upgrades" and tripling rents
- Absentee house-flippers are buying homes and listing these empty, furnished properties on peer-to-peer "home sharing" sites such as AirBNB, further reducing inventory from both the rental and sales markets
The Portland City Council has declared a "housing emergency", which is basically lip service to pacify advocates acting on behalf of genuinely aggrieved Portland residents who are making a living wage but unable to pay their skyrocketing rents.
Action is needed. The City Council should adopt a policy that assists existing Portland residents with finding and keeping a place to live; that punishes and deters out-of-town mercenaries from looting and pillaging the Portland housing market, and funneling the profits out of state; and hinders the conversion of homes that could be used full-time to per-day "home sharing" rentals.
Here's what needs to happen:
- Five-year extension of the current 90-day notice period for rent increases more than 5%
- Five-year moratorium on no-cause evictions
- Five-year suspension of zoning restrictions prohibiting tiny houses, RV's and campers from sharing a property with an existing home (lot size greater than 0.33 acres)
- The purchaser of any real estate property must honor the existing leases of tenants on the premises at the time the property is put up for sale, and purchaser must engage in good-faith stewardship of the property until all leases expire
- Tax rent for properties owned by out-of-area landlords at 33% (gross receipts, not profits; and grandfather in existing property management companies with more than 20 units under management and on-site offices & maintenance staff)
- Restrict per-day "house-sharing" listings to on-premises owners only
- Restrict the number of days a given property may be made available for per-day "house-sharing" rental to 90 days per calendar year
- Limit the conversion of an owner-resident home to a rental home to the expiration of a 3-year waiting period
This is merely an immediate set of first steps needed to stop the bleeding. The next three steps are as follows:
- Build
- Build more
- Build even more
Increasing inventory at all price points will help quell the tumult in the current market; so while the city should focus its energy on attracting and fast-tracking low- and middle-income rental unit construction, even luxury apartment and condo construction is good in some way.
And let me say one more thing. This is a crisis of staggering proportions. Children are sleeping in homeless shelters even though their parents earn $50K a year and pay all of their bills on time. So anyone coming to City Council meetings with "not in my back yard" complaints or whining about "maintaining the aesthetic of the neighborhood" needs to be taken into the street and given a good ass-whooping. And City Council should ignore any and all concerns to this effect until things have stabilized.
The City Council has let a runaway housing market currently in the hands of out-of-state robber barons and Scrooge McDuck wanna-bes accelerate to the point where dual-income families are becoming homeless at the rate of dozens per month. The people of Portland shouldn't be tolerating this lack of action on the part of the City Council. The Mayor's office should be under siege, and every resident should be demanding immediate action -- action that puts Portland residents first, and moneyed interests dead last.
