Plutocrats for Portland

Why do we hear so much about the supposed failures of recent progressive reforms in Portland?  Why does there seem to be so much panic about downtown?  Local organizer and activist Hyung Nam explains how Trump-era tax breaks have further incentivized the wealthiest developers and property owners to undermine the will of the real people of Portland. Hyung Nam is an organizer with the Portland Metro People's Coalition , a coalition of grassroots groups that aims to "create a Portland Metropolitan region that serves the needs of the many instead of the privileged few."

As host Norm Diamond notes in introducing this segment, a plutocrat is someone who becomes powerful only because they are rich, and the dark-money group "People for Portland" might more accurately be named "Plutocrats for Portland."

The second audio link below (scroll down for audio) includes the introduction to the segment.

Image: Silhouette of Godzilla looming over silhouette of Broadway bridge against a rainbow background.  Image by Mark Nerys. Used with permission.

Text/transcript:

Between mainstream news and local billboards lately, you might think that downtown Portland is a free-fire zone occupied only by syringe-wielding homicidal litterbugs, and that everyone but you wants more police, more sweeps, and fewer environmental protections. Over and over, stories suggest that all our hard-won progressive reforms were mistaken and we must change course. But none of that is true.

It is true that downtown has changed--but not because of things peculiar to Portland. The changes largely result from the global pandemic and the shift to remote work. As John Rennie Short explained recently in The Conversation, downtown development all over the US had been inflated by Reagan-era tax policies and low interest rates, and Covid helped burst the 40-year bubble.

So why all the panic about downtown Portland?

Let's review. As part of massive, nationwide, historic protests in 2020, Portlanders demanded the city reduce police budgets and redirect funds to Portland Street Response, an unarmed response to non-life-threatening mental health and behavioral health issues. Oregonians passed Measure 110 to decriminalize drugs and align the response to addiction with professional best practices. County voters elected a progressive district attorney, who called for police accountability and a rethinking of public safety. Portlanders also worked for housing justice: passing relocation assistance for renters, and voting in the 2018 Metro Housing Bond and the 2020 Metro Supportive Housing Services measure. And after a long process, with extensive community engagement, Portland voters approved a new city charter.

Portlanders pushed for these changes in a city that already lacked affordable housing and access to drug treatment, and was out of compliance with a federal Department of Justice consent decree over police repeatedly violating residents’ civil rights. People in Portland were responding to ongoing police brutality, to some of the nation's worst racial disparities in arrests, and to data that showed that the majority of arrests in Portland targeted unhoused people for low level offenses — not even crimes — resulting in costly police, courts, jails, and even prison sentences. These experiences further traumatize unhoused people and make it even more difficult for them to become housed, and the 9th Circuit Court in Boise ruled that it was unconstitutional to sweep and arrest unhoused people when there were not enough shelters available for them.

Despite the housing crisis, real estate developers fought against inclusionary zoning and other housing reforms. Developers are major players in the Portland Business Alliance, recently rebranded as the Portland Metro Chamber. The PBA is the most powerful lobby in city politics, has repeatedly violated lobbying rules, and spends large sums on local elections.

Grassroots efforts have resisted the onslaught of business influence, passing County and City ballot measures to limit money in local elections, despite a challenge from the PBA, the Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors, and Associated Oregon Industries. Since the plutocrats can no longer buy local elections so easily, they created new advocacy organizations including the dark money group, People for Portland (P4P).

P4P has spent millions creating a narrative about Portland--push-polling, generating emails to city leaders, lobbying, funding multiple PACs and pushing to criminalize unhoused people while partially causing the housing crisis as they gentrify the city for profit.

In 2022, P4P, the 'Everyone Deserves Safe Shelter' PAC, and donors like the real estate firm Killian Pacific spent tens of thousands of dollars (and were ready to spend hundreds of thousands more) to redirect Metro supportive housing services tax dollars to emergency shelter beds, instead of actual housing. These plutocrats keep attempting to move us away from proven solutions like Housing First, towards costly sweeps and temporary mass shelters.

The City Council collaborated by awarding a 50 million dollar contract to Urban Alchemy to manage encampments that will get around the Boise ruling and remove homeless Portlanders from public spaces. Now the PBA and their politicians are seeking more state funding for corrections, and trying to undermine the new city charter so rich lobbyists can maintain control.

The push for police and sweeps is not just ideologically based. Landowners and developers have a stake in trying to quote-unquote "revitalize" downtown. Notably, they have an interest in capitalizing on Trump’s 2017 "Opportunity Zone" tax breaks. As David Wessel explains in his book Only the Rich Can Play, "Opportunity Zones provide tax breaks on long-term investments in certain low-income census tracts"--although, because census tracts are often quite large, wealthy areas–like the South Waterfront and the Pearl District–can be included in tracts that count as overall "low-income." Wessel adds, "Through the program, the rich can invest capital gains into a Qualified Opportunity Fund and postpone capital gains taxes” or, if they hold the property for ten years, pay no tax on it at all. “Oregon has 86 Opportunity Zones, including 31 in Portland. A cluster of them blanket the inner city.”

These opportunity zones allow the wealthy to evade taxes in the name of development. Take the Goodman family. Funders of PBA and P4P, the Goodmans are the largest downtown property owners. Through the Downtown Development Group and about a dozen obscure LLCs, they control 25 sites in the Opportunity Zones, including the land the luxury Ritz Carlton hotel was built on. Terrified that unhoused people, or anything else that hinders gentrification, will limit their returns on investment, Portland’s plutocrats push for more police to sweep ‘undesirable’ people into jails or mass shelters that critics have called concentration camps.

These vested interests have not only created an array of deceptively- named advocacy groups, but also used their money and power to get the governor to create a special task force on downtown Portland. That is, the agenda of wealthy property owners and developers has captured both the mayor in the Central City Plan and the governor in a new public-private partnership. Led by the PBA and their wealthy and powerful sponsors, the task force pushed their ideas about downtown, homelessness, and crime in meetings that were closed to the public and to journalists. And what has this task force called for? Limits and cuts to taxes, subsidies for businesses, and more cops — neglecting the root issues of housing unaffordability and lack of living wages, all to continue to make Portland a playground for the rich.

Our new city charter means the next city election will be historic. Portlanders must remember that everyone deserves housing, not carceral shelters; that equitably-resourced cities don’t need militarized policing; that we can’t resuscitate a burst business bubble but we can revitalize community action. Watch out for the fake P4P, and support the real people of Portland.