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An article in the Portland Business Journal about the postponement of an affordable housing project in the South Waterfront does a good job illuminating the fraud, waste and abuse that most Portlanders have become all too familiar with: a “build-it-and-they-will-come” mentality that our elected local officials had billed as a strategy to insulate the Metro region from economic downturns and provide us all with a higher quality of life. Unfortunately, it’s saddled it citizens with debt, an uncertain economic future and misery rate that’s amongst the highest in the nation. From the Portland Business Journal:
Portland’s housing bureau is recommending that the city shelve an affordable housing project into which it’s already poured nearly $2 million.
Margaret Van Vliet, the city’s housing director, told City Commissioner Nick Fish last week that the project “as currently structured should not move forward.”
Van Vliet’s concerns:
- The housing bureau lacks the in-house capacity to effectively provide asset management, ownership and general project oversight.
- There’s too much uncertainty in the housing market.
- It’s difficult to manage a “somewhat untested mix of populations” in an emerging residential market.
What strikes me a particularly noteworthy, is that the City turned a blind eye to enormous project risks BEFORE they spent the $2MM. The City of Portland did not have the in-house resources to effectively manage and oversee the project prior to the inception of the initiative. And, the social experimentation of managing a “somewhat untested mix of population” smacks of the failed inner city projects in Chicago or New York.
What's a "somewhat untested mix of population?" Rich people and poor people? Black people and white people? What combos haven't been "tested" at this point in history and who would suggest that such arrangements ought to be avoided still because they were "somewhat untested?" Sounds pretty awful to me.
The history of urban development is replete with monumental failures when bureaucrats have attempted to control what is otherwise a free and open market activity governed by the individual choices of all people regardless of their race, sexual orientation or socioeconomic class.
While it sounds incredibly well-intentioned to develop public housing projects in urban areas, what if the "target audience" (as defined by the master planners at City Hall) doesn't want to live there? What about their freedom of choice to live somewhere else, but can't afford to? What if instead, they — just like you and me — want a good living-wage job so they can exercise that freedom of choice?
Check out wikipedia on the topic on one of the most reviewed cases in world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt-Igoe
The post concludes with the following: "… location, population density, cost constraints, and even specific number of floors was imposed by the federal and state authorities." While the excerpt was being used in the context of architectural considerations, it does illustrate just a few of the complexities that government is ill-equipped to manage.
Or, do some reading on the Housing Projects in Chicago written by the Illinois State Historical Society by Branford Hunt:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3945/is_2...
I dunno … I rather put in a good day's work, get paid a living wage and retain my freedom to choose.