This will change the nature of the city but it'll take about 40 years for the change to be very obvious.
I live in a neighborhood where the first 4 blocks off the transportation corridor basically already had this zoning for about a year and a half. I like the feeling of the new construction well enough I suppose. Before it was enacted everything was faux posh 2500+ single family modern boxes (as of a year ago most neighborhoods don't allow any new single family residential over 2500 SQ ft). The new infill often has a bit more character than the big boxes.
The neighborhood is almost fully gentrified, this will probably stave off whatever comes when you shoot past gentrification and into who ever buys a 2500 SQ ft house.
A year ago passing this through council was all anyone who cares about public policy could talk about. Now a days a with COVID and the ongoing riot/protests it passed with little mention in the run up to the vote.
I hope it helps make housing more affordable. Like I said this was already how a big chunk of my neighborhood was developing before this passed. They jacked up density in my neighborhood and reduced services at the same time, pretty much the opposite of what you should do when increasing density. I joked that they were going to make us an affordable hellscape. There no money for anything now and services are going to be cut to the bone. I hope it isn't terrible.
- I hope it isn't terrible.
Hope in one hand.
Seattle knocks this down every time because it's pushed entirely 100% by "microdevelopers" that want to knock over single-family dwellings and put in "live-work lofts" with shared bathrooms and no parking that end up being occupied three to a room. It's an effort to slumhouse every neighborhood so that instead of five college students per thousand square feet within walking distance of the University they can do five GenZ wage drones per thousand square feet. Same communal kitchen, same communal bathroom, same lack of parking that makes getting home a virtual impossibility if you leave and don't come back two hours before rush hour. This is all of the 213 and half of the 323 and Los Angeles still requires a parking spot per dwelling.
Portland has some of the best zoning laws in the United States. They award tax incentives for structured building and access to transit. Those tax incentives are one of the reason Portland has such great public transit. What you'll have now is a place that used to be a family of four and then became six roommates is now going to become a sixplex with four people per apartment and every single one of them has a car because they all work in Gresham or Vancouver. They'll all be rentals because nobody bothers to do this shit to sell, you do it to squeeze blood from the stone of the proletariat.
I did a lot of design work for low-income housing in downtown Seattle. They knocked over a single-floor commercial building and put in nine floors of Section 8. They got lots of tax incentives and rebates to do this. Fifteen years later that commercial building is walking distance to The Spheres. Not sure if they've sold it for nine figures yet or not.
The YIMBYs always think "I want to live in this hip neighborhood but my parents don't pay me enough money to do it so I will attend zoning board meetings and stick it to the man." The man goes "why yes yes I would like you to self-righteously make it orders of magnitude easier to overcharge you for a postage-stamp-sized apartment."
Hey steve - what happened with your project? The hole in the ground we didn't buy in 2015 is a hole in the ground that was bought by the local Eagles lodge in 2018 until they discovered they couldn't build shit on it so now they're trying to sell again.
- Hey steve - what happened with your project?
I gave up. The city just wasn't having it. Despite being surrounded by multi-family, despite knocking down four out of four barriers they threw up.... there was always a next one... and a next one... and I ran out of time. Actually a fairly dark fucking chapter of my life I haven't completely let go of. Kinda haunting now that I think about it.
so I sold it and moved further in to suburbia.
Like I said, this zoning has been how it is for about a year and a half in my neighborhood and so far it's been ok. Most of the homes seem to be owned by single families. A percentage of them are housing for the expensive private university that's in the neighborhood but at about the same rate that housing already was.
Many years ago the four story wooden apartment buildings with retail on the bottom started dropping along the main transportation corridors. I worked on one corner where the three other corners were turned into these monoliths. 500 apartments were added and with only about 100 parking spots. That shit was disruptive. The neighborhood went from Portland's version of a ghetto to highly desirable in about 5 years. Parking seemed to be the thing that upset the most people.
I don't exactly get how the 6-plexes will work. If 3 are "affordable" and 3 are market rate, aren't the market rate prices going to just subsidize the below market units such that they will actually be above market? Half and half seems like too high a ratio for cost offsets to not be onerous. Isn't the best way to make things more affordable just to build more in general? I'm admittedly no policy wonk in this area, but I just don't see how that math can work.
I have no idea about the details on the affordable units. Adding a few affordable units to a large apartment development gets you some preferential treatment through the permitting process to an extent that most big developments add 10% low income.
There is a pretty big pot of money that they could be using to encourage low income housing but once again I'm not up to date on how that is being implemented.
A fair amount of time efforts geared toward encouraging low income housing don't work all that well and that could be the way it goes here.