October 17, 2016

Seattle DSA holds forum on housing to learn from Portland and Vancouver

Seattle and its Cascadian siblings Portland and Vancouver, B.C., share a lot more than geography.

All three cities and their metro areas have experienced rapid growth and development in recent years, and they all face attendant ills such as expensive housing and homelessness.

But just as each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, these three cities confront their own unique set of challenges.

The Downtown Seattle Association held a panel discussion Friday to examine the future of these cities in light of their particular trials and triumphs.

Speakers were Jon Scholes, DSA president and CEO; Sandy McDonough, president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance; and Neal LaMontagne, co-chair of the Vancouver City Planning Commission and an urban design instructor at the University of British Columbia.

The typical price for a detached home in the Vancouver was 1.58 million Canadian dollars ($1.2 million) in September, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. That's up 33.7 percent from the same month last year, even with a new 15 percent tax on foreign property buyers.

“We have a San Francisco housing market and Reno economy,” said LaMontagne. “The gap between incomes and housing costs is wide.”

Chalk that up in part to geographic constraints and Chinese homebuyers, who have been blamed for bidding up prices. The long-term effects of the new tax remain to be seen, particularly if it faces legal challenges.

Vancouver takes pride in its role as a global city and as part of the network of international capital flows, LaMontagne said, but the local economy needs to catch up and hold its own.

Portland is the smallest of the three cities and has retained a small-town feel despite its status as a national magnet for young people, McDonough said.

Still, housing prices have escalated there, pushing lower-income households to the edges.

“We're facing a lot of the same issues as Seattle and Vancouver,” she said, with housing affordability problems exacerbated by lagging incomes and the reluctance of neighborhoods to accept greater density.

“We're having growing pains as we transition from an overgrown smaller town to a bigger city,” McDonough said.

Jon Scholes said one of Seattle's successes is its record of churning out housing for new city dwellers, including thousands of new market-rate units slated to be delivered in the few years.

“We're punching above our weight in housing production,” he said.

Yet, Seattle home prices remain out of reach for many households, and not enough housing is getting built where people want to live and work, Scholes said.

One of the more intractable problems faced by all three cities is homelessness and the opioid epidemic.

Despite spending millions on shelters and services over the past decade, “we're not getting the outcome anyone wants,” Scholes said.

Vancouver has been a leader in harm reduction, such as with its supervised injection site, LaMontagne said.

Harm reduction is something Seattle has been studying, and it has seen success with 1811 Eastlake, which provides housing for homeless alcoholics without restricting their drinking.

Finding homes for such services can be problematic, though, and LaMontagne acknowledged that Vancouver's injection site is in a neighborhood with concentrated poverty and addiction.

Portland's homeless crisis came to a head after the city started allowing people to camp on public property throughout the city, McDonough said.

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales put an end to the policy in August after outcries by neighborhoods, business groups and community organizations.

“We found that widely dispersed, uncontrolled camping was a very big problem and hard to undo,” McDonough said.

As the need to provide permanent housing for the homeless gained currency, “‘shelter' became a bad word in Portland,” she said, and the city stopped funding shelter beds.

Portland is now looking at solutions such allowing organized camps in places where it can provide services.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray released a new set proposals last week to provide services for homeless people such as authorizing four new encampments, including a harm-reduction encampment; creating a new shelter; and making restroom and shower facilities at some pools and community centers available.