 Welcome everybody. What a great turnout. I guess we picked the topic that's of interest to folks. So it's a good thing. Good evening. My name is Marcus Miller. I'm an educator, business owner, and engaged in active citizen, particularly around community planning issues, sort of the intersection of housing and transportation. Been involved for years. And I'm one member of a pretty diverse working group that believes that Portland can be a place where everyone has the opportunity to prosper. But we're concerned that there are important opportunities that are being missed and that their decisions being made that aren't always really aligning with our goals. We know that we're not the only group that's working on these issues too. And I want to recognize representatives here that we have from a number of organizations and groups that are involved in these issues as well, including, but not limited to, the Greater Portland Community Land Trust, the Main Immigrant Housing Coalition, Portland Society for Architecture. We have candidates here, local candidates, the Bayside Neighborhood Organization, the Parks Commission, the School Board, members of the Development Community, People's Housing Coalition, City Planning Department, Community Land Trust, Main Democratic Socialists, Portland Housing Authority, Housing Providers, Bayside Village Tenants, folks from the Muskie School, Housing Co-op, Homeless Advocacy for All, State Representative and Legislative Delegations, Engineering Firms, Lending Institutions, and I'm sure there's more I didn't mess with. So welcome. We're obviously all really engaged in this issue and one of our goals tonight was to get us all in the room together and have some constructive conversations. So thank you all for attending. I'd like to ask the members of our working group that helped organize this event to stand up or raise your hand to be recognized for a moment. We've got stickers on, maybe others of you have stickers too by now, but we've got stickers. We're approachable. We want to hear from you. This is the beginning of a conversation. So throughout the night and afterwards, please reach out, introduce yourselves, and we really want to join together and begin to work together to tackle this issue. You know this is a community problem and it's going to take community solutions. We also understand that we enjoy a certain degree of privilege. Many of us have secure housing already, and we have some resources that allow us to balance work, family. One privilege is that some of us enjoy the time and the capacity to devote to civic and political engagement, to work to make our communities better places as we conceive them. We know that's not the case for many Portland residents. There are many faces of those who are priced out of Portland, and we know that their suffering is real and their suffering is immediate. It's a problem now. We believe that Portland is, has been, and will continue to be a very special place, and that we're all here for a reason. We know that Portland is going to continue to be that special place. There needs to be room for everyone, not just those who can afford the rising cost of entry into our community. So this evening, we hope to reframe a conversation that many of us have been having in our own little bubbles, our own small groups, over and over again for years. We want to share information about Portland and national housing trends. We want to understand the varied perspectives and experiences of people that we don't normally communicate with. We want to learn about how other communities are addressing these issues, gentrification, equity, and inclusiveness. We want to find common grounds to address these issues together. And finally, we want to set the stage for the collaboration that is necessary to ensure a more prosperous Portland for all its residents. So thank you for coming here to be part of that tonight. We'll be having a respectful, inclusive, and constructive dialogue tonight. And we ask that everybody is respectful of the speakers, that we avoid any cross-talking or calling out. We provided sticky notes at the front table for you to write any comments that you have. And you can place those at the stations around the other room. Save your questions for the Q&A at the end of the presentation as well. And we look forward to a vibrant conversation after this presentation to get started. Housing follows the market demand not need. This is a sad fact and perhaps a pitfall of our capitalist system. Since homes are expensive to produce and there's little subsidy for affordable housing, homes get built for the people who can afford them the most. And those who need them usually have to wait for the moment of oversupply. It's clear that the market is failing to meet the needs of the middle class and low income members of our community. And that is a problem. The campaign celebrating Portland's quality of life have succeeded. Attracting those who can truly choose and afford to live wherever they want to. This has outpaced the building of new homes where people most want to live in multi-unit and small-lock developments in walkable neighborhoods. The ripple effects of market demand are being felt by many downstream. Portland's median income is nearly half of what is needed to afford the median home price. And we know that many in our community do not even make that much money. Still, more people are coming to Portland, attracted by our quality of life and our growing businesses. On top of this, we have not built the multi-units demanded in today's markets, not prioritized building homes where most desired in our walkable neighborhoods, or improved other neighborhoods to these same standards. We have zoning that's rooted in a 100-year-old land use paradigm that obstructs growth and commonsense solutions often. We've been slow to update our local housing and zoning policies. In addition, we have historically low home starts since the 2007 recession. We have decades-long trends of decreasing household sizes. So those homes that used to have six or eight people in them now have one or two or 2.3. We also have a lack of continued political and community leadership to prioritize and advance our city housing goals. And finally, we've got well intentioned but scattershot ad hoc single advocacy that results in strategies that often work counter to our final goals and lateral damage as a result of crossfire from different advocacy groups. And of course, the burnout that leads from all of that. It's been the making of a perfect storm. Despite all of Portland's accolades, our population has barely grown in decades. Wealthier newcomers are displacing middle and low income residents who must move out, along with other newcomers for less expensive homes and perceived better schools and surrounding communities. As a result, surrounding communities experience tremendous population growth. And Portland stays stagnant. For example, Scarborough has quadrupled in population since 1950, while Portland has lost 10,000 people. For Portland, this trend has dire political, economic, and environmental implications. Limited housing drives up prices. As people are priced out of Portland, they must move to surrounding towns. Portland gets more commuters, more traffic and more parking, but not more residents. And the strong job market further drives housing costs up. Workers can't afford to live in town, and businesses then struggle to find or keep enough employees. Too many of our neighbors, both renters and homeowners are struggling to get by. The imbalance of housing costs and incomes puts households in precarious financial circumstances and diverts money from supporting our local economy. Multifamily housing in walkable neighborhoods is the most desired and needed in the city. It allows the most efficient use of land, infrastructure, and services. However, it is restricted to few locations in the city, primarily on the peninsula. The brighter yellow and orange shades here show where we can have multifamily housing on the peninsula. That is more than two units, three units or more. The little bit of pale yellow that you'll see, particularly closer to off peninsula, or where you'll find single family homes. Why? The majority of the land is restricted to single and two family homes. See all this pale yellow? That is primarily single family homes to very large percentage of the land mass. The two yellows that are barely brighter show where all the multi units, three or more families are located in the city. And many of those probably don't even conform to current zoning. That means you couldn't build them there today. Portland's actual zoning map is of what is currently permitted would show even greater restrictions to multi family development. But it was really kind of too complicated to show and walk you through. We need more complete neighborhoods, more land zone for multi use homes, and neighborhood based plans for additional multi family housing that speaks to the context of our existing neighborhoods. And this brings us to property taxes and the city budget. Property taxes are the single largest source of revenue for the city. The city budget is not going to stop increasing. Either we find ways to increase the sources of revenue, or we keep raising property taxes. By rezoning these yellow zones for multi family homes, we plant the seeds for more complete neighborhoods and greater share the tax burden of property owners by increasing property tax revenues. So the status quo isn't working. There's more people coming to Portland. The wealthy will get their housing. But the middle class being forced to the suburbs. The exodus of the creative class and service workers. And our inability to provide homes for asylum seekers, immigrants, and others in need is evidence that things are not working. And they're going to get worse unless we start doing something different. And this is where we think in becomes in. The interconnectedness of affordable housing, mobility, zoning policy and sustainable growth is where we're going to find those solutions. It's time for all of us single advocacy, single issue advocates to get outside of our bubbles and work together to develop a more holistic integrated approach to creating a Portland for the 21st century. The goal of GMB is to understand and illuminate this ecosystem of intertwined issues. Advocate for effective reforms and create meaningful change. Yes, we believe Portland can be equitable and prosperous for everybody. We believe that Portland can say yes, yes to homes for all people. Yes to commercial space for local businesses. Yes to scale development. Yes to more homes and less cars. Yes to walkable and bikeable streets. Yes to complete neighborhoods. Yes to improved mass transit. And yes to economic growth and shared prosperity. Started in 2013. The yes in my backyard movement has popped up in North American cities with the goal of bringing a more collaborative approach to land use and government's issues. We believe such an approach will be beneficial to Portland and we want to join with others to discover common ground on which we can experience shared success, cultivate a more collaborative, equitable and sustainable approach to increasing housing, business and transportation options throughout the city. We want to engage members of our community with different perspectives and experiences to deepen understanding and respect. And we want to collaborate with city government, organizations and residents to solve problems related to urban living. We didn't just make this up. This is happening across the country and across North America. You'll find GMD groups experiencing success. We can you can find information online. We'd like to share with you one short video that succinctly captures some elements of the approach. Ever wonder why rent is so high? Or why home prices seem to keep rising out of reach? Why is that? One reason is, we don't have enough places to live. Remember musical chairs? When we were kids, you had to be fast. But in the housing market, instead of being fast, you just need to be rich. Here's how it works. Imagine there are two houses and three families playing. The music stops and everybody scrambles for a home. The wealthy family gets the big house. The middle class family gets one too. But there's no house left for the last family. What if the neighborhood added a new house? Let's make it a fancy one. The wealthy family says, Hey, cool, and moves in. The middle class family decides to spread out. And the family with the least money finds a home in their neighborhood. Nobody is out of the game or out of the home. What if we played the same game city wide? You see, our city is really a huge game of musical chairs. And we're all playing. When there aren't enough homes for the people who live and work here, everybody has to compete for what's available. And the rents go up and up until people are priced out of the city and have to drive farther and farther to get to work. To fix it, we need more homes. Let's see what happens if we add more cottages and condos. Let's swap these old warehouses for something more comfortable. How about a mother in law apartment? What if our communities add enough homes of all shapes and sizes for all our neighbors? Ah, that's better. More homes means more of us can stay and thrive in the city we love. And that's great. Want to do more? Visit sightline.org slash more homes. So I have to start with a couple critiques of that that video. It successfully did some things. But first, in my book, that bigger home for the wealthy family, that should be a multi unit home for maybe a middle class family and lower income family. Second, sometimes economics break down. And if there's a seemingly endless supply of wealthier people buying into Portland, that becomes a problem. We recognize that this is a complicated issue. And to introduce it in a 90 minute forum, let alone in a two minute cartoon, doesn't really do it justice. But we also know that working together, we can overcome these challenges. This is not an academic exercise tonight. This is a call to action for everyone here and for the rest of the city. On that note, I'd like to introduce our guest speaker. Eric Kroenberg is with us tonight. Eric is a zoning whisperer. He specializes in examining and demystifying zoning ordinances to find ways to make great projects possible. And help others navigate through the zoning swamp. His work with Kroenberg wall, the incremental Development Alliance, the Congress for new urbanism and other organizations has solidified his stance as an advocate for livable communities. Please give there a warm welcome. Thank you, Marcus. Thank you all for being here tonight. We're going to talk through what I'm calling the EMB tool kit. Some ideas to talk about policy and how different forms of housing and transportation play together to work towards a better Portland. We're a architecture and urban development, urban design and development firm. So we tackle problems from both the built environment, transportation, urban planning, street design, and we also do our own development out of Atlanta, which means basically that we have to understand math. We'll come back to math. It's a really important component of this stuff when we talk about how we solve problems because that is an unavoidable reality of dealing with housing in particular. We tend to get asked to deal with problems that, you know, neighborhood scales and city scales, you know, both with urban infill policy and a lot of adapters we use for taking underutilized places and trying to make them better. And we work with a lot of nonprofit partners, in particular Georgia Conservancy, they're a sustainable growth nonprofit Atlanta or Atlanta, but for all of Georgia. Informal Development Alliance helps train small developers and communities to get the kind of quality infill housing they're looking for. You know, the idea is that, you know, people aren't coming to save you. You need to do this on your own. We teach that with them. But then we also work with groups like Land-Bike Coalition. They're a tenant of ours and we really care deeply about mobility options to help solve some of our housing challenges. You'll see how that stitches together later. And when we talk about trying to find ways to solve problems, we strongly believe that walkable areas with existing infrastructure are the easiest targets for quick and cost effective ways to prevent inclusive communities. And just before I go on, what I mean by that existing infrastructure, that isn't just sewers and pipes in the ground. That's curbs and sidewalks and street trees and paving and on street parking, all the stuff in communities. If you've got to build that new, there's not going to be any money left for quality housing. So where we have these resources, we need to leverage them to the fullest extent. These are the places for inclusive communities. These are the places to best leverage housing choice, also affordability and economic sustainability. If you want to complete community, let's target our lowest-hand fruit to do the best with the most that we have. And then if you're going to make this stuff work, I'll be talking about parking, I promise you. We also need to talk about mobility options, right? How can you effectively get around in your community in a car-optional fashion that's not necessarily car-free, but having choices to get around for some of your trips that don't automatically require a car? And so, who are we collectively in America? From a demographic standpoint, at this point today, nearly 75% of households are singles living alone, couples with no kids and roommates. That's one to two person households, right? We are not a 3.5, 4.5 person for household society anymore. This is really, really important. We talk about the kind of housing we need to solve problems in our cities and towns and neighborhoods. Projected by 2030, 83% of households will have no children, right? I know in Maine, with your demographics, you're kind of on the bleeding edge of a lot of these aging issues to be kind. So you guys, maybe they're already, but the rest of America will be catching up to you shortly. As we talked also earlier, it's really depending on your place 5% to 10% of our land areas walkable neighborhoods or potentially walkable neighborhoods. The rest of it is, you know, challenging suburban context. We deal with suburban from time to time, but suburban is really hard to fix when you've got big six-lane roads. We tend to focus our efforts towards easiest to do the right things in the right places. And what we also like to say is, it's not as much a shortage of walkable neighborhoods, though, even though there's not that much of them. It's a shortage of housing in these places. That's how we approach these things. And then the bottom line, as we talk about, you know, our demographics, our housing stock is not nearly as diverse as we are as the people. What's about 65%, 66% of housing, all housing in America is detached single-family housing, three to four bedrooms plus, usually in a garage-only location. That's not the kind of house we need in society as we age and move forward. And we need more housing, we need more housing types. And as we get to talk about these issues, you know, I've been to Portland several times, this is an amazing, beautiful city. You know, I'm from Atlanta, and you're building stock on a pencil is stunning, right? And you guys have such a rich diversity of housing types. It's mind-blowing and it's great to be here. And I wasn't sure to bring this in, but when Marcus explained that there's still a lot of Portland that is single-family zoned, this is how we typically talk about this stuff. I hate single-family zoning, I'm going to be outright honest with you guys. It causes a lot of harm. I'm going to touch on that a little bit tonight to help reframe how you think about this stuff. One of the challenges of single-family zoning is it's low density. It requires a lot of land for one unit of housing. That's a lot of curb, gutter, streets, and it's not producing typically the tax revenue to provide to service the infrastructure or the services needed. As much as you think your property taxes are high, single-family zoning tends not to pay its share for a city. All these issues I just hit, these are the challenges with it. But even if you have a more dense single-family development pattern, this is to scale. These are typically 50 by 150 lots. This is a typical in-town Atlanta neighborhood, but very typical for the Eastern Sea Board of America. It's low variety. You've got a great selection of single-family homes, ranging from 2,300 to 3,500 square feet, right? Three bedrooms to six bedroom homes, those are your choices. That is not the kind of housing choice we need to address our needs in the society today. So it's low choice, low diversity, and it's expensive. And because of its limitations, it will naturally be more expensive as a product. Now, when you talk about low variety, you can take a look at a range of folks in the community. You know, we're really looking for housing, a young millennial trying to buy a home, a commercially old man that just wants to have no neighbors and have a big house, you know, a baby boomer in the downside, you know, perhaps a divorced dad with some kids. So the single-family neighborhood, maybe the divorced dad can afford it in the services him and the promotion, get some big house by himself and no neighbors to talk to. But everybody else is left out. If you want to bring in housing for more diverse people, we need more diverse housing types. And when we talk about single-family, I'm not saying put towers next to your neighbor. I'm saying be thoughtful and integrate. You start to look at, you know, duplex to family right here, which you guys have a lot of. We start to look at two, this is why having two ADUs is a really important option for neighborhoods. You know, you guys are, you know, last night's got the pleasure of going to the recode meeting. They're talking maybe one ADU a lot. This is why this matters. This is an example of an attached ADU to a house in a detached. These are how you start to address housing needs in our society through housing choice. When I say housing choice, I mean a variety of housing types and a variety of sizes, right? This is how you can do this in a non-scary, compatible way to single family homes. In Atlanta, we have a lot of angst at tear downs and McMansions coming in. What we like to explain to people if you want to fight McMansions, putting an ADU is a really effective strategy because it becomes too economically robust as a property to tear both those units down. So if you want to protect the fabric of your neighborhood, ADUs are actually a great way to both keep you in place to respect or resist property tax increases, provide housing for residents, and prevent tear downs. So pick your thing that you want to fight on. That's how more housing helps solve a lot of those issues. I said, okay, so if this seems pretty awesome and pretty obvious, why are more cities doing it? Like what are the roadblocks, you know, humans? But in addition to humans being involved, we tend to have a silo mentality, right, both as advocates but also city departments, right? Everybody's in their own little silo worried about their own issues, not understanding how these things interact and interweaves. We had a great series of workshops with BuildMain to do some system mapping over the built environment for the entire state of Maine. What we were trying to do is to map out all the things we could think of that actually affect the built environment. And so this is a quick summation from this group of all these different components that get interrelated as to how our built environment works. Transportation highway funding all the way around. The point of this is there are a lot of different pieces that affect outcomes for places. And status quo, you know, I was going to put an Indian but that was too mean, status quo keeps everything kind of siloed and separated and people don't have a sense of how to work together to flag the solutions. So my, I thought Marco's diagram was great with the circle. My diagram was also to pull this stuff together to show how these pieces interrelate and intersect to try to get some commonality to solve problems. We also jumped in our office it's a great little metaphor for the benefits of density versus suburban sprawl. Spread out together. Better place. But we also, as I let in, you know, places with existing infrastructure where we like to focus on, the where we do this stuff really matters. We're not trying to do this stuff everywhere. And when we talk about existing infrastructure near downtown or in neighborhood center, please understand that when I say it's not just your downtown, this is at the scale of a neighborhood. So you may have a little commercial there that's the heart of your place. You want to support those small businesses. The thing they need the most are residents living close by to support them. These are the places to concentrate efforts. We love downtown to neighborhood centers. They are usually very economically prosperous for a city. They provide often time location for small businesses. Smaller buildings provide smaller tenants and lower rents in the perfect world. And they allow for incremental change over time. You know, we're not a big fan of the tear down on the 40 story tower. We love the shopfronts. It's a much more fine-grained, interesting place to live and support. Again, they use great with land efficiency, great with infrastructure. They should be the heart of your community. And then when you compare to suburbia with the lower tax values and transportation challenges, this is a money suck for our society that we're dealing with. This is a really hard problem to solve. We like to focus on what we can do with lower hanging fruit. That's why we like downtown adjacent housing. And when we talk about this stuff, we like to say, you know, downtown adjacent does is a quarter mile or a half mile of goods and services or job centers or transit. This is proximity. This is where to focus effort as a first step of lowest hanging fruit. And I also want to make the comment that I walked with Kara Wilbur from her house over here in about 20 minutes across town from West End. Again, we're on Peninsula, but a 20 minute walk across your town is very pleasant and very reasonable. It was all downhill too, so it's going to be worse going back. I mean, getting here is awesome. So pointing that out. You guys have a very walkable city until like a month from now. Right? So we'll see. But also when you think about what makes for a quality neighborhood, you know, it's not just housing, it's a range of other uses. And traditionally suburban based zoning was designed to separate all these uses away from each other, right? Schools over here shopping over there, housing over there, and there's no interacting, right? There's no corner store. There's no walking down to the pub to get a beer and walk home. So understanding that we need diversity of uses to have a complete community is part of this and it allows for if you have housing intermixed with us, this is where that car optional living comes from. I'm not saying car free. You may have to drive to work because of employment, but you can do a lot of your trips in your neighborhood on foot. That is a tremendous benefit to local economy, local businesses and vehicle reuse reduction. This is a quick map we did is another way to show that this is in New Orleans, been a lot of affordable housing. This is Seventh Ward and Tremay as a snapshot. We were just mapping all the goods and services that exist in this traditional neighborhood. And all the red dots were affordable housing units we did. And we were blown away at the outcome of how much commercial integrating these communities. It's kind of obvious that when you map it like, oh, I see a lot of stuff like at least in the Peninsula of Portland where I've been, you guys got a lot of great commercial little corner nose that need more housing and more support. And at the end of the day, if you want to have nice stuff in your city, if you want to have more workforce housing, more affordable housing, you're going to have to come to terms with how parking is the devil, right? Unfortunately, this is the problem. And it's heroin and we've got to get you guys at least on the methadone as an approach. This is actually a great little diagram we pulled the other day from the other Portland on the other coast. This is from Sightline Institute as well. The research is phenomenal. They ran through a bunch of development studies for a typical lot in downtown adjacent neighborhood and realizing the current regulations of one parking space required per unit. What's the big deal? They found out from development standpoint building 10 town homes for $730,000. There was a market for that and that was the most profitable outcome for the developer, right? Path of lease resistance guaranteed buyers market. That's what the developer is going to do. And they ran through a range of scenarios to see what other choices could happen and said what happens if there's no parking required at all or provided? What is the outcome? This with 32 units of housing for $280,000 a piece was more profitable for the developer. Their comment was we regularly required this. This is what we want. We make this functionally illegal with our parking requirements. Now, this isn't to say that every developer is going to rush out and build this. There's financial requirements, all kinds of other stuff. But why are we legislating this and then complaining while we know that this is an outcome? This is how parking requirements directly plays into our ability to not provide sustainable housing. I've said for years in Atlanta, people complain rightly so at how ugly our five storey apartment buildings are that go up. I mean, I've seen it in Denver and Portland. They're ugly as in the new construction. But when you have to build a $5 million parking deck and put another couple hundred grand for stormwater underground and build some sidewalks, there is literally no money left for the building. And when you look at how much rent has to cover the cost of the parking infrastructure for the deck and otherwise, that's why their rents are so high. And also that deck that you built, you could have built another 50 or 60 units on. So if you want nice things, this is the best quick sketch of illustration I've seen as to how parking kills it for us. Another great thing for scale is understanding how parking is to hit the message home if you haven't got it from me yet. This is a 650 square foot apartment. That's two parking spaces. Like what provides more economic value to your city? What provides more benefit to your place? And again, we mandate legally require free, affordable housing for cars in America. And then we wonder why you can't have affordable housing for people. It's not that complicated, right? And then also just for a quick hit as to why I hate zoning. It's probably the best way to say it. It's helpful to have a really great understanding of zoning in like three slides. Pre-World War II, which a lot of downtime Portland, you're pulling on the pencil, you guys have the stuff for your great housing stuff, you know, great walkable downtown. It was doing really great. After World War II, you know, the federal government thought it'd be great to have a bunch of white folks out in the suburbs that give them super cheap FHA loans and making it illegal for anybody black or brown to move out there. And so that was also the cheapest way to buy a house if you're coming back from the war and trying to start a family. So everybody moved out there as they were building the highways. So Suburbia is taking, you know, but taking names economically in the 60s and 70s and cities like, oh my God, we're getting killed economically. We should try some of the economic development zoning just to see what happens. So suburban zoning requires every site to have its own parking. It's an open space. It's on stormwater. And cities brought suburban zoning to their towns. You know, y'all was at 68 or 69 is when Portland brought theirs. Atlanta, we really re-upped there as an 81. You look at Baltimore, Memphis, you pick a major city right after civil rights legislation, not a coincidence. Most towns redid their zoning to become suburban base. And so what happens is you adopt that from the 70s and 80s and this is what you get. Right. How many towns you see that are hollowed out with parking lots because we have all these parking requirements to make it work. Our cities historically did not have parking requirements. Some of our best love parts of our towns are built in the 1920s before auto parking was required. This is what we get. And you don't want to walk there and you want to drive there. You want more parking lots. I put this out there because we had great traction with the city last night on ADUs. They seem to get that. The political will to reduce parking is very weak right now. Elected officials, potential elected officials need to hear from you about this issue in particular. Because I've got so many parking spots. I'm trying to get fast. Again, to help you understand what a zoning parking regulation looks like, most places in America require one parking space for every 300 square feet of office. That's what this is. And then it gets more intense for retail, restaurant, and bar. So typical parking regulations require that a one-story office needs half of this land mass to be parked in the required zoning. Right. Any other more intense it gets more than that. You wonder why our downtowns are hollowed out. This is what parking does. It's a city, some standard zoning regulations. Understand, too, these are one-story buildings, right? You go two or three storey to get much, much worse. And then for folks that don't know where parking ratios came from, they came from the International Transportation Engineering Society in the 60s. They went and measured the parking loss and tried to get some data because nobody had data. And they wanted to make sure the data was really pure so there's no possibility of biking or walking or taking a bus there. Subverting location is really extreme. They published this data and they said, this is the most these uses should ever need to provide under any circumstances. Seriously, right on. Somebody has data. Let's think those are the minimums, right? They took the maximums. They could have clocked the data gathering standpoint. You see, maybe those are the minimums every use could possibly need would have to provide. So there's a guarantee that nobody would call a council person to complain, explain parking streets in front of their house. Like, that's how zoning works. So in February of this year, I.T.E., the group that gave us the start-off requirements officially put out a statement that said every city America should eliminate their parking requirements. We're really sorry we screwed up America. This is the right thing to do. A little late, but at least they're trying to complain. And so also though, when we talk about providing more affordable housing and the challenges of parking and making that near impossible, we also respect and understand that mobility options really matter, right? Bust-alignancy groups should really be tied in with parking reductions in affordable housing. And I also want to point out that you have a walkable city and when I say mobility, I am very specifically not saying transit, right? Transit is awesome. Like, when it works, not every city has a great transit system, but every city or town can have a mobility system that's appropriate for them. That is creating safe sidewalks to walk on, right? That is street, trees, for shade. I believe that Ontario Park is a form of mobility to store cars and provide better options for a private land. Trails matter too, right? Pushing this kind of stuff to make a city much more livable as you identify, it should be a requirement, not an afterthought. Again, sidewalks matter. Sidewalk assessments to figure out where you have problems. This ties into providing affordable housing and justifying less parking. They're not disparate issues. Bike lanes tremendously matter. Like, I'm in land, I don't have a bike in the snow, but I know you guys haven't figured out, but they matter a lot, right? And supporting that really, really does matter. And it can be transformational, both for small business and for people safely getting around town. I don't have a car. My wife does. I bike every day, but I do not bike in big urban roads, neighborhood streets. I want protected infrastructure. I've got two young dollars. I want to bike with them. I look for infrastructure where we can bike together, right? That's the kind of stuff I'm looking for. I don't need spandex going 30 miles an hour down at an arterial parking. And we cannot stress enough how important on-street parking is. It is the most effective way to store cars. Atlanta, we just passed a policy, a lot of really good parking reforms. One of which was to say that any on-street parking directly adjacent to your property can count towards your parking requirements. Not only is that basic, simple, and logical, it also puts property owners incentivized to try to create more on-street parking, which creates a safer environment for pedestrians because the car shields pedestrians can traffic, right? It's a virtuous cycle that you can start to form with good policy. Street trees matter a ton, right? Again, tottering Atlanta, but shade and trees are a critical component of a natural element in any kind of public environment. These are non-trivial things to have a dignified place to live for everybody. I could go for hours, but I'm gonna stop to turn the panel. But I was trying to try to get a good way to wrap it up, and we talk about policy reforms. We've been talking with a lot of groups lately that you can get the policy right, and you can tweak some parking ratios here. You can do some density bonuses there, but all too often, somebody builds something that's legally conforming to the new rules, and a neighborhood group gets really upset, right? And they get really upset, and they vote out all the folks that voted for the stuff, and they roll back the laws, and you start over with another 10-year cycle. This is a common thing for cities across America. What we've been talking about internally is the way you resist that is you need to have a really great story and a really great narrative for your place. And I would contend that you guys have done a lot of great work with Portland 2030. You've set a lot of high-level vision goals right of what you wanna be as a city. It's easier to set up the vision goals than to actually get the policy to support those visions, but pushing elected officials, pushing civic leaders to say how do these decisions affect Portland 2030? Are they meeting our goals? Are they working across purposes? That's as good of a story as you're gonna get, right? So I would say leverage 2030, work with the Marcos and then Karen and then the Yembees, they're not the Yembees, the Yembees to try to push this stuff. But you've got a narrative, you've got a collective vision for your city, embrace it. It may not be perfect, it may be tweaking, but you have something to latch onto, and you're going through a recode right now, right? The success of that recode will be directly tied to the feedback that elected officials get, may all candidates and otherwise, because we tend to find that every now and then you find really brave elected officials, but generally they're just gonna respond to how their constituents push them, right? They don't wanna get too far ahead of their elected. And so they need to hear from you to know that you'll support them and you'll work with advocacy groups to help them make the right decisions around a recode and the Portland 2030 goals. So I'd like to introduce our panel. We have Mary Ellen Lindemann, co-owner of Coffee by Design and founding member of Portland by Local. LaRu Madoko, program director for Democracy Maine and the Maine Immigrant Housing Community Coalition, sorry, Ron Gann, Portland property owner and developer, and Colin Ryan, who's the executive director of Community Housing of Maine, an affordable housing development agency. Mary Ellen, if we could start with you. If you could just tell folks a little bit about yourself, your role in the community and the perspective you bring to the housing issue. You don't mind, I'd like to read something. I've had a very wild past couple of weeks. I've been drowning, trying to keep my head above water and desperately holding on to my apartment in a world where the cost of living far exceeds what I, as a middle-aged human, working full-time in a city I love, could handle. It's sad, really. I feel defeated, disappointed that at this point in my life, I still can't support myself. It's crushing. But I know it's not me. The economy in Portland is effed. We all know this. I'm so thankful to be surrounded by amazing people who love me and I'm so lucky. It takes a village, and though it's dwindling, I'm so glad I still have that here. This is my tiny new pad. It's got doors made for giants in years worth of good vibes. I can settle into this. This will be my new home. This was a post on Facebook that my office manager put online. I am a proud small business owner. I have amazing people who work for me and I'm trying very hard to be a socially responsible business. I pay what I feel is an affordable living. I have a very rich benefits package. I have very loyal people and I can't keep them here because I have a 40-year-old person who's been with me for years and she can't afford to live here. She can't afford to have a place she calls home. I'm here tonight because we have hardworking people and we have apartments, but they're not affordable and what is being built, none of us can afford. I myself have had to move off the peninsula because I can't afford to live on the peninsula. So I'm here tonight as a business owner. I'm also vice chair of the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center and I'm co-founder of Portland by Local and I want to keep local business here, which means keeping our local people here too. So I'm here to hear ideas, share what I'm experiencing and say help me to keep my business here and to keep my staff happy, healthy, and a walkable city, which we all love. Mary Ellen, if you had a question to pose to Eric or you wanted to pick his brain, what would that be? You were in Bayside today. We have an amazing local economy there that's growing. What would your vision be for East Bayside? So luckily Karen and I were talking about this at lunch. One of the things that we've been discussing is how certain uses are prohibited in certain places as an industrial zoning residential is not allowed. That's not uncommon, but that doesn't make it right. But what we talked about is if you were to allow multifamily into your Bayside district, all the small actual funky warehouses could be gone in a shot, right? Like apartments could spring up and while they provide some housing into the right housing is affordable and it's crushing for the critical incubator small business funky spaces that startups and the local need to survive. So what we talked about is as an example of a policy and this is kind of tricky is let residential be added but only to raw land, right? Not to existing buildings, right? It could only be existing buildings that stay, eliminate parking requirements like housing be added to access land and sites. If there's a vacant site that's been vacant for a certain amount of time, maybe housing goes there. But it's a really tricky balance of you could open the floodgates to new housing and have really unintended consequences to small business. But when you have underutilized resources like some of the land of that district and you really start for housing that's an example of a place to make that more of a complete community, right? Because if there's no housing there there's no hope of living and working or walking and how do you make that housing affordable you prohibit parking for it, right? Like you make it work. That's one way to try to make your neighborhood I'd say inclusionary and hopefully more affordable for folks to stay there. Thank you. Colin, if you could please introduce explain your role in the community and the perspective you bring to the housing issue. Sure, thank you. Colin Ryan. I work with community housing in Maine. We're actually really small nonprofit but we focus on housing, homeless and special needs populations and including them in affordable housing throughout the whole state. And then we do a lot of advocacy to make sure that policies change so that everybody can be part of the community. And just to sort of elaborate on that I think that a community is really enriched by having all of its participants be able to be included. And when I look at Portland and I see the level of homelessness that is happening here and it's happening elsewhere across the state in the country I think there is a way for us to fix this and it's going to come from doing the type of things that Eric was talking about. I wanted to describe to you that we have a housing development here in Portland and it cost a great deal of money to do simply because we were forced to add a parking garage underneath it. I walk through that building with regularity and I find that parking lot to be sitting empty almost all the time. It was a waste of money, it was a waste of energy and it took away from our ability to create housing for people who desperately needed it. And on top of that we're facing issues that are beyond Portland, this mindset that housing should cost a certain amount of money and we had a treasurer in the state who really came up with a one liner that's housing should cost this much or else somebody should be able to build a house out in the country somewhere. And it misses the point because what makes Portland livable is when you can walk to things. And when somebody can go, if somebody builds a house out in the country somewhere or a suburban area, they must now get themselves and their family back and forth to all the services and everything that they need to go to school and everything else. And they need to keep up with that house. They need to take care of the roof. They need to take care of the heating system. They need to take care of the snow removal, the yard, all their pairs, everything that goes on in that house has to be factored in. When you have a multi-family house, somebody simply needs to come up with rent. That's what makes the difference and we should be comparing things in terms of the cost per square foot as opposed to a cost per unit which drives families out of housing. And Colin, what's a question you would pose to Eric then? What can you do with powers to be such as state housing finance agency that's still locked into rules that are talking about affordable housing having to fit within cost caps which don't fit for Portland? It's a one-size-fits-all mentality for all of Maine and it boxes out all kinds of communities. Man, that was an easy question, sir. That was the first one. I thought about that one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, when you look at the estate, I think that one of the, I'm gonna answer indirectly. One of the challenges that we see in Atlanta and a lot of places that really struggle with budgets which is like really every city in America is that they really hope that they expect to not be able to solve their problems on their own and that's gonna take federal or state subsidy to really deal with the problems facing them. And we've dug ourselves a budget hole for a lot of reasons. I mean, suburban development's part of it but there's a lot of things going on. And I think if we were to say, how are we gonna save ourselves as a city? How are we gonna try to address this problem and not depend on the state and come up with a, if we're not hoping that they're gonna change their rules because they're probably not in our lifetimes, what are we gonna do to solve this problem on our own locally? The only other comment I'd say that the most interesting thing on the homeless side of things that I've heard was about a year and a half ago on NPR, it was a state senator from Hawaii talking about working really hard. It didn't really pass but trying to get homelessness diagnosed as a medical condition or providing housing was an acceptable treatment. Getting back to actually providing housing for homeless individuals is actually much more cost effective than all the services provided. So trying to rethink how we approach these things is part of it. Thank you. And Ladoo, if you wanna introduce yourself please. Yes, my name is Ladoo Lodoka and I work for Democracy Main but I also lead the Immigrant Housing Coalition. And I'm actually excited to see this turn out because I've been going around town doing presentation about affordability in Portland and some of you probably have seen me or attended one of my presentations. And the reason is for us especially the new manors, the challenge is we are starting at the bottom in terms of the income and living in Portland, the other thing that you can add on the top of that is we have bigger families. As compared to the numbers that you're giving earlier, our families are five to 10 people in their family. And so if there's only two people who are earning income in that family and the area immediate income is $65,702 that make it very difficult to be able to live in Portland. And that is the challenges that face all of us working class people in Portland. How can we have a community that everybody who work here should be able to live here? So that is the challenge that I'm glad that everybody is getting involved so that that problem will be addressed so that we don't have to move out of Portland and be able to work in live here. So my question for Eric is, I'm glad that on your presentation you basically diversity of housing is one way to tackle the problem. Recently, how can we maintain the stock of housing that we have with all its diversity and add on the top of that so that we will be able to have options for many different people who are just starting out, students, all option. The reason I'm bringing that question up is because recently, Bayside Village exchange ownership and in the process, the utility or repurposing of the building become an issue for people like me who advocate for more housing in Portland because the repurposing means is basically cutting it down to half of what is housing right now. So how can we maintain the stock of housing with all its diversity and add more into it? So I like to kind of provoke and challenge thoughts. One of the things that we talk about in this, I think we'll get to some of it is to focus on understanding that diversity of housing is critical and important for a healthy community. Like that just has a point, right? And we need to be looking intentionally from a land use policy standpoint how to do more of that. One of the other things that we're looking at in Atlanta and other cities, much more like Boston, DC and San Francisco is looking at co-living as a critical solution to how things are going. And for those, co-living is a really sexy way to say somewhere between a rooming house or boarding house but it takes on a lot, it can be done a lot better than the 10 minutes that you think of in New York and historically, but you take a larger house, you have one kitchen, you have shared, you have master suites, you can accommodate eight to 12 people. We were talking last night, apparently Portland has a very flexible definition of a household or family which is up to 16 unrelated people which is quite a number of people. It looks like the city is thinking about cutting that down to only eight people. But even eight unrelated allows for an interesting co-living model. Now when you talk about larger families that's not necessarily the best, it's a solution, right? There's a lot of solutions needed but when you talk about a larger family, that's eight to 10 people, a traditional single family house with four bedrooms may be a very reasonable housing type for that location matters, right? How do you provide that affordably? There are challenges in that but I think the bigger point is to constantly be thinking of housing diversity as a benefit and understanding how our zoning works will constrain that and limit that. One of the other benefits of a co-living situation is that there's some bigger groups doing stuff in the land, they're doing five bedroom co-living units. Basically it's kind of a roommate plan situation but because it's only one unit, it only requires one unit of parking. So there are ways to bend the housing format to deal with poorly written zoning laws around parking. Again, understanding that sometimes you have to work around the walls to get to a solution as part of the understanding and co-living does sound a lot better than boarding house so we like the sexier word. Thank you. Ron, my name is Ronald Gann. I'm a developer here in Portland. It's dangerous to give me a microphone. The people who are out here know that I might not put it down. It's all about narratives. We're gonna have a lot of plans and there's gonna be a lot of things posted up on the board and we're all gonna get really excited here. But the facts are is that downtown, they don't really have the desire to increase housing here. They're doing everything they can to create exclusionary zoning. And I thought about what I wanted to say here tonight and I really wanted to put out a positive message but I'm the reality guy on this panel. And the fact is if you think about this, despite how bad our zoning currently is, there are people contemplating about laying a historic district up on the hill on top of an already bad zone. We will never even be able to go back and fix it because we will be locked into this historic zone. So the dysfunctionality and these continual narratives, we need a reset button. I don't really care who is the problem or where the problem comes from. The bottom line is that we need 1,000 units of all kinds of housing, 1,000 units. And Eric, I love your proposal but our issues are far beyond the peninsula now. We're not gonna put any more multifamily housing on the peninsula in any great numbers. And it is folly for us to think that the people doing the recode are somehow going to come up with a way that all the people who are in the other our zones are going to be able to live with multifamily housing in their neighborhoods. And all you have to do is think about all the hoopty-doo that people out in Stroudwater gave for the redevelopment of the farm. Imagine going into one of their streets and seeing a 10,000 square foot piece of land and knowing you can't build six units on it. So what's the solution? The solution is, A, we need more land. And that land lies in our industrial zones. That's the key to this whole thing. We need more land, whether it's down by an East Bay side or where we're working out in the Riverside corridor. That's where all the land is. There's over two million square feet of underutilized land along the Riverside corridor. That is enough to build more than a thousand units without adversely affecting the commercial people out there, without overburdening the land and without adversely affecting our neighbors. Now that's the starting point. We need more land. And the question is, why is it that downtown, they are so resistant to this idea? Because they can't lose any political will by being in favor of repurposing this industrial land. I don't have a question, Eric. I mean, honestly. So one thing I would say is thoughtful repurposing industrial land I think is important. Again, thoughtful, exactly, that's nuance, there's appropriate ways to do that, but generally I'm in favor of building on industrial land with housing. But I will say that anybody who thinks that they have the silver-bowl solution to these problems is missing the point, right? It's in everything and the kitchen sink to try to solve these problems. Rebuilding industrial land is a critical component of this. Co-housing is a critical component of this. ADUs are a small piece that really helps change mindsets of multiple unit housing. That matters, it all matters, right? And anybody that says they got the one thing, that's an important piece of the puzzle, but it takes all of it. So just keep that in mind. And we always like to build housing where it's close to other amenity. It's challenging to, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't build out in these other areas. But if amenity isn't present by grocery and schools and walking, either you got to build all that stuff or it gets harder and more expensive, right? It's harder to be car optional and car light in those places, which means that you're stuck building the parking infrastructure, which inherently raises the cost of housing. That's not to say land can't be subsidized and the city can't put in money and there are other ways to solve these problems. But again, it's everything and the kitchen sink approach to this. I told you if you gave me this mic, I wouldn't put it away. One of the things and anybody who's worked in real estate here in Portland knows what I'm about to say. The things we see in other cities and other towns and other states, for whatever reason, don't really work exactly the same way here. They don't work exactly the same way here. We have already tried the in-town, the walkability. We all know you try to put up a three-flat on Munjoy Hill, you'll have 10 people screaming. It's just, we're just sort of past that part of it. And so what I'm proposing is to look at a new area for the future of Portland. That's my proposal, is that this area along the Riverside corridor with all this land will be the walkable area. We already have the infrastructure built in. We have a Haniferts, we have a CVS, we have a bus stop right at the corner of Forest and Riverside. So to put this in a easy to understand perspective across the street, the city owns 13 acres of land adjacent to the trail system. There's 100 units that can be done right now. The lowest hanging fruit, we can build 100 units there without overburdening the land. And now you have workforce housing and senior housing right across from a grocery store, grocery's a drug store and a bus stop. So I understand that the model is to bring everybody into the city, but the land is too expensive now and we don't have enough of it. But they're members of the panel. Our issue though is the cost in Portland for construction. Because I know those of us who actually have wanted to build onto our properties to add worker housing, once we actually costed it out and found out the cost of construction, we had to end our projects there. Or in the rezoning issues, it's a very interesting zone there in the space side. You have to produce what you manufacture in order to have a retail operation and the square footage of your retail has to relate to your building size. And so trying to come up with how can we actually have live workspace within our Diamond Street property for example, the cost to rezone and have it divide in the way they want it and go through the permitting of it, it's no longer affordable. Why is that if it's needed space? I think that's both of these points are great examples of why we don't have nice things, right? Zoning is packed full of mostly good intentions and a lot of exclusionary tendencies to boot and it's over complicated and I like to joke that regulators love regulations as a security blanket and they just keep adding on top and adding on top and adding on top. And you can, I would point out it's hard enough to build in most places in America and with your main labor force being even less than other places, you're right, it is so hard to get these things done. There's no reason to have zoning laws that make it that much harder, right? And so some of this gets back to, and I also respect that it's so hard in most municipalities to do the right thing and this is where it takes a group like this to really put pressure on political leaders to say, look, this is enough is enough, right? We've got to have a simplified process. A lot of this stuff has to be done as of right. We've got to find a way that neighborhood groups can't stop what we say meets a city goal and a city objective and we've got to do it in a way that provides political cover so city council doesn't get voted out if they support something rational, right? So part of it is not just the zoning but it's also an approval process that doesn't make every city council member stick their neck out for every little project. So that's also a system change component of this but let's start with getting rid of a lot of these unnecessary zoning laws that don't provide benefit to anybody. Ma, do you wanna speak? Land in Portland is very expensive. An acre of land is somewhere between $200,000 to $250,000 and the zoning is an issue. In mass, they have a law that has been in the book for so long, it's called 40B and Connecticut has copied that law, it's also applied in Connecticut and what it does is basically it has an allocation for each municipality to have affordable housing within that municipality. So if a municipality do not meet their orders, the developer who is going to develop affordable housing within that municipality can bypass the rules, the local rules and they will be able to build those affordable housing so that they will come on market much faster. How can we do something like that here in Maine or in Portland so that we don't have to worry about if you are a politician losing your position in the next election because it's the state law that allows that to happen to speed up housing coming to market. So some of this from a NIMBY response perspective is as much as we like ground up solutions that are local and community based, no one community is really willing to meet city goals. Like they always feel like city objectives for housing otherwise would be handled one neighborhood over or two blocks over, right? It's never appropriate at this site. It should always be a little bit further away which leads to a need for some kind of top-down solutions to these problems. Like we're dealing with this in Atlanta right now for these exact same reasons for our facing our own housing challenges and we're helping the city try to craft a path from a performance standpoint, right? If you provide a project that provides the workforce housing and this is near transit meets a series of other very modest objectives, you get to bypass the zoning review board. The NIMBYs don't have a chance to slay you or still work with legal to see how that works because it's the same kind of question of you want a law like that, you know that's taking away local control, which is what it is that takes a large advocacy group to move the needle. And, you know, and I'm still getting a handle on main state politics, but I understand you guys obviously, you know, Portland and Mabliss and then everybody else. And so laws like that I would recommend being crafted in a way that apply to municipalities over a certain size, right? You're over 50,000 or 60,000 people pick a number so that this can be a state law that only impacts like a very narrow ban of people. So yeah, so 21, well, yes, well that's the point. But again, the point is like don't pick if you want to, you know, have a rural constituency that supports this, don't make them think they're getting undue birds put on them, right? Be careful how you craft these laws to win support across coalitions. And so again, a statewide solution as a state law that only applies to municipalities over 50,000 people might be a very reasonable way to tailor this in acceptable way for the rest of the state. Colin, can you speak a little bit of the challenges you're having with the affordable housing development in Portland? Sure. One of the challenges is that we are trying to compete with a lot of other interests. And we haven't talked about Airbnb and what that does to the markets, but we really have got some opportunities that we miss sometimes here. One of them is that Portland decided that it needed to create more affordable housing. And so folks got together and said, you know, when the school turns over and it's time to repurpose it, let's put out an RFP for some affordable housing developers to come and do this. So two affordable housing developers came and put out bids for this. They made sense, they included some density, having 40-some units in an area where there was a school. In the end, I watched two schools, really rare opportunities, get converted and handed over to a for-profit developer who promised to put in only 16 units. And the complaint was that we couldn't possibly have that many people in our neighborhood. And what we forget is that when that was a vibrant school it had several hundred kids and families coming all the time and it was actually the heart and soul of the neighborhood. So somehow I think we need to change the discussion to talk about what happens when we exclude people and we don't make room for them. And just homelessness is a good example. We see people who have mental illness who are now living outside among us. What we know is that each time we house a person, they do really well in housing. A group of 15 organizations has housed 240 of the longest stares in homelessness. Those folks who when they're outside, when they are out unhoused are not doing well because no one does well without housing. Those same people once in housing with support have had a 93 to 94% success rate in that housing. That's better than a landlord can get just going on Craigslist to find somebody to move in. People do well when they move into housing. They do not do well when they're left out of housing. Communities do well when they allow everyone to be part of them. They do not do well when they exclude people from housing. So yes, in my back room, we change the dialogue. We can't have city counselors that are worried that they're gonna piss off neighbors because they're saying we can't have too many people here or too many people there. We actually need to make room for everybody and share the space and convince our counselors that they have covered because all of us want to have a healthy, vibrant communities inclusive of everyone. And that's how we get there. Great, thank you, Colin. Thank you very much. I know I'd like to take some questions from the audience. You guys have been sitting and listening for a long time and we wanna hear from you. I wanna remind you in advance that if you have comments or ideas, you can write them on pieces of paper and stick them at the stations in the other, the room next door. Or hand them to one of the organizers, one of us with our YINB stickers, or just grab us at the end of the event and let's talk about it. But this time right now is for questions for our speakers or myself to deepen our understanding of the topic tonight. And please raise your hand and I'll come and bring you the mic. My name is Justin Beth. I'm a resident here in Portland, the renter. I've never owned a home. I'm 45 years old. I'm very active in politics here in Portland. I'm with the Portland Greens and the main Green Party and also National District Party. And my question is not one word of gentrification has come up tonight. And we have a lot of people moving to Maine, to Portland, right? We are growing our city, that's great. But what does that cost us here? What does that cost the people that try to work here and live here? They have to move up peninsula. So not one word of gentrification tonight and how do we make it a more inclusive city? And I mean, I love the ideas being presented here tonight and I'm very hopeful that our city council will work with the folks in this room tonight to find these solutions. So thank you. Anyone want to respond? I usually get the gentrification question. We talk about it a good bit and I think most of the time, particularly in Atlanta and the South, there's a forced displacement just from natural growth. I think Portland has a really interesting challenge in that as a really attractive city for outsiders, you're getting so many folks coming from other places. And that's not the norm for a lot of cities in terms of the specific kind of problem you have to deal with. One of the solutions to make your town completely terrible so nobody wants to come here, right? That's not advisable, but that's an answer. And part of the challenge with this is expecting that you're not gonna completely trash your town, people are gonna keep coming, right? And so this is where I'm fully on the supply side of the housing question where we've got to provide more housing to address this. There's no other way to the problem other than ruining your local economy. I'm not for that. So we do a lot of adaptive reuse because we like to target projects that are vacant because there's not displacement that would provide value to neighborhoods. And there's a benefit to infill projects that are both affordable and not destroying existing either housing stock or commercial uses. So when you talk about adding housing in vacant underutilized land in industrial areas, that's, there's some sensibility to that. When we talk about adding housing and not displacing existing housing stock or some sensibility to that, I like to talk about, if you're tearing down a tree in Atlanta to build some housing and the tree contingent gets really mad at us, like we should be obligated to build six or seven units of housing back to provide housing for that tree coming down. If you tear a house down, there should be an obligation to provide eight to 10 units of housing back, right? Flipping on its head, density is a virtue. They should be small. They should be affordable. And if you remove one necessary resource, we should be providing that much more, right? And again, we should be planting more trees. We advocate for that too. But again, if we're gonna impact our land, particularly in our urban cores and the neighborhoods around, we should be providing as much human habitat as we possibly can. That's the only way forward with this stuff. Thank you, Eric. Others from the audience? Mark. My name is Mark Johnson. I live out past Morales Corner, have since 1988. One of the other challenges that Portland has is that we are a regional service and employment center. And as such, there's a lot of external impact on the city by people who come here to work and use those services. And what happens is that the surrounding communities, tax rates oftentimes are much lower. There's a lot of state subsidizing of their infrastructure and whatnot. And in contrast, that with Portland who has to raise taxes to offset the impacts that are imposed by just being a regional service and employment center. I would ask you, in your experience, have you seen examples of the financial burden being redistributed? So that, A, people who move outside of the city pay the cost for their decisions in terms of increased burden on transportation systems, things of that nature. And B, looking at the state perspective of we are a service center. We are helping those who are less vulnerable. So I usually take an approach that I, and I'm having to pass my ball to myself for this, but that like state level politics is a little bit past my brain capacity. And I try not to look for solutions there. But what comes to mind is that when your regional center bed's driving in, and you're burdened with traffic and congestion and then the need to park a lot of vehicles in your city, the most appropriate thing I can think of is the charge for parking, right? Like that, what's a revenue source to bend behavior? All street, non-site, on-street decks, charge more for parking so that if you wanna drive in, you can subsidize the city in that manner, right? Or make it more affordable to live here and not have to drive in for services and goods. Which here is understaffed? Well, and the reason is in a informal poll with my staff this week, they don't want to live outside of Portland but they've been forced out. So, and they have to have a car and they didn't want cars. So to tax them again or charge them again, they already been forced out and now they're gonna be penalized for moving out. Which they didn't want to do. Which is to tell you the pan, right? But you gotta provide the housing here and without providing the housing here is not their tax, right? I would agree with that. But also, what are the revenue sources to redistribute? But it also comes back to, if you're not gonna count on the state to solve your problems and redistribute taxes and wealth and subsidy, what kind of density do you guys get to provide in Portland to provide the housing and you need to provide the tax revenue and you need to be self sufficient? We're gonna add from the, Phil Maine was describing what's going on with surface parking. When you get, if you own a house or something and you get assessed, you get assessed for the land, you get assessed for the improvements above it. Right now, the folks are having an incentive to keep surface parking lot undeveloped through our tax structure. We could change that. And I'm not sure the increase in rent or the property is due to people's moving to Portland because if that is the case, why is that Portland population since 1980 up to 2015, it went up by 4,982. If people are moving here, why is that growth only 4,982 since 1980 up to 2015? Well, it's gonna get rough now, I see. Okay. So the issue is revenue. We all know that it's a revenue. We don't have any money. And we've already gone through this. We couldn't hire the necessary firefighters. We can't bring in an extra planner to work on the zoning. So we have to find revenue but we need to find positive revenue streams. And the city needs to find more positive revenue streams. And the easiest way to do that is to start looking at land that is not generating revenue. The city takes the approach that if they have a piece of land, they're gonna sell it and get the highest price possible. But it's a one-time thing and they end up just paying bills with that money. In the example that I was giving you about the land across from Hanifers, the city can partner with any number of affordable housing developers. There's plenty in this room right now. And with a 100-year land lease, the city gets revenue, revenue, revenue. Constant revenue. Right now, the only way we get revenue is through penalties. The other thing is, is that we cannot lay the burden of this housing thing at the feet of just one industry, the developers. Inclusionary zoning, there's about 1,300 of them in the country. Most of them, they don't work. They work in very vibrant cities if they work at all. But you have to have a lot of housing being built so that you're not getting two or three units a year. We need 1,000 units. So we have to look at land that is not producing revenue. I have a two-acre piece of land in Riverside. I pay $2,500 a year. If I could develop that land and put 22 units on it, I could bring in $125,000 a year. So that's the deal, positive revenue. Then other things can fall into place. So what you're saying is, if I follow, is that we should not sell public property so that we can convert that property into affordable housing and we'll be able to, at least, dent some of the issues that we're facing. Some of that is property, but there's a great opportunity to do a long-term ground lease if you had 100-unit building in Oregon. Go on, would you take the mic? Hold on, sorry. If we had 100-unit property and if we could just generate $50,000 a year, year after year after year, the city can count on that revenue. It makes budgeting much easier. And if they can do that 10 different times, that's not chump change anymore. Then we can take care of some of these other issues that we have, like asylum seekers show up here and we have to have a bake sale. It's embarrassing. These are the things, it's revenue and it's the use of land that is sitting doing nothing. If we start there, all these other ideas will come into play. Thanks, Ron. I want to take a couple more questions from the audience here. Hi, my name is Alyssa. I live at Bayside Village, so this is very interesting to me, the concept of replacing what is lost in housing with the equivalent down the road, because we're losing 400 rooms, 100 units right now with the loss of Bayside Village in our community. So me personally, I have rented a one-bedroom and had four people there at one time and that is completely legal in Portland. The problem is I think a solution in the interim before we can get the equivalent of Bayside Village here again, which may never happen. But is renting a one or two bedroom to more than one or two people and I've lived comfortably that way in the past. But many people in Portland don't want to rent to people renting a one-bedroom for multiple people. Now I think that should be a personal choice. I don't think it should be a judgment call based on what people want in their communities. That would be a solution for many of the immigrants that are looking for housing and many of the working class people, such as myself, that are looking for housing in Portland and can't afford an apartment on their own. So I think that legally we can do it, but the obstacle is getting approval from management companies or personal landlords to be like, yeah, you can live four people in a one or two bedroom or even more. And I think it's possible, but how do you overcome those social judgments that people make and can we implement a law that says you have to abide by the law that more than two people can live in a one bedroom? So some of the stuff gets really hard, right? And we hope to legislate away from prejudices and humans and we do that effectively sometimes and other times it's unintended consequences. I don't really have a good solution to say from a legal standpoint, how do you enforce good behavior at a city level? But I do agree that being more creative with how we use our housing and how we house people in units is a critical component of this. And it's also, as cities get to a breaking point, this becomes more and more necessary as a solution if cities can't get off, get out of the way of providing more housing, right? And most of the time it's helping the cities get out of their own way, right? We were talking earlier about how downtown of the city is trying to roadblock housing. I typically see cities, not intentionally trying to roadblock housing, they just don't know how to get out of the way, right? They can't clear the streets for things to happen, right? And so resetting expectations with neighborhood groups and city officials top to bottom is part of this conversation, right? That's part of what this group is here for, is to say, look, this is reasonable and maybe there's an increase in utility share or rent goes up a little bit for the extra person. There's totally reasonable ways to make that an acceptable solution to have more people living in space. Thank you, Eric. I think we've got time for one more question. Sir? Hi. First of all, I just wanted to agree with you about your parking issue. I think about a group in San Francisco, which I think is a great city. I think Portland could be a great city when you ask people, what makes a great city? No one ever says parking. Thank you. One of the things I'm really interested in is you talk about some of the goals of things like diversity of housing and density and sort of infill. And what I'm really interested in is are there a couple of useful measures that you can sort of boil down on a city-wide or whatever regional basis that says, we track these things. We have an inventory of what our housing is. We, it looks like this. We want it to look like this. How, what is there sort of a data dashboard or things that you can look at to say, yes, we're making progress in the way that we want with our housing? So that was a question that's raised last night in the recode that a neighbor had asked about like, what are the goals for ADU, right? Like, how many are we trying to get to you? What does success look like? Another way to say it is like, what does a healthy patient look like for a successful neighborhood? And honestly, in America, we've been so long departed from having neighborhoods as healthy patients. It can be kind of hard, right? But what I would say is that, you know, you start with the number of housing units as goals, or it was 1,000 units in the next nine to 10 years. I think data tracking is critical to this. And every which way of all the data you can grab. And, you know, the playing department also agreed that they would love to track more data. But, you know, they're trying to keep their heads above water with the recode, but also pointing out, we need to track and measure because what we see with so many of these zoning policies, inclusionary zoning or otherwise, that takes constant refinement, right? Like you have best intentions, you slave and put it into a code, and there's always unintended consequences and roadblocks you never thought. So to have an expectation that you could do this huge lift and fix your zoning, you're good for another 50 years is a myth, right? It can't be that. You know, these are living, breathing documents for cities and changing the expectation that this should be every two to three year process. We should see how we're doing. I don't know the best dashboard. I will say that in terms of projecting interesting data gathered for cities, CNT Center for Neighborhood Technology is a nonprofit of Chicago, CNT.org. They do some phenomenal tracking of data for poverty and mobility and other kinds of outcomes for cities across the nation. That's the best group I know of at a nationwide level, but I would push locally to track as much of this as you can and know that, like, just expect to slog it out every three years, but hopefully not a whole rezone or a zoning rewrite, but, like, keep expecting to tackle stuff on the edge just to make it better. If we could hear, get a round of applause for our panel, it's just the beginning of a conversation that we think needs to be sustained in order to really make a difference in our city. We're gonna be following up with some focused outreach to you folks and to others in the community. We also hope to hold a listening session in early December. You've had a chance to listen to us and to the panelists and we wanna reciprocate, be sure that we hear from you and others in the community as well. There are also some events that are happening in the community that should be highlighted. The University of New England is hosting election zoning December 5th. There's flyers at the front table, and that's a great opportunity to hear about how zoning has been used historically to segregate members of our community. Also, tonight you've heard many references to the city's recode effort. It's in process right now, it's going on, it's moving slowly, but that means there's plenty of opportunities to be engaged and to inform and influence the decisions made there. This is a great place to get involved and DMB hopes to play a role in helping to facilitate community engagement in that process. So you can go to our online resources and we'll be trying to keep you informed of that and really make sure that we can leverage our vision for change there. Before you leave tonight, my quicker go Eric. Before you leave tonight, please on your chairs, there are cards. You can use those to get in touch with us. We wanna know more about you. We also have the sign-in sheet in order to follow up any contact information. We'd also love to know how you wanna get involved. If you have expertise in these issues, we wanna know about that. If you have a special skill that can really help a new fledgling organization get started, we wanna know about that also, how you can help. So we wanna follow up with folks on an individual basis. I mentioned the listening session in early December so we can share perspectives and find common ground where we can work together. I wanna thank everybody that helped make this event possible. The members of the EMB working group. The public works for providing this venue. Portland Media Center for their filming and our sponsor, Benchmark Real Estate. Before you leave, I want you to be sure connect with somebody during the night. We tried to get a lot of different people in the room. Talk to somebody whose perspective is new to you or who has a different experience. This is a time to learn and to set the stage for next steps, collaborating as a community together and get in touch with us, EMB, through our sign-in sheet online with the cards on the table. Thank you all for coming tonight and thanks again for our panelists and our speakers.