Housing is increasingly expensive in east Linn County, and the reason is short supply.
We detailed some of the specifics in a report in our April 25 issue, but anyone who has acquaintances who are renters seeking to move out or up can attest to the problems.
That reason is not complicated. Economists across the ideological spectrum agree on the impact the housing shortage is having on the market.
In a recent discussion of the situation, some Sweet Home planning commissioners expressed reservations about a bill passed by the state legislature last year requiring cities to allow accessory dwelling structures on pretty much every piece of property, increasing density in municipalities across the state.
Oregon is reaping the results of its controversial land-use planning system, created in 1973, which greatly restricts development of land zoned “Exclusive Farm Use.” The purpose is to preserve agricultural land, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But when it precludes geographical expansion of housing – particularly in urban areas, creating homelessness and other issues because people can’t afford to live where they work, that’s a problem.
The solution the legislature has come up with now is to increase density in urban areas. That’s really the only alternative.
Chairman Lance Gatchell stated in a recent Planning Commission meeting that this is really a problem for other Oregon communities. We don’t really have a housing crisis, he said.
The evidence suggests that’s not the case.
Yes, Sweet Home does have quite a lot of buildable land relative to other cities, such as Salem and Portland. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
We know numerous people who have moved westward into those cities because rents were lower. We’ve heard regularly about the high cost of rentals in Sweet Home.
Sweet Home has one of the highest rates of “homeless” students, about 10 percent of our K-12 student population, among larger school districts in the state. The vast majority of those homeless students are considered such because they are stacked in single units with other families.
That’s a housing crisis, if we’re determined that single-family dwellings should house single families, which has been the tradition in our society.
The housing crisis is probably even bigger in Sweet Home than that 10 percent figure. The causes are likely many, but higher levels of poverty seems to be the main culprit.
That means we need housing to be affordable.
Contrary to the fantasies adhered to by legislative leaders, who continually introduce programs engineered to solve pet social problems, politicians cannot simply mandate lower prices. They cannot exempt themselves from economic laws of supply and demand.
We’ve previously pointed that out after, two years ago, legislators and our governor hiked the state’s minimum wage to the highest rate in the nation.
Though the results of that may not have hit home yet, we already know what is happening: Employers will have to find ways to cut jobs (costs) and prices for customers will rise. They already have.
Studies have found that increasing the minimum wage results in decreases in employment among teenagers and young adults, cutbacks in raises, cutbacks in hours worked, cuts in on-the-job training and other benefits (free or discounted meals, paid breaks, etc.) and greater use of independent contractors and part-timers.
In a study of the minimum wage increase’s impacts on agriculture, released earlier this year by four Oregon State University professors, the researchers were told, point-blank, by one farmer: “I’m never gonna hire a high schooler. I mean why would you hire a high schooler for that wage?”
Not to belabor the point, but these tweaks by our leaders have consequences. Dollars don’t lie.
And that’s true of any attempt to dictate what rental rates should be – indirectly in Oregon because state law prohibits actual rent controls. Sure, greedy landlords can present big problems for renters, but we don’t think the general rise in rental rates that officials in Portland and elsewhere have tried to fix are a wholesale case of slumlords.
And it won’t fix the problem because if rental rates are too low, there will be no incentive to build new housing.
If we are to be compassionate and care for our poor, we should be patient and allow the market to work. We can and must make it easier to expand the supply.
The auxiliary dwelling law, while not perhaps a complete solution, will help expand the supply.
Back to Sweet Home: For some reason, the housing supply here is not rapidly expanding, despite the availability of land. Perhaps it’s Sweet Home’s distance from more lucrative job offerings, and it doesn’t pencil out for builders, who are looking at higher prices for materials and other considerations.
If that’s the case, then the new state law may be just exactly the perfect solution for Sweet Home, allowing property owners to add an extra dwelling unit to their properties at a relatively low cost. With rental prices as high as they are today, they’ll certainly have an incentive to do so as long as the Planning Commission and, ultimately, the City Council do not choose to make it too difficult to accomplish.
The Planning Commission wants to require an additional parking space for each of these units, contrary to the state’s recommendation for no parking requirement. Such requirements discourage construction of new housing supply.
Besides that, turning small front yards into parking spaces to meet that requirement is just an ugly idea.
Yes, additional housing could result in more crowding on streets, but that shouldn’t be a deterrent to solving the bigger problem: homelessness. Frankly, if the city gets more tax revenue, which will happen if additional housing is constructed, that would give it funding it doesn’t have now to improve streets and maybe come up with some solutions to the parking issues.
While we understand our planning commissioners’ concerns about seeing R-1 turn into R-2 zones simply to enrich out-of-town investors who have little stake in the health and welfare of our community, we think the commission was right to eventually line up behind the argument that life circumstances can change and create financial devastation for property owners if such a rule were in place.
The fact is, we are short of housing. This “R-2” solution may not be ideal, but neither is having kids living in someone else’s living room, or local employers unable to find workers and unable to recruit because there’s little or no affordable housing available.
This law may not be ideal, but it looks better than what we’ve got right now.