Portland renters will get the chance Wednesday to tell city officials how difficult it can be to find housing in a city where vacancies are scare and where increasing rents and stagnant wages have led to a growing affordability gap.

The City Council’s Housing Committee, a five-member panel tasked with finding ways to increase housing supply in the city, is inviting tenants to testify about the market and about ideas to make the city’s housing more affordable. Rent control and hiring a tenant advocate at City Hall are expected to be among the suggested solutions to help working-class people live in Portland.

“We will be talking about some suggested reforms the city should look at,” said Tom MacMillan, a founding member of the Portland Tenants Union. “Most tenants are working long, long hours now to be able to live here.”

The Housing Committee held its first meeting on Jan. 27 and heard testimony from a national housing expert who said lagging wages and rising rents were creating affordability issues nationally. The panel also heard from people involved with the supply side of housing, including developers of market-rate, affordable and low-income housing.

On Wednesday, it will hear exclusively from people on the demand side, primarily tenants and tenant advocates. The meeting is scheduled for 5:30-7:30 p.m. in council chambers at City Hall.

In addition to the Portland Tenants Union, the committee will hear brief presentations from the Maine State Housing Authority, Cumberland County Community Development, Southern Maine Agency on Aging, Maine College of Art and Pine Tree Legal, which provides legal assistance to low-income tenants.

Following the presentations, there will be a public hearing, at which anyone can address the committee and share experiences on the topic.

City Councilor Jill Duson, who leads the panel, said she hopes tenants will take the time to participate in the public hearing, to help lay the groundwork for future policy discussions to set short-term and long-term goals.

“We are really, really hoping people will come and give us direction about what’s driving them nuts and what’s working,” Duson said. “I wanted us to really hear from customers who are impacted. I don’t think we’re the single-best source of ideas. My sense is tenants in Portland have also been tenants in other communities and could give us some valuable feedback.”

According U.S. Census estimates for 2014, the city had about 30,000 occupied housing units. Rental units comprised 56.3 percent of the occupied units.

MacMillan said about a dozen members of the Portland Tenants Union met over the weekend to develop a list of requests for the committee to consider. Chief among those are hiring a housing ombudsman to mediate housing disputes, help people in crisis and to advocate on behalf of the city’s estimated 16,900 renters, he said.

The group will suggest that the ombudsman be paid from city coffers. MacMillan equated the proposal to the school district paying the salary of the Portland teacher union’s president, who works full time on union issues. “We thought it makes sense the city would have an analogous position for a tenants advocate,” he said.

The tenants union will also suggest rent control to set limits on rent increases from year to year. A similar request has been made in South Portland.

MacMillan said the 2030 Workforce Housing Demand study, released last year by the Greater Portland Council of Governments, noted that rent control could be used as a temporary tool to alleviate a rental crisis, though the report warns that permanent rent control policies can lead to housing shortages by discouraging development.

According to the report, rent control exists in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An analysis conducted by the Maine Sunday Telegram/Portland Press Herald as part of the six-part series called “Welcome to Portland: No Vacancy,” found that the median renter household would need to spend 59 percent of its income to pay rent on the average two-bedroom apartment on the market in Portland last fall.

Apartment listings in September and October revealed an average market rent of $1,560 for a two-bedroom unit, including heat and utilities. At the same time, a rent payment considered to be affordable for the median renter household – 30 percent of the household’s monthly income – was about $800 a month.

The newspaper’s analysis also found that market rents have climbed 40 percent in the past five years, after adjusting for inflation.

“We think the city needs to take a hard look at rent control,” MacMillan said. “We want the city to really dig deep on that and help the 60 percent of people who live in Portland and most of whom can’t afford it anymore.”

 

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