Amy Oberlin is a member of the Urbanist Coalition of Portland.

Inclusionary zoning has failed to live up to its promise of efficiently delivering affordable housing paid for out of developers’ profits. Any honest analysis will demonstrate this.

We at the Urbanist Coalition of Portland have been studying the impacts of inclusionary zoning (IZ) in Portland, and the trends are concerning. We take issue with a recent op-ed celebrating the success of Portland’s IZ ordinance, created in 2015 and expanded by the Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal referendum in 2020. 

The op-ed presents the total number of affordable housing units created before and after the 2020 expansion — 272 units before compared to 620 units after — as evidence that IZ has been a success. These might be the most misleading data points one could choose to support this argument. 

Yes, Portland has built affordable units in the last five years, but only a fraction of them can be credited to IZ. The actual number of affordable units completed as a result of the post-2020 IZ ordinance? Forty-three. 

Not 620. Just 43 units, according to the city of Portland’s own recent analysis of IZ. The other hundreds of affordable units referred to by the op-ed are either fully affordable developments exempt from IZ, or are from projects that applied under the former policy, not the current one.

IZ was a well-intentioned idea. It was thought that by requiring every market-rate project to include a few affordable units, we could skim a bit off the top of developer profits to create affordable homes that wouldn’t otherwise exist. However, the data suggests that IZ is actually preventing market-rate projects from being completed at all unless they can get public subsidies. This is a problem, because when all projects require subsidy, development can’t keep pace with demand unless the public subsidy scales with it. 

What the data does show is that permanently affordable income-restricted housing is created by public funding. When public funding is available, affordable housing is built. When public funding dries up, construction stops.

Since 2020, affordable housing funding has been available thanks to state spending programs under Democratic leadership and federal COVID relief funds, but some of that money has already been spent and won’t be renewed.

Declining public funding — if not disappearing funding, given recent disruptions at the federal level — is an existential concern for affordable housing production. Yet with IZ, we have pegged virtually all of our housing production to its availability.

A policy that is serious about creating affordable housing is a policy that sustainably and consistently funds affordable housing. IZ doesn’t do that. Instead, it forces market-rate developers to compete with affordable developers for the same pot of public funding. It is a zero-sum game. 

We at UCP are a group of residents who advocate for more affordable housing and expanded transit options like buses, bikes and walking. We support increasing the supply of housing in general to ensure a wide variety of housing options, including both market-rate developments and affordable developments built with public subsidy. 

We are suggesting an alternative to IZ: a simple formula to put a portion of property tax revenue from new developments toward affordable housing.

The best way to make sure developer profits contribute their fair share to our affordable housing supply is by taxing profitable projects and using the revenue to build the affordable housing we need, not by fantasizing that people running a business will choose to make unprofitable investments if we take all their other options away. Portland residents of all income levels can only live in housing that actually exists.