Very refreshing to see the editorial board favor the building of new housing (“Our View: To ease rental crisis, we can’t just regulate space – we must create it,” Feb. 14).
Rent control, regulatory restrictions and NIMBY attitudes have proven to be successful deterrents in Portland for decades. Prior to the current development boom, Portland’s rental housing stock was dated, dilapidated and woefully undersized to demand. Despite the housing stock’s mediocrity, rents exploded to a level sufficient to justify privately funded, nonsubsidized new development for the first time in 50-plus years. And the city of Portland backed down on regulatory restrictions just enough to support the building boom.
But it didn’t last. Now we have new and onerous rent control and regulatory hurdles that forced developers to either abandon new rental housing developments or convert them to high-priced condos that are only affordable to the wealthy, especially now that home mortgage rates have more than doubled.
The free market has an unlimited supply of private capital to fund both market-rate and low-income housing, using both state and federal low-income housing tax credits. Bayside is the perfect location to incentivize the development of maximum density housing, some of which has already been built. But not enough will get built until we unleash the market from burdensome regulations and “NIMBY.”
Geoffrey Emanuel
Falmouth
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