Cascade CounterPoint

When Uri Rafaeli accidentally underpaid his property taxes by $8, Oakland County took his Michigan rental home. The county sold it for $25,000 and kept all the profits. Shockingly, this same kind of home equity theft is happening in approximately a dozen states including Oregon.

Listen to Christina Martin speak about the dangers of home equity theft in this recording of Cascade Policy Institute's July Policy Picnic.

Christina Martin is a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, where she fights to bring justice to her clients and set precedents that protect individuals across the country from government overreach. Prior to working at PLF, Christina was a Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute.

Full text: If we want to continue seeing downtown Portland improve, maybe it’s time to refund the police.

City leaders reopened Portland this weekend, hosting a flurry of festivities meant to attract people back into downtown. The reopening, called “Welcome Back to the Heart of Portland,” included concerts, musical performances, and pop-up vaccination centers.

Portland does seem to be slowly getting back on its feet. Mayor Ted Wheeler reported that a committee found fewer plywood boards on buildings. The city is cleaning more homeless campsites and has identified 70 potential spots to locate what the city calls “Safe Rest Villages” for homeless people.

With these modest improvements, downtowners report an increase in visible foot traffic.

A major missing link to Portland’s recovery is a police presence.

The equation is simple: Downtown attractions plus visible safety measures equals people making their way back to the city.

Portland Police Bureau teamed up with the FBI to cover their bases during last weekend’s festivities, in an effort to make Portlanders feel a sense of safety amid rising gun violence. But without the FBI, Portland police currently cannot manage patrolling streets on their own. Traffic safety is down to only one full-time traffic enforcement officer for the whole city. Defunding the police may have drawn focus to scrutinizing police practices, but it created an ongoing wave of unsafe situations.

The way forward for Portland to reopen is to create a trusted police presence, not to continue without any safety measures.

According to a recent poll, 74% of voters support school choice in the United States. Micah and Helen discuss the reasons behind this surge in support, policy wins in the past year that have resulted from it, and the outlook for school choice in Oregon. 

Full text: The City of Portland’s housing state of emergency, first declared in October 2015 and recently extended into next year, is set to turn six years old this fall. Over the course of two mayors, we were told the declaration would expedite the building of affordable housing and help alleviate our housing shortage.

By that measure the city has failed. In fact, the city has taken steps to make things worse. One of these steps was 2017’s “inclusionary zoning” ordinance.

Portland’s inclusionary zoning law requires developers of any project over 20 units to set aside at least 10-20% of those units for low-income housing.

The result? The number of permits for new housing units has plummeted from almost 7,400 in 2017 to under 1,800 in 2020. In the same period, the mandate has resulted in the creation of only 237 affordable units in the entire city.

Because the majority of households below the Area Median Income are still renting at market-rate, suppressing these developments under the guise of creating more “affordable” housing is a betrayal of these people. While the 200 or so families who do receive subsidized units will benefit, thousands of families will see their already-high rent continue to skyrocket.

Portland needs to stop with its “affordable housing” fantasy, and instead work toward making housing affordable for everyone. One way to start is by getting out of our own way and stop handcuffing developers who are trying to provide it.

Full Text: Portland is on its way to having more than three shootings per day.

Last year amid nationwide protests, Portlanders were among some of the loudest voices shouting, “Defund the Police.” Last summer, Mayor Ted Wheeler disbanded the city’s Gun Violence Reduction team, claiming that the team excessively targeted black people.

What do we have to show for it?

As expected, we’re seeing a sharp uptick in violent crime. Portland police data report 38 homicide offenses through May of this year. Over the same period last year, only 6 homicides were reported. That’s over a 600% increase.

We’ve also seen more than double the number of shootings this year, with 580 incidents.

City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty asserts the shootings are “a totally unrelated issue,” even going so far as to say the police have a role “to solve crime…not to prevent crime.” This simply doesn’t make sense. Just one month after the city disbanded the Gun Violence Reduction team, the number of shootings doubled, and homicides increased seven-fold.

What’s worse is that increasing violent crimes disproportionately affects people of color—they make up almost half of all homicide victims. If City Council wants to stop the violence, they cannot ignore that our police force is underfunded and understaffed. Local leaders must listen to the people they represent, not just the Defund the Police elites who have their ears.

Listen to Helen Doran interview Micah Perry, Cascade's newest staff member! Micah interned with Cascade in 2019 and is now serving as a program assistant for External Affairs. 

Micah can be contacted at [email protected].

Full text: The U.S. Postal Service boasts that “neither snow nor rain nor heat” can keep mail carriers from swiftly completing their rounds; TriMet’s MAX Light Rail service can make no such claim.

Last week, the heatwave brought temperatures well into the 100s, causing MAX services to shut down from Saturday to Tuesday. If you are from the Portland area, you know these closures aren’t just limited to heat. They also happen when we have ice, snow, or—most commonly in Portland—excessive rain. If you are depending on public transit to get to work, why lean on the unreliability of light rail?

Despite the billions of dollars our local, state, and federal governments sink into light rail, daily bus ridership doubles that of the MAX. This should come as no surprise, as buses are more reliable, faster on average, and get you much closer to your final destination. Every time the MAX fails, the buses are there to bail it out.

But local leaders still haven’t given up on their obsession with trains. Congressman Earl Blumenauer insists that any I-5 replacement bridge over the Columbia River must include an extension of light rail to Vancouver. However, an Express Bus Route operated by C-TRAN already runs along the same path and gets passengers into Downtown Portland—far more quickly than light rail could. Let’s instead focus on what works—investing in reliable roads that support the smooth travel of our cars and buses.

A proposed ordinance aims to deprioritize some homeless camps considered “low impact”

Full text: The city says a camp is low impact if it’s 150 feet away from a childcare facility, preschool, or primary school. That’s a 30-second walk. I’m sure most parents would think having a sprawling homeless camp less than a minute from their kids’ school isn’t low impact.

Once kids hit high school, the Council’s new rule says a camp is low impact if it’s only ten feet—or just 20 seconds away.

But, it gets worse. The city won’t clear camps more than ten feet away from a residential or commercial building. In front of your home is a no-no. But, across the street from your house is okay in the city’s eyes.

The proposed ordinance turns a blind eye to the devastating toll the camps have taken on Portland. They’re more than just a visual blight, they’re a public health and safety nuisance. When camps pop up in a neighborhood, they bring garbage, crime, and violence. They are a danger to the community and to the campers themselves.

There is no such thing as a low-impact camp because small camps can grow into sprawling camps in a matter of days. Ignoring low-impact camps only redistributes the problem, it doesn’t solve the problem.

The city must find enough shelter space to begin cleaning up all camps.

Full text: If you get the Sunday New York Times, your Fathers’ Day edition had a very special message from Travel Portland, whose job is to convince people that the Rose City is a great place to visit.

Don’t get me wrong. Portland is a great place to visit. But, not right now. You see, we’ve got some issues to work out before we’re ready for visitors.

First, we’ve got to get the plywood off of our storefronts. But, unfortunately, every time that happens, a group of mostly peaceful rioters break our windows and loot our stores.

We’d love to have you eat in our restaurants. But, we can’t seem to hit the governor’s target vaccination rate, so you’ll have to order takeout or wait an hour for socially distanced seating. Oh, and make sure you bring a mask. We don’t fluoridate our water, but everyone needs a mask.

We’d love to have you see the sights. But, you have to have a taste for sitting in traffic. Our rush hour starts at about 2 pm and runs all the way past 6 pm. Just treat that as an opportunity to count tents and tarps. You might even catch a street brawl with transients beating each other with sticks.

As the ad says, “Come see for yourself.” Just give us a few years to tidy up the place first.

Listen to Helen Doran interview Vlad Yurlov, policy analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, on the current state of homelessness in the Portland-metro region and what needs to happen to actually address the root cause of the crisis.