PORTLAND, Ore. — Earlier this year, Mayor Ted Wheeler shook up the bureau assignments for city commissioners. Commissioner Carmen Rubio, then in charge of city parks, was placed across two of the city's most critical issues: building more affordable housing and helping Portland businesses to thrive.
Rubio heads the city Housing Bureau, the Bureau of Development Services and the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. She also heads up Prosper Portland, the city's economic development agency.
Gov. Tina Kotek has made it abundantly clear that the state needs more affordable housing, and she's looking for ways to speed up housing production.
With that in mind, what is Commissioner Rubio's plan and does it, as some critics claim, come at an environmental cost? Straight Talk's Laurel Porter sat down with Rubio to talk about that and reflect on her nearly 2.5 years as city commissioner.
Portland housing goals
In describing the state of housing in Portland right now, Rubio is not afraid to say that it's a pretty bleak picture.
"It's not good news," she said. "We're in this moment where we're experiencing the perfect storm of market conditions, where we're coming out of the pandemic, we also see inflation and rising construction costs. All together, that makes it really challenging right now in terms of the housing production outlook, and we're behind in our housing production."
Rubio said the city needs to build about 20,000 more housing units for affordable housing alone. That number should easily be doubled when including workforce and market rate housing, she said.
It'll take about 10 years to reach that goal, Rubio thinks. The good news, however, is that local and state government officials seem to be aligned in getting it all done.
Rubio's office recently sent out a survey to builders, architects and developers in order to ask them what city requirements could be modified to help speed up production. The responses are now helping to shape policy.
"We hear back numerous things from the experts — you know, nonprofit developers, for-profit developers, people within our permitting bureau, in other jurisdictions — and they all coalesce around certain policies and processes that sometimes things get stuck (on) or we need to find a way to untangle the knot," she said.
Rubio's own Bureau of Development Services is the gateway to all of the necessary permitting agencies, she said, but bureaus across city government — including ones under other commissioners — also have a role in the process. That can be incredibly difficult for developers to navigate.
"We think that there are ways that we can increase that efficiency by working together to come up with some easy fixes, but also look at some structural ones that we might have to take on as well," Rubio said.
At a city council meeting last month, Rubio successfully achieved a freeze on system development charges at current levels for one year, which she said would help spur housing production.
With the city soon changing its form of government to ditch the siloed bureau model in favor of a single city administrator running all of Portland's agencies, Rubio hopes that will help all of these processes run more smoothly.
"We have this short window until that time comes," she said. "So my goal is to work together with my colleagues and bureau leaders who are experts on this issue so that we can come up with these these longer term solutions before that change happens."
Environmental concerns
While increasing Portland's housing supply is broadly popular, the measures that officials like Rubio are taking to get there have plenty of detractors. Speeding up housing production by relaxing requirements for trees, open spaces, bicycle parking, bird-safe windows and eco roofs could come at a cost to the environment and climate.
Bob Sallinger, urban conservation director for Willamette River Keeper told the Willamette Week that suspending these regulations ignores the city's own climate goals — something that Rubio has said is important to her.
"I think that Bob is raising good points for us to be ever aware of as we we move through all of these process analyses," Rubio said. "I happen to be a very, very big advocate and firm advocate on climate issues, so that is something ever-present in my mind. But I do think that there's a way for us to balance the capitalization and fast-tracking of housing while lifting up our climate goals and being true to our climate action plan."
Already, some of the most vulnerable communities in Portland suffer from a lack of tree canopy and form urban "heat islands," producing some of the hottest temperatures in the city during the increasingly hot summers brought on by climate change.
"We have no interest or plan in like, you know, creating a situation where we're targeting trees," Rubio said. "In fact, we're doubling down on our tree canopy expansion... so I think it's important when you look at the list of issues that surfaced, it doesn't mean that we're tackling all the list."
Since Rubio heads the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability as well as the Housing Bureau, she's responsible for reconciling Portland's need for housing with its environmental goals. However, she doesn't think this is a contradiction.
"We're trying to support and lift up and center the same people, the same people that are experiencing housing shortages and the pinch of the crisis probably the most acutely are oftentimes some of the same populations that are at the front line of the climate crisis as well, so I feel these goals are mutually aligned," she said.
Homelessness
Last week, the Portland City Council held a vote on whether to ban homeless camps on city property between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. each day. The ordinance included strict rules for how camps can operate at all hours as well. Repeat violators could be punished with fines or jail time.
Commissioner Rubio was the only member of the council to vote against the ban, which passed in a 3-1 vote.
"It came down to two reasons for me," Rubio said. "Last year, when a lot of these things were up for discussion and we had passed several resolutions as a council, one of the things we had committed to was exploring a policy that would be on the table later this year, but there was agreement and a commitment not to add any provisions to any future policy that would criminalize someone just solely for being homeless.
"We have other tools and other laws already at our disposal that we could use to enforce if we needed to, so that for me felt like going back on our commitment that we had made in the previous year."
Late last year, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler championed and passed a plan to construct six large sanctioned homeless camps in the city, to eventually be paired with a full-time ban on street homeless camps. While the plan has been plodding forward ever since, with one site identified and a nonprofit contracted to operate it, the first camp isn't expected to open until later next month. A second site is tentatively slated to open sometime in the fall.
In her dissent, Rubio expressed that she wanted to hold the daytime ban until at least two of these sites are open. Rubio said she also was aware that the day centers and other homeless service providers that operate during daylight hours did not have the capacity to suddenly take on this avalanche of new need.
"I don't know why they didn't vote for that — probably because of the urgency everybody is feeling," Rubio said. "However, for me, if I want a policy to work and I want it to work in the best way possible... that seemed a way to guarantee that we had the time and the runway for our providers, for our jurisdictional partners, to actually be partners with us and ensuring that there was a place to receive people and meeting its intent."
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