PORTLAND, Ore. — City, state and business leaders spent the first two days of the week in downtown Portland at the Hilton Hotel for the Cascadia Innovation Corridor's annual conference. The group says the corridor encompasses the region stretching from British Columbia to Portland, bringing ideas to help solve major problems impacting everyone living there.
"It really is an opportunity for us to all work together on common problems," Christine Gregoire, former Washington Governor and current co-chair of the Corridor, said. "We're confronting here one of the biggest challenges we all have, which is affordable housing — particularly, workforce housing. Everybody's done a pretty good job focusing on homelessness and low-income housing, and what we failed to understand is if we don't focus on workforce housing, we can't solve the low-income and we can't solve the homeless because it's all just packaged together."
Oregon has an affordable housing crisis; it was one of the major issues Gov. Tina Kotek wanted legislators to fund earlier this year during the session. Ultimately, lawmakers cut her $500 million request down by $150 million. Within her first few days in office, Kotek declared a housing and homelessness emergency and set a statewide goal of building 36,000 new units of housing per year. This is to make up for Oregon's current housing deficit of 140,000 units and the need to produce 440,000 units over the next 20 years to meet future needs.
When she was asked if she had come close to meeting those goals, Kotek said, "I think we are still trying to figure out the tracking of new housing development, and honestly, one of the biggest challenges there has been: the mortgage rates. Inflation, the interest rates, they have been a challenge to getting more construction in the pipeline.
"The $100 million from this year's legislature for water and sewer and sidewalks is really going to show progress in the next two years. We have to bring more urgency to the development side. When you deal with the policy barriers that you've been dealing with now, I think we have solved a lot of problems; I think, now, we have to get people in the pipeline to build and that's going to take resources."
Gregoire says one way that cities can help address the housing shortage is to look at zoning laws and rezone unused commercial properties.
"In this country, we are six times greater than any other country in the world in terms of commercially zoned land and far too much of it is sitting vacant, so the land is more valuable than anything on top of it," Gregoire said. "If we were to rezone that and make that available for affordable housing, workforce housing, we could really not only solve our problem but maybe have a margin."
Gregoire says she believes it could bring more than a million homes to the region and 400,000 to Oregon over the next twenty years.
When Gregoire was asked if it was enough, she said it would meet the needs and would make the region a model for the rest of the country.
"We need to be able to have our firefighters. We need to be able to have our construction workers. We need to be able to have our teachers and nurses live in the community in which they want to work and which they want to serve." Gregoire said. "Everybody ought to have access to a home. If we don't solve this, it's going to hurt our economy. It's going to hurt our people, where they are having to move out of places they want to be because that's where they work to distant areas and commute in."
When it comes to commuting, she said, "What we're working on is how do we address the affordable housing crisis that we're all facing in the corridor and then how do we address the transportation needs?"
One idea: ultra-high speed rail, like those in foreign countries, built with both public and private funds.
"In the United States and Canada, we act like it's something completely different and outer space. We need to understand that is a way to connect the corridor; that is a way to ensure affordable housing. That is a way in which we can have an economy that will thrive," Gregoire said.