Sarah Iannarone (running for Mayor)
Should policies be adopted to ensure every neighborhood in Portland welcomes more neighbors, through smaller, denser, lower-cost housing options like smallplexes, cottage clusters, and small-to-moderate-sized apartment complexes, via both the nonprofit and private markets?
Yes, everywhere. I served on the Advisory Committee of the Mixed Use Zones Project of The City’s Comprehensive Plan Update; I have advised through the community engagement, organizing, and publicly testimony processes of both the Residential Infill Project and the Better Housing By Design projects on behalf of the Mt Scott-Arleta Neighborhood Association, where I serve as Chair of the Land Use and Transportation Committee. Updating our zoning codes to relegalize a variety of housing types in every neighborhood across the city of Portland accomplishes so many overlapping goals: it leads to longer term housing affordability, it makes it easier for Portlanders to age in place, it provides opportunity for more Portlanders to live in lower carbon housing with lower carbon transportation options, and it allows us to push back against racist segregation-era development patterns. As an urban policy expert, an engaged community member, neighborhood business founder and mom who’s worked hard (sometimes two or three jobs at a time) to make mortgage and rent, I’m deeply supportive of the efforts of Portland: Neighbors Welcome. An affordable, climate-smart Portland is one with four-plexes and six-plexes, ADA-accessible units, ADUs, cottages and affordable multifamily housing on every block. I am grateful for the work of Antidisplacement PDX and advocacy groups to ensure that the implementation of these reforms do not harm Portland’s neighborhoods most vulnerable to gentrification and displacement . We need to focus new growth in the wealthiest neighborhoods with the greatest capacity to absorb change. Doing so is crucial not only to addressing our housing crisis but fighting socioeconomic, racial and school segregation.
Should Portland expand transit-oriented development (allowing apartment complexes by-right within a short walk of all major transit lines) as a way to discourage the use of single-occupancy vehicles and reduce our city’s carbon emissions?
Yes. Compact walkable neighborhoods connected by active transportation infrastructure and transit are the cornerstone of my climate action planning. If we wish to live up to our progressive values, Portland must spend every dollar and adjust every land use and transportation plan we have to remake the city with frequent, abundant, reliable bus and MAX lines connecting every neighborhood, and where every neighborhood is walkable and contains abundant market-rate and public housing available for all income levels, all ages, all families.
I have long and vociferously supported numerous policy changes to make Portland’s transportation system more equitable, sustainable, and reliable. The flip side of your question, here, is not just that we need to allow much more housing near our frequent transit centers, but that we need to change our paradigms of investment in transportation so that we extend frequent transit to every corner of the city. This includes supporting a full implementation of Commissioner Eudaly’s Rose Lane Project, supporting the Fix Our Streets renewal, opposing the $800 million Rose Quarter fossil fuel infrastructure expansion, and prioritizing investments in Vision Zero to eliminate traffic fatalities. It’s not enough to just legalize dense housing near transit but to also rapidly expand the number of neighborhoods with excellent transportation networks (many of which, particularly in East Portland, are already fairly dense by our city’s current standards).
Multifamily housing is an absolutely a crucial part of our city’s plans to lower carbon emissions. Because they are smaller and attached, they take less energy to heat. Their smaller size also means that residents are less likely to consume and own as much stuff, which also correlates strongly with lower carbon lifestyles. And finally, obviously, proximity to frequent and excellent transit and ease with which one can get around town without owning an automobile has massive climate implications. So yes, absolutely, I am proud to have contributed to shaping in particular the Better Housing By Design policy through my participation and feedback (especially the parking policies!) and I believe they are a crucial ingredient in a municipal response to climate. (I encourage any PNW member interested in my full climate plans to check out my Green New Deal for Portland document, released last September, which specifically references these and other ideas on housing and transit: www.sarah2020.com/greennewdeal).
Should neighborhood associations have less, as much, or more power than other community organizations when it comes to questions of housing, such as whether new apartments or homeless shelters are permitted in a given neighborhood?
The same amount of power. I have been involved at the neighborhood level-- formally and informally-- for eighteen years in a variety of capacities so feel fully qualified to speak to this issue in both theory and practice. We should all thank Commissioner Eudaly for taking on the challenging work of dismantling racial and spatial inequality in our city. This is not easy work and as Portlanders, we must commit to helping each other and giving each other the benefit of the doubt that we are doing our best to make Portland the best place it can be.
I led the Mt Scott Arleta Neighborhood Association through the 3.96 Code Change process; ours was one of a handful of NAs willing to go on the record as supporting the proposed resolution as well as the direction that civic life and other bureaus are taking to broaden engagement citywide. As a hardworking --some might even call us scrappy-- neighborhood association along 82nd Avenue we know how hard increasing diversity in civic life can be. We have learned that people cannot engage without adequate recognition of the costs of engagement to their daily lives. We encouraged our electeds to support and compensate historically excluded groups to enable their engagement in civic life and asked that they adequately fund the mandate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the civic life of Portland citywide. Recognizing their important service work in our communities, we requested an extension of the contracts for Neighborhood Coalitions, regardless of time, should be so that Civic Life will conduct equitable and meaningful engagement with neighborhood associations, neighborhood coalitions, culturally specific community groups, Black, Indigenous, people of color and historically underrepresented community groups, Council, and other key stakeholders, and not only Neighborhood Associations and Neighborhood Coalitions.
Additionally, We encouraged The City to convene a multi-bureau workgroup to provide recommendations for City bureau engagement methods to ensure we are equitably providing City services to all Portlanders-- not only to achieve outcomes with regard to equity & inclusion but to decrease redundancy and increase efficiencies across city government. We asked for explicit consideration of the measures we will establish as a city to achieve our diversity, equity and inclusion goals for engagement: how will we know what success on this front looks like and whether we are achieving it? Are our feedback mechanisms robust enough for the dynamic-- even chaotic-- times ahead as Portland grows and changes in the midst of climate chaos? Finally, we would like to see it explicitly laid out how this 3.96 code change process will play out alongside the charter review process convening in 2021 which will be considering whether we should change the city's form of government. These structural considerations should be taken in tandem to improve outcomes rather than reinforcing the existing silos which result in suboptimal outcomes in terms of government efficiency, efficacy, and equity.
For further information about how we can reform Portland City government to work for all Portlanders, please visit my website at sarah2020.com/goodgovernment.
Should Portland dedicate less, as much, or more money to regulated affordable housing? (If you answered "more money," what funding mechanism(s) would you pursue to build this additional housing?)
More money. One of the first steps I would take as Mayor is to establish a “Five-Year Strategic Plan for Ending Portland’s Housing State of Emergency (2021-2025) led by the Progressive Task Force for Housing All Portlanders” task force; this entity would be tasked with three deliverables in its first year, one of them being a deep dive into how best to establish a progressive revenue mechanism to find the resources for the variety of housing needs. To quote the document:
“There is a significant amount of money available across the spectrum of housing options flowing into the city from various pipelines, but these monies are not being strategically coordinated nor leveraged for better outcomes. There is significant tax inequity between property owners in East Portland and the rest of the city that needs to be evaluated and corrected through assessment recalibration and possible implementation of a land value tax (LVT). We are also leaving revenue on the table that we could be capturing for public investments in shelters and permanent housing, including but not limited to lobbying in Salem for a local exemption to Oregon Real Estate Transfer Tax, as they have in Washington County (Amendment, Measure 79, also known as Initiative 5); a surcharge on luxury housing sales; a tax on vacant luxury real estate developments; scale- and carbon- impact fees; and a real-estate speculation tax.”
I am in fundamental agreement that the city of Portland needs progressive, bold leadership to build on our successes of the 2016 and 2018 housing bonds (and the pending success of the regional 2020 housing services measure) to build a lot more regulated, affordable housing. We should be looking internationally at European and Asian cities as models for how having a robust supply of public, affordable housing alleviates so many other expensive problems - homelessness, public health considerations, truancy, economic stability, and so on - all problems disproportionately born by vulnerable communities on depressingly predictable lines of race, class and gender.
Please see my answer to question six for more information about other funding sources for additional housing policies.
Would you support a citywide moratorium on evictions during the three coldest months of the year, as Seattle recently adopted?
Yes. Absolutely. This was a no-brainer even before the coronavirus epidemic broke out, and it speaks poorly to the lack of leadership from our current elected officials that we haven’t already passed such a measure. I fully support policy initiatives that prioritize the health and well-being of our most vulnerable residents over the right for landlords to profit off of our housing scarcity. There are ways to work with the landlord lobby in good faith, but I absolutely stand with organizations like the Community Alliance of Tenants and Portland Tenants United in their unequivocal push to make sure that we aren’t sentencing families to the cruel realities of homelessness because they fell behind on a rent check.
As Portland implements an anti-displacement plan, which policies from the Anti-Displacement PDX Coalition would you support? What additional anti-displacement policies do you support?
Require advance 90-day written notice to a tenant if the owner plans to sell, demolish, or redevelop their home.
Grant a “right to stay” to existing tenants; require landlords to rehouse tenants they displace in their neighborhoods at a rent comparable to what they had been paying, or by helping the tenants to purchase a unit with down-payment assistance.
Implement a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase policy that gives all current renters, and then the city, the first and second rights of refusal to purchase a property at fair-market value before it goes on the market.
Earmark Construction Excise Tax (CET) revenue from construction in single-dwelling zones as a source of subsidy for affordable units in single-dwelling zones.
Charge a fee for any redevelopment of a property in single-dwelling zones that does not include at least two units, unless prevented by site constraints and use the new revenue from this fee to subsidize regulated affordable units in the single-dwelling zones.
Property tax exemption for any regulated affordable units built on-site, for the duration of the affordability restriction.
My “Housing For All” plan includes language supporting the creation of a rental subsidy reserve fund. In addition to stricter short-term rental (e.g. AirBnB) regulation enforcement with revenue going to renter protections programs and a rental subsidy reserve fund managed by the RSO and overseen by the RSC. Keeping rent (move-in and monthly) within reach for eligible families without a waitlist helps people evade homelessness and keeps our city in compliance with the Fair Housing Act.
You can see more in my Housing For All plan here: https://sarah2020.com/en/policies/housing-for-all.
Unfortunately, the anti-displacement aspect of our exceptional zoning reform policies (driven by frontline community organizations) was considered too late in the process of drafting our abundant housing policies. If Portland values equity and inclusion, we need to prioritize anti-displacement, putting it at the top of the agenda from the beginning in all public policy discussions and infrastructure investments.
What else should Portland pro-housing, pro-tenant community know about you & your candidacy?
Thank you for your time and your thoughtful questions. I have greatly appreciated how much Portland: Neighbors Welcome has stepped up to fill a leadership void in City Hall to forward critical municipal housing policies in this state of emergency. Our policies were made better by your deliberate efforts to incorporate the full slate of necessary reforms for more housing justice here in Portland, including tenant rights and public housing. I appreciate the care with which you applied lessons from the Bay Area “YIMBYism” by crafting a mission around the values or equity and inclusion foremost. Yours is a model that we will certainly share with other cities around the world.
My “Housing For All” plan is not an afterthought; it’s a 3800-word, community-sourced document that includes numerous specific details about my plans for everything from (re)legalizing SROs, substantial reforms to the Bureau of Development Services, ensuring equitable outcomes in our Opportunity Zones, a commitment to the establishment of a Tenants’ Bill of Rights, fully funding the rental registration program, supporting more Community Land Trusts and encouraging more ADUs. It was crafted after extensive conversation with many housing advocates across the city, including input from many members of Portland: Neighbors Welcome (and from many leaders of organizations adjacent to PNW, as well). I encourage you to read it in full, and reach out to the campaign if you have additional suggestions or questions: https://sarah2020.com/en/policies/housing-for-all
There is also additional information about my establishment of Community Safety Hubs and my reasoning to eliminate the sweeps of homelessness in my “Rethinking Public Policy” plan, available here: https://sarah2020.com/en/policies/rethinking-public-safety
As Mayor, I intend to keep BPS, BDS, and PHB to ensure that my aggressively pro-housing agenda is implemented to its fullest extent. Depending on the results of the other city council races, my election would also establish a three-vote majority in support of more aggressive tenant protections on the Portland City Council, and I would work with my peers and community advocates to ensure that this majority was employed to strengthen tenants’ rights and housing stability for our most vulnerable.
Finally, I want to close by acknowledging my participation in Portland’s Open and Accountable Election program. I am able to run my campaign over the past nine months by attending public hearings and listening to community advocates because of the grassroots support I have received. My campaign has received over 2000 donations, with the average size around $30; I have refused any donations above $250 and I have received zero donations from landlord lobbyists or other special interests - this has allowed me to focus on housing policies that best meet our city’s actual needs, and not those of the wealthy and connected powerful interests that have historically stood in the way of housing reform.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can help my campaign, I’m going to need every ounce of grassroots support that I can get, particularly during this epidemic. Please check out my website to learn how you can help elect an intersectional, climate-conscious, unapologetically pro-housing woman to Mayor this year.
Iannarone received an A overall from our scoring committee. See all scores and read about our process here.