Looking at Portland’s economy as a microcosm of speculative capitalism is a great way to examine the extractive mechanisms of the real estate market. The most recent boom/bust cycle has completely divorced land value from land taxes and rental rates, and the rich seem to be focused on a final push to squeeze everything possible out of the US economy.
Unreinforced Masonry (URM) buildings, Enhanced Services Districts, Opportunity Zones, Residential Infill: all of these policies are intended to shore up the overinflated and commodified rental market for maximum profit expansion until this bubble inevitably bursts. Land can not be treated as a commodity. Could this soon-to-fail market lead to the long-predicted final death spiral of capitalism? Why not try an anti-capitalist experiment in Portland? Now is the time, there isn’t much left.
Establishing a human right to housing is necessary, as is a thorough re-examination of the entire process of settler colonialism that set the whole process in motion here in North America. The Sogorea Te' Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led community organization in California's East Bay, is a bold and creative example of how concrete redress of the theft of Native land can be linked to fundamental challenges to the vicious land and rent speculation that is continuing to destroy lives and communities.
Join host Paul Roland and his guest Jonathan Ogden from Portland Assembly as they discuss global capitalist trends as they play out in rapidly transforming Portland.
A recent Bloomberg.com article, Welcome to Tax Breaklandia, examines the 2017 tax overhaul's creation of large tax breaks in co-called "Opportunity Zones" and how they are being used for major new real estate development and speculation in Portland.
Some other articles about the "Opportunity Zones":
Developers Look to Hit Tax-Break ‘Jackpot’ in Opportunity Zones
Billions pour into funds targeting low-income areas as Treasury lays down rules for who benefits
A New Tax Break for Poor Neighborhoods Could Benefit Luxury Developers
Opportunity Zones in West Coast tech hubs rank highest for gentrification risk in new study
How the "Growth Coalition" is ranking these zones to determine which ones will also be most profitable.
A link to this ranking,, authored by Smart Growth America, has been moved apparently, but here's a copy.
Opportunity Zone funds like Portland's are proliferating. Here's a brief sample of the investor perspective.
And here is a nationwide map of those "opportunity zones" with high poverty rates and/or other qualifying factors.
The issue of rent speculation was also addressed on KBOO by Linda Olson-Osterlund in her 2013 interview with Laura Gottesdiener, author of How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get Rich Quick Scheme Again!
Other Pertinent Links:
Bleeding Albina: http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf
Sogoreate (Ohlone) Land Trust:
https://sogoreate-landtrust.com/shuumi-land-tax/
Capitalist critique of Opportunity Zones (even they get it):
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-03/how-to-get-growth-in-the-places-that-need-it-most
- KBOO
Comments
Rent Speculation\Control; Blackstone Hedge v. Inflation
Excellent discussion, so glad I didn't have to punch into my Wage Slave life until after morning's broadcast. I will be sharing this link with the Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa Media Discussion List as this was truly a paradigm sifting\shifting hour of Public Interest use of the community's airwaves. We don't get that in the U.S. ( As compared to Canada where the CBC is not yet interrupted by corporate underwriters and their 'Enhanced Underwriting' branding and messages). Here in Corporate Caliphate occupied North America even our public airwaves and cyber platforms are underwritten by the Corporate Caliphate instead of taxing the very corporations that profit off their licensing of broadcast spectrum that legally since the birth of national broadcasting belongs to U.S. in order to pay for a national EDUCATION\PUBLIC INTEREST broadcast network. See Media Studies researcher Dennis Mazzocco's book NETWORKS OF POWER for the final chapter's floating of that sensible suggestion decades ago.
I also appreciate the extra step you've taken Paul and Portland Assembly to track the missing link from your backgrounder journalism & reference guide linked above.
Your guest from Portland Assembly's suspicion that the PoTown building boom of luxury housing during the Homeless and Renters' Emergencies as declared by our previous one-term mayor Charlie Hales (who was last heard from setting off to sail the seas on his yacht) is speculation having more to do with Wall Street and NYC's gentrification is on the money. Bravo for the original analysis and paradigm shift of your guest in citing gentrification as the modern form of what we used to call settler colonialism. Replete with Mass Displacement accompanied by the Advertising\PR make-overs of downscale depressed working class (and so often predominately people of color) neighborhoods into hipster magnets turning the property values into INVESTOR DREAMS via the modern form of the Church's Doctrine of Discovery.
The Levy Institute your guest alludes to in his shout out is based at Bard College, here's some background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levy_Economics_Institute
The "sneaking suspicion that this all has to do with New York" has already been illustrated many times over. The journalistic illustration that shifted my own paradigm on that taboo phrase in U.S. News Media and Business Reporting, namely Neo-Liberal Economics which I refer to as Neo-Lib E-CON, where our elected leaders of both political parties in our 2-party cartel must pledge loyalty since the Cold War Mighty Wurlitzer days to seeking only market-based solutions to the very market-based socio-economic problems, while only the military may remain organized along socialist lines. And with the military, no threat of Democratic Socialism....
Here is the article late in the 3rd term of Mayor Billionaire Bloomberg (NYC mayors are restricted to 2 terms but this Mayor gained a waiver from the utterly corrupt political machine to seek a 3rd consecutive term...) that clarified the business of "Idle Capital" which seems to conflict with the Protestant Work Ethic productive capital as does much of modern investment practices and that filled the indoctrination of generations of U.S.
Moral Hazard as defined by Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin be damned.
It helped that I was reading Canadian journalist and often invited to be a CBC socio-economic analyst Naomi Klein's book THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM when the scales lifted from my eyes as I ceased to view the creation of the Homeless Crisis as an ACT OF GOD (or rational markets liberated from the bondage of government rather than their own industry's) regulation and enforcement under criminal law...:
http://nymag.com/news/features/podolsky-homeless-shelters-2013-12/
How does this relate to the Dan Saltzman era as Housing Commissioner on the PoTown City Council (via the system of commissioners rather than district reps presiding over policy for the Greater Metro Area that became PoTown after what we now refer to as The City was in fact the cities of Albina, Kenton, Vanport, St. John, Montavilla, Mt. Scott etc) and now into the Mayor Wheeler Dealer era as the normalization of Hoovervilles of Homeless families and individuals can be traced to the dissolution of the Cold War and surrender of our Peace Dividend to Daddy Warbucks. At which point Washington and Wall Street no longer had to win any war over Hearts and Minds as our Commie Rivals went the Robber Baron route and there was no shame anymore in sanctifying GREED IS GOOD as our new GOD?
Here is what non-profit journalism found out after the election of our current President aka The Symptom In Chief of Neo-Liberal E-CON's policy outcomes which got the Privatizing Push from the previous Democratic and Republican administrations dating back at least to Nixon's appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court after the battle cry of the infamous POWELL MEMO. Llook it up...don't expect MARKETPLACE, PLANET MONEY, BLOOMBERG NEWS or NPR\PBS where every week is THIS WEEK ON WALL STREET without ever broadcasting a WAGE SLAVE WEEK to counter the indoctriNation of our Food Stamp Nation and the burgeoning Trump Swamp. That will be one coast to coast URBAN RENEWAL Project that will require some gentrification by the usual suspects when that fetid tide rolls out...
https://www.revealnews.org/article/profiting-off-pain-trump-confidant-ca...
Keep on doing and 'splainin'
Most appreciatively yours,
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters & Shifters
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
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