10-year plans and the limits of reason

Editorial

Gov. Tina Kotek wants Oregon to build 360,000 homes over the next 10 years to fix the state’s housing crisis. She pushed through a $278 million funding package and created an advisory council to see that it happens.

As speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives in 2017, Kotek used all her leverage to enact another grand plan to end homelessness, a bill that essentially ended single-family zoning in the state.

In between these broad strokes, Metro voters approved a $650 million housing bond measure designed to get at the root of the problem—a presumed housing shortage—within 10 years. The city of Portland also did its part with a $258 million housing bond, following up with a bond to provide social services needed by people moving from the streets into stable housing.

One might think that all of these attacks on the root cause would be evidence in themselves that the strategy was not working. Could their diagnosis be wrong? Apparently, that never occurred to the people in charge. As the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of an idea they weren’t reasoned into.

The plans involved numbers and timetables, but none were given the even-handed scrutiny appropriate for massive social endeavors. They have instead been driven by pitches to fear of even greater social breakdown and appeals to moral conscience. That is not a sin in itself. Such appeals do not, however, foster democratic dialogue. When you’re on the right side of a moral issue, compromise can be seen as cowardice.

Kotek made that abundantly clear in testimony before her legislative colleagues in 2017.

“House Bill 2007 would get rid of some of the loopholes that allow NIMBYism to block development … where wealthy neighborhoods simply want to self-segregate and prevent affordable housing development in their communities.

“We have to acknowledge that land-use regulations at the local level have history, they are political and they should be scrutinized to ensure that they do not perpetuate the racialized inequities that have been built into them.

“We don’t have to be reminded that we just finished a winter in which a lot of people didn’t have a place to live,” she concluded.

Most would agree that providing a roof for everyone is a higher moral value than protecting the livability of comfortable neighborhoods. As long as the argument stayed on her high moral purpose— homes for all and overcoming racial segregation—she was in charge. The bill (renamed Senate Bill 1051) passed the House 59-0 and the Senate 23-6.

No one seemed to raise a more critical question: Would this measure produce the results promised? She referred vaguely to research suggesting that it could, but her prescription was based on shaky social, economic and political assumptions that have not been borne out.

Seven years later, evidence mounts that chronic homelessness is more closely associated with addiction and mental health than a simple shortage of homes. Funding and public policy, however, are locked into maximizing housing construction. And where public money flows freely, a self-interested network of agencies and business interests flourishes. The housing-industrial complex, as it is derisively called, will not readily relinquish its hold on programs and theories that keep it endowed.

A more democratic approach to our homelessness crisis might have begun with similarly lofty goals. But it would have been designed to adjust to changing circumstances and evidence. It’s always easier to learn from the past than to predict the future.

Society needs its moral visionaries, reformers and saints. They call on our consciences to right wrongs and save us from ruin. They push the wheels of government in directions it should go. But a zealot at the helm of public power is doubly dangerous: prone to pursue the extreme or infeasible and exceedingly hard to reason off a cliff.