Good news and bad news out of Portland; the bad news is that media hype around skyrocketing rents is moving right along just like it is in Seattle. The good news is that Portland is putting its attention on an incentive based, tax exemption program, borrowed by Seattle, to create more affordable units. Here’s the first two paragraphs of a front page story in Saturday’s Oregonian:

As thousands of Portlanders struggle with skyrocketing rents, the city has failed this year to convince a single real estate developer to tap into a city fund meant to encourage more affordable apartments.

Even as Mayor Charlie Hales proclaims a housing emergency, one of the city’s key tools for affordable housing has gone virtually dormant.

There it is. “Skyrocketing rents!” The term is thrown out there, as it often is in Seattle, without any substantive definition of what warrants use of the term or what it even means. In Seattle, a closer look at the numbers shows that rents change, and when they go up it might feel like a skyrocket when rents previously lowered by a down economy rise with flat supply and increasing demand. The story, however, is really about Portland’s version of the Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, a program that Portland had first.

Three years ago, city and county officials put so many new restrictions on the fund that chased away developers and killed any chance the program had to make a dent in Portland’s shortage of affordable housing.

The city has since reversed course, but the program that gives property tax cuts to developers in return for affordable apartments remains a tough sell: Zero deals in 2015, even as a blitz of new apartment construction changes the city’s skyline.

Notwithstanding the pointless hyperbole, the good news is that some in Portland seems to understand the relationship between larding up an incentive program with too many rules so that it isn’t an incentive anymore. The Seattle City Council has a stubborn streak, wishfully imposing changes to the MFTE program to mandate lower levels of Area Median Income (AMI), a higher percentage of set aside for rent restricted units (from 20 to 25 percent) and infeasible two and three bedroom requirements.

But we can also see Portland following the disastrous “incentive zoning” script played out in Seattle over the last decade. In an opinion piece in the same paper, the editorial board validates bad thinking :

It remains to be seen how the proposal will be structured. The current incentive involves granting developers up to an additional floor area ratio of 3 to 1 for adding affordable housing, according to Joe Zehnder, the chief planner for the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. They’re also grappling with where to set the price per square foot that developers would have to pay in lieu of providing affordable housing if they want the extra square footage.

“Just like anything, we should get good value for what we’re giving up,” said Zehnder.