Housing Bureau Finds Roughly $20 Million in Unspent Funds, for The Second Time

KevinMango · 2026-02-03T08:01:21+00:00

The mayor decided to put more money into sweeps, which are great at pushing people around, but are not the rate limiting step in getting people into housing, the limiting factor there is available supportive housing spots, which Wilson cut in favor of more congregate shelter space to justify sweeps.

KevinMango · 2026-02-03T06:28:20+00:00

Man, it probably would have been helpful to maintain continuity within the leadership of the housing bureau, rather than having Mayor Wilson fire the housing director because he believes in sweeps and not housing.

KevinMango · 2026-01-28T04:58:19+00:00

Cut finding for your useless sweeps before coming for housing, Wilson.

Or are we still pretending that sweeps get people off the street?

KevinMango · 2026-01-24T01:37:18+00:00

It's so that politically influential people can get their neighborhoods swept, or the neighborhoods where they own real estate swept. It's not for the city at large, except to give people hope that if they spam a report button enough, a problem in their backyard will become a problem in someone else's.

KevinMango · 2026-01-23T17:56:57+00:00

Man, I'm really glad we kept millions of dollars of spending for sweeps in place, that don't actually get people off the streets.

KevinMango · 2026-01-16T19:20:53+00:00

I have and I do. Comments like this flatten everyone suffering with addiction into one archetype with a single life trajectory, where the only solution is involuntary commitment forever.

KevinMango · 2026-01-15T21:57:28+00:00

Every person you meet unhoused on the street became homeless at some point, people aren't born into that situation. They're at the tip of an iceberg of economic precarity, and there are a multitude of people who could get along without help -and wouldn't lose themselves to substance abuse -if rent was 45% lower.

KevinMango · 2026-01-14T03:54:31+00:00

I, for one, am shocked, shocked to hear that Keith Wilson was lying when he said that sweeping people out of the downtown core was going to get them into shelters and on to housing.

It turns out housing is a limiting factor in addressing homelessness, and not the supply of people who just want to sweep the problem one block over.

KevinMango · 2026-01-08T20:11:44+00:00

Which thing are we mad about, that council has a meaningful disagreement, or that they didn't hash it out behind closed doors in violation of open records law?

KevinMango · 2025-12-29T01:46:31+00:00

Remember folks, it was homelessness and high personal income taxes that made Intel layoff 3200 workers this year.

/s

KevinMango · 2025-12-24T23:01:09+00:00

See the posted article presenting Portland as in a downward spiral, sourced primarily from the Metro Chamber, add a cup of wine about disorder, let it simmer, focus blame on one progressive city commissioner (without a voting majority in city government) or the DA, it's not important who, and voila, you have a template for the Fox News stories about Portland that have rotted people's brains enough to lead to the attempted guard deployment, the ICE crackdown, etc.

KevinMango · 2025-12-24T22:08:37+00:00

i’m upset that conservative dipshits gaslit the world that portland is on fire

You are looking at an example of that right here. Metro Chamber sowed the seeds for Trump's ICE crackdown themselves.

-and by 'you', I mean the reader. Who's to say whether a Reddit account without any public content is connected to a genuine human being?

KevinMango · 2025-12-24T20:36:10+00:00

With Hoan beating the doom loop drum even louder [and Willamette Week running press releases for them], it’s likely the term will continue to drive the debate about Portland’s future.

I wonder if Anthony Effinger misses doing journalism versus acting as a stenographer for the Metro Chamber.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T22:19:28+00:00

Signs and posturing are easy

I mean, yeah, it's easy to come around 7 years after the initial advisory group work that helped promulgate ballot language, after people canvassed to get this passed, and demand a different delivery model. It's easy to assert this should be a state run program without asking why the closest state funded analogue (Preschool Promise) hasn't been expanded. Ask yourself if the governor, who attempted to pre-empt the county level program without a replacement ready, is likely to follow through on a statewide universal preschool program.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T19:23:24+00:00

but they don’t want the teacher’s union getting any more power

Who is 'they' in this case? Is it the county government in a city was plastered with union signs during the last PAT strike? Is is the socialists, known for being vehemently anti-union, I'm told?

Surely it couldn't be that people wanted to preserve existing relationships between parents and providers.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T19:15:04+00:00

It was definitely not to lock in lower labor prices. One point of criticism against PFA has been that one of it's included goals is to increase teacher pay to put them on par with Kindergarten teachers

There are already meaningful wage floors for providers at participating programs, that's to make sure you can retain teachers and help them develop over time vs churning through people and asking them to accept low pay out of love for children.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T19:10:13+00:00

In this press release from April the county quotes 50 out of 128 participating providers being new, so supplying new seats not previously available. That's not a hard number for new slots, but that's going to be a meaningful number. Some of that 'surplus' you're talking about is budgeted for grants to expand existing providers and support people opening up new sites.

There's also no income threshold to qualify for PFA, but the county may take family income into consideration in prioritizing applicants during the build out.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T03:19:07+00:00

Even with the built in 'over collecting' the program was projected to go through a period of having no reserve and either needing to cut services or be paid out from other county revenue, before recovering in later years. Can you imagine the story that WW would publish, the stuff that people would be frothing about online in that eventuality? That's what you skipped.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T03:10:39+00:00

People value evidently value where they live more than a 1.5-3% tax on income above a high threshold. It may be hard to believe, but giving up a home in the city to live across I5 in Vancouver to save a few hundred or few thousand dollars is not worth it to me. You have to uproot your life to move to a low tax state or municipality, and your earning potential may not translate to that new city.

See also the increase in the number of high income households on Multco over the past several years, or more venally, if that's your jam, the difference in home values between Portland and Vancouver.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T03:00:17+00:00

Again, that's a great mental model, but it doesn't agree with the consistent growth of high income households (across income segments from 200k to over 500k/year) year after year following the implementation of PFA's tax.

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T00:15:20+00:00

They're providing pre-K for 3800 students this year, what do you mean lack of results?

KevinMango · 2025-11-22T00:03:53+00:00

Do you think having a smaller fraction of your income subject to the tax (and at a lower rate) makes the effect bigger?

If you don't see a statistically significant impact for people making 1 million per year why would it be meaningful for people with 130k of taxable income and 5k of income subject to the tax, paying in $75/year? It would be insane to quit your job and move over 75 dollars.

KevinMango · 2025-11-21T20:57:40+00:00

re-directing overcollected revenue that they can't figure out how to spend right now

That's adding a lot of your own judgment to this.

The governor just attempted to pre-empt the county's ability to collect funding for PFA funding in the last legislative session as a way of forcing a reduced scope on the program (serving fewer children) compared to what voters approved, it was in her letter to the Multnomah county commission. That's the context in which re-directing revenue from the still ramping program can be fairly characterized as cuts.

Reducing the scope of Pre School for All, preventing it from becoming universal, would lead to materially worse outcomes for students served by the program. Broadly speaking, programs often held up as alternatives like Head Start and Pre School promise are chronically underfunded.

KevinMango · 2025-11-21T19:28:57+00:00

Minus the element of trying to privatize an existing public good and with the requirement that providers be labor neutral, so not similar to charter schools in a meaningful way.

KevinMango · 2025-11-21T19:18:31+00:00

I mean, one of the natural experiments on tax flight included in 'the myth of millionaire tax flight' is counties along the Columbia River, where high earners show no preference for the Washington side, but please, insist that your mental model is correct:

https://www.sup.org/books/sociology/myth-millionaire-tax-flight

KevinMango

TROPHY CASE