Skip to main content
FIRE SALES COULD LOWER RENTS
I just read your article about the Ritz-Carlton building [“The Towering Inferno,” WW, March 12]. Great read, packed with super-interesting stuff.
My one quibble was a perspective thing at the very end: “...Portland might lose, too [by not getting the $7.8 million promised to dodge affordability].” I agree the story means Portland’s coffers will take that one-time hit. But if a $500 million building gets sold off at a fire sale price of $300 million, and then again for $150 million (for example), that could be a huge win for Portland’s vitality (and for its soul) because it would unlock the possibility of rental costs dropping too. Artists, quirky upstarts, and small businesses in general can’t survive under $1,200-per-square-foot rents (nor $400 per square foot for that matter). The city needs a concerted effort to bring rental prices down, and building fire sales can be a great mechanism for removing the central roadblock to that objective. I think we should applaud it.
Yeah, I know fire sale price reductions mean lower property taxes for the affected buildings, but the broader revitalization impact would increase other tax revenues. Nothing would do more for Portland’s tax coffers than to make Portland cool again, and I don’t see how we can do that when quirky businesses are effectively shut out by steep rents. The tax revenue upside to deflating rents is harder to quantify than the downside, but that shouldn’t lead us to assume it’s any less real.
Josh Rushton
Southeast Portland
STOP PLAYING SHEL GAMES
So, are we now supposed to believe that Willamette Week has more wisdom than Shel Silverstein? And what does Willamette Week want to do with all that wisdom? Have the city forester fired?
The article “The Taking Tree” [WW, March 5] doesn’t convince me that the author knows better than the good folks at Portland Parks & Recreation about personnel management. Jenn Cairo leads a program that is the envy of our neighboring Northwest cities, a program that, among other things, tries to get citizens to understand that trees are a common good, whether on private or public land. In the dominant culture, that is a lesson that is hard for many citizens and even other city bureaus to understand. An idea that understandably will run into opposition, and cause conflict that requires efforts from all parties to work to resolve to the benefit of the greater community. An idea that occasionally requires sacrifice.
For me, the article doesn’t make the case that these conflicts are anywhere as one-sided as the author would like us to believe. Despite the downright blasphemous cover art and the demonizing tone of the article, trees provide essential ecosystem services in urban areas, including cooling, carbon sequestration, stormwater management, wildlife habitat, air pollution capture, and mental, physical and spiritual well-being, for all of us.
If anything, the article shows that trees don’t take, people do.
James Thompson
Northwest Portland
USE CARROT, NOT TWIG
I understand the intent of the Tree Code and I agree with its goals. I don’t think anyone is saying Portland shouldn’t have a beautiful tree canopy. But threatening a $1,000-per-day fine or six months of jail time isn’t the way to go about it. Urban Forestry should use incentives to achieve this goal, not penalties. Surely the cost of 27 inspectors could provide ample incentives to residents. Today, the Tree Code disincentivizes planting of trees for fear of draconian enforcement action. That needs to change.
Write your city councilors and come to the Urban Forestry Commission meeting on March 20 and the Finance Committee meeting on March 24.
Michael Smitasin
Southeast Portland
STUDENT TESTS HAVE FATAL FLAWS
I see how opt-outs pose a data-collection issue for state testing, but there are other concerns that make me question the ability of these tests to produce meaningful conclusions around literacy rates [“Missing Context,” WW, March 5]. Most importantly, the Oregon Statewide Assessment System tests suffer from fatal design flaws. They are ugly, cluttered, and do not resemble any other text-based task a student might encounter in the classroom or in “real life.” It is difficult for many students to distinguish between the instructions, the texts, and the questions they must respond to, even after completing a practice test. After reading and answering questions about one random text, perhaps a poem, students are pushed automatically to another random text, this time maybe a complex nonfiction article we would normally analyze over the course of a few days. Students are encouraged to read and respond to something like six texts in one sitting. None of this is appropriate to how typical middle school brains tackle reading. My district places no importance on these test results—they are quite literally never mentioned. Kids pick up on that vibe. (We use other, more user-friendly benchmark tests that we reference frequently.) Each year around one-third of my students simply click randomly through the test, then spend the rest of the week playing computer games or reading while a few devoted kids painstakingly finish. Most teachers shrug all this off as an easy, if painfully boring week, but it’s a poor use of classroom time, student brain power, and state resources.
Andy M
North Portland