@Steve B. Morning!
I think I agree in part with what you're saying...that the activists and city council are connecting housing and homelessness to a degree that isn't correct. Yes, there are people who are on the street who can't afford to live in the PDX metro area. And, I believe that is a much, much smaller percentage of the total homeless population when compared to those who can't find housing due to mental illness, addiction, etc. I feel like it's a shell game or three-card monte that the city/county/state leadership is playing-"look over here at the 'housing crisis' not at policies that have actually exacerbated the problem"
I totally agree in the short term that rents have softened (although I just finished a rehab in one of my rentals and went for $1,000/mo to $1,495 so I'm pretty happy there!!), especially at the higher end as the new condos that have been springing up come online. I do expect that flattening to continue for awhile. That top end dictates and caps what I can charge for my rentals and puts some downward pressure on rents across the whole metro area.
But I think that's temporary and that on the whole, the PDX metro area is still facing a housing shortage and here's why...
New construction permits are far out-paced by the influx of people to the Portland Metro area. To date in 2019, there have been 32 residential new-construction permits finalized, issued, or approved to issue in the city. There are about 400 in the pipeline for review/inspection. On the mixed-use/multifamily commercial side, I found just over 30 permits have been applied for in that same time span, with less than half since the rent control ordinance went into effect in Feb. Those numbers aren't outside the norm with what the last few years have brought. 1/2 of the 2018 new home permits are still under review and all together 2017 and 2018 saw under 1,500 total new home permits.
I'm not an economist so maybe I'm missing some numbers from somewhere. What I'm not missing is that forecasts put another 400,000 people in the Portland metro area in the next ten years. Where are they going to live? We're not building homes fast enough. Even the large Polygon developments like what's going in out off Roy Rogers road isn't going to put a dent in the housing we'll need in the next 10 years. Not everyone wants to live in a high-rise condo (nor can everyone afford to). Because of that, I'm saying we've got a housing shortage.
We're in this for the long-term and although it's soft now, I just don't see how the housing stock recovers, makes up ground, and gets ahead to a point where landlords don't win. To the original poster's point, I'd say build anything they can on land they own so they can be making money off of it. There are plenty of people who won't/can't/don't want to live in an apartment/condo building so a detached unit /ADU should be a great long-term play because people will pay more for that privacy.
Here's an interesting link to a Portland Business Alliance article with a great graph on Portland's housing, employment, and population growth:
https://portlandalliance.com/advocacy/2018-economic-check-up.html
And, none of this gets into existing home sales, which continue to decline year over year as I think people are priced out of the market/hole up in whatever home they've got rather than moving up and creating velocity in the market.
Mathew
*I know some of the numbers I used are Portland specific and some are metro area-It's not ideal and at the same time, they still illustrate my point :)
