News

ARTICLE
Date ArticleType
10/31/2018 Member News

Courts refuse to overturn Portland Parks SDC


The Oregon Supreme Court declined to review an Appeals Court decision that upheld the City of Portland’s controversial Parks SDC. A coalition that included HBA and several other construction and Realtor organizations challenged the new SDC when it was adopted two years ago. While we had a number of concerns with the new SDC, the biggest by far was that the City didn’t start with the establishment of a Capital Improvement Plan nor did it use a level of service based on existing acres per 1,000 residents. Instead, the City placed arbitrary values on all existing “parks”, including Forest Park, and used this to justify a Parks SDC over three times higher than what it had been. They also disregarded accounting for existing deficiencies in their current parks system.

While HBA and our partners in the lawsuit realized we were unlikely to get relief from a Court system that gives strong deference to cities in how they establish SDCs, we knew that we needed to exhaust all legal remedies first. We’ve been working with our State Association, OHBA, on legislation that, if passed, would help bring more clarity and guardrails around Parks SDCs in particular, which have risen disproportionately to all other SDCs and have a huge impact on housing affordability in our region. Those efforts will now be the focal point of our work to create more of a balance between funding infrastructure and the impact our current system has on housing costs.