Image by Chris Orcutt.
Tearing down old, affordable housing in the name of progress is an old story. Oregon Public Broadcasting details a slice of mid-20th-century Portland history in which new construction ruined low-cost shelter and triggered widespread homelessness in the city. At one time, single-room occupancy hotels housed low-income workers for the equivalent of $12 a night in 2023 rates. Outside the city, counties managed “poor farms” that, despite sometimes awful conditions, provided an additional low-cost resource. Then came a shift: “… in the 1950s and ‘60s, Portland began tearing down these hotels as part of a national shift toward urban renewal, where cities leveled poor and minority neighborhoods to make way for higher-end housing, businesses and other development meant to spur economic growth.” Sound familiar? Affordable rental units plummeted. In the following decades, pricy high-rise apartment buildings that are a hallmark of gentrification popped up in many neighborhoods. As happened nationwide, rents and home prices have climbed rapidly since the early 2000’s and homelessness has proliferated.
A 2019 Oregon law requires cities to adopt the current version of the “tear down the old and make way for the new” mindset: middle housing. This is housing that’s somewhere between an apartment complex and a single-family lot on the density spectrum. The movement for middle housing often cites a nationwide “housing shortage” as the main cause of unaffordable housing and promotes massive growth in housing construction as the solution. To that end, Oregon mandated that any city with a population over 10,000 rezone for middle housing, essentially outlawing single-house zoning in those areas. In 2025 the legislature went further and passed a handful of bills designed to grease the machinery for a more rapid expansion of middle housing. HB 2138 will force cities to further loosen zoning regulations. A press release from the governor’s office explains how other related bills will provide architectural templates and subsidized loans for developers as well as loans for municipalities to expand roads, water, and sewage for the new development. These kinds of details help clarify that middle housing isn’t really about affordable housing. It’s an economic development strategy focused on real estate. It’s about changing zoning to make it more enticing to demolish old, affordable housing and build multiple market-priced units in the same location, allowing investors to profit from the sheer scale of units that can be squeezed onto one lot.
Because this movement is accompanied by rhetoric about affordability, reducing homelessness, and keeping carbon footprints to a minimum, it’s tempting to place it somewhere on the liberal-left continuum, and in fact it’s uncommon to find left critique of the issue. Choices about urban housing tend to get posed as a simple dichotomy between two options: urban infill (middle housing) and suburban/exurban sprawl. No one wants to be pro-sprawl. But there are good reasons to oppose middle housing, ones based in concerns for social justice and ecology. Middle housing stinks of local politics held firmly in the clutches of real estate and finance. The most common rationale for it is the ubiquitous “housing shortage” narrative. It’s been cited by NPR, among many outlets: “A severe housing shortage in the U.S. means many people can’t afford to buy homes in their communities.” There just aren’t enough houses out there, and the limited supply is driving up prices, the story goes. But according to the WSJ, “The U.S. housing market had nearly a half million more sellers than buyers in April (of 2025).” The shortage narrative relocates the high price of housing away from structural causes and related factors and places it within a simplistic “supply and demand” perspective. The neoliberal solution, middle housing, is to relax zoning and build more units. Social inequality, fiscal policy, and gentrification can’t be considered causal factors driving up prices.
The evidence so far suggests that in Portland, Oregon, middle housing is more expensive per square foot than other types of housing. The fact that the Democrats at the state level can’t seem to talk about anything other than the “housing shortage” makes it easy to see that the party remains tied to convoluted neoliberal policies both locally and nationally.
Carbon Footprints
Middle housing advocates like 1000 Friends of Oregon promote middle housing as an environmentally friendly path to affordability, a path that respects the state’s land use planning system established in the 1970’s. It’s a system based on urban growth boundaries that encourages urban infill instead of sprawl. Mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club take a similar stance. Growth is inevitable, they claim, and urban infill is the way to do it. Studies do in fact show that rural residents use 4% more carbon per capita than urbanites. Suburbanites fare the worst, using 8% more than urban residents. Middle housing groups often cite data like this as support for their positions.
The absent and crucial point here is that new construction, middle housing or otherwise, never offers a greener footprint than renovating or expanding existing structures. According to the UN Environmental Program, “The buildings and construction sector is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, accounting for a staggering 37% of global emissions,” more than transportation. The World Economic Forum tells us that renovating and retrofitting older houses emits half as much carbon as building a new structure of the same size. In Eugene, Oregon, the city’s zoning policy follows the state mandate for rezoning in any city over 10,000. It allows a developer to buy an older house on a lot, tear it down, and build up to six three-story structures, a CO2 footprint to be reckoned with. Oddly enough, Eugene’s code doesn’t require that duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes actually be touching each other and sharing common walls, a logical feature if energy conservation and carbon emissions are actual concerns.
Economic Forces beyond Local Control
Unexamined by middle housing promoters is the effect of federal interest rates and financial policy on real estate prices. The numerous instances of quantitative easing from 2008 onward increased the money supply and drove real estate prices upward. Real estate prices became detached from basic inflation before that, as early as the 1990’s, and the curve has grown steeper in the 2000’s. The federal funds effective rate has historically declined as real estate values have decoupled from broader inflation. Low interest rates have coincided with quantitative easing for much of the last 20 years in a policy mix that favors stock market returns, pricy real estate, speculative investment, and tech. The role of large private equity-funded firms can’t be understated either. Numerous articles in ProPublica detail the invasion of the family housing market, which is happening even in small cities like Eugene. In 2025, the US Justice Department and ten states sued a group of private equity firms who owned a total of 1.3 million units for algorithmic rental pricing practices. Suffice it to say that in a global economy marked by inequality and the free movement of capital, private equity and landlordism exercise leverage on local markets beyond what most would imagine.
The Portland Experience
Portland, Oregon has a middle housing program called the Residential Infill Project that has studied the effects of middle housing from 2018 to 2024. It’s worth looking at the findings, which are mixed and ultimately fail to provide strong support for the idea that middle housing substantially lowers housing costs. On a positive note the report suggests that middle housing appears not to have encouraged the carbon sin of demolishing older housing–at least not any more than previous policies did. Many neighborhood activists opposed to middle housing argued that demolitions would inevitably rise with policies that encouraged new construction on existing plots. Demolitions have reportedly not increased, and number of new units built compared to number of structures demolished more than doubled. Another key finding listed is that new middle housing units sold for an average of $250,000 less than new detached homes. This price difference, however, is easily explained by the fact that middle housing is smaller and has smaller lot sizes than a typical detached house.
Crucially, we learn later in the report that middle housing units are more expensive per square foot than other houses–a lot more expensive. The square foot cost of a quadplex was found to be a full 34% higher than that of a detached home. These are expensive little units–not exactly the kind of housing that working families are looking for. The much promised overall decrease in the cost of real estate per square foot promised by the supply and demand champions has failed to materialize. The opposite has occurred. It’s not surprising that growth and gentrification fuel higher costs.
We can also bet that the older houses and apartment buildings that are being demolished rented for less than the new units. Now the old rentals are gone, replaced by cute, costly units designed for one or two professionals, not families in need of affordable housing. In Eugene, a planned apartment project is too large to count as middle housing, but it demonstrates the same pattern of tearing down the old and building something expensive in its place. The local weekly reports that the old building where Lane Community College had a downtown campus is slated to be torn down. The new project to be built in its place will have some rent-controlled studios, thankfully, but they are estimated to cost $1,100 a month. Studios without rent control will be a gut-wrenching, by Eugene standards, $1,500. This is not San Francisco. Wages are low. One wonders if the units will even fill. But for some reason the city keeps pushing forward, and five-story apartment complexes dot downtown Eugene’s skyline like shrines to landlordism.
Democratic Politics and Fading Vision
Neoliberalism used to be a term discussed in the context of international trade. It was the inspiration for the national and supra-national policies of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. The game has always been driven by a simple question: how can we make a world in which people and institutions who have money can make more money, more easily? This project, so one-dimensional and damaging in its essence, required a PR project to make it palatable. Enter the Democratic Party of the 1990’s. The job was to push an investor’s dream yet cloak the project in liberal, humanitarian, environmental, and scientific rhetoric. It was humane, green, tech-driven, backed up by data, and inevitable.
Decades ago, cronyism at the local level meant doling out public works contracts to favored local developers and the like. These days, local Democrats bend over backwards to benefit investors they don’t even know. They can think of nothing better than fine tuning policies that help people from around the world pillage their real estate markets. This is fine-tuning of neoliberal policy at the municipal level, and it’s accompanied by the same parade of nonsense about affordability, environmentalism, and inevitability. And don’t forget, it’s always backed up by “data”–unless you look closely.
In 2024, Eugene elected a mayor who highlighted a housing shortage as the most important issue facing the city, and Democrats from former US Rep. Peter DeFazio to former Eugene mayor Kitty Piercy lined up to endorse her. Somehow in all the talk we’re not hearing much about landlordism, gentrification, interest rates, quantitative easing, wealth inequality, or Portland’s sad history of demolishing affordable housing. Instead, we are told by a visionless Democratic party that housing is the local issue of our times, and the quest to build more of it is a heroic one.
Even in progressive towns like Portland and Eugene people seem unable to imagine a green left alternative. In Eugene, Kaarin Knudson won over 95% of the vote in an uncontested mayoral race. According to the website for her mayoral campaign, she’s a licensed architect who started a nonprofit that advocates for middle housing. When Oregon governor Tina Kotek was the Oregon House Speaker, she pushed hard for the state’s original middle housing legislation, HB 2001. As NPR puts it, “House Speaker Tina Kotek, a Democrat, was the driving force behind Oregon’s bill.” In 2025 Kotek was the champion of HB 2138, the expansion of middle housing legislation. The bill speeds up the permitting process and ends that pesky requirement of providing public notice to adjacent property owners. Middle housing is a cynical policy draped in disingenuous rhetoric. Forget carbon footprints, real affordability, or trying to end homelessness. The plan is simply to build, build, build.
