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Tuesday June 3, 2025

Reading Toward a Better City

The City Council had a relatively light agenda this week, but we did pass a few meaningful items last night that I want to highlight:

  • We approved the Storefront Improvement Revolving Loan Program (Order 224-24/25), a Portland Development Corporation initiative that will help small businesses revitalize downtown. This program will complement the Vacancy Ordinance currently under review by the Housing & Economic Development Committee. It’s one of several tools we’re working on to bring energy and commerce back to the downtown core.
  • We formally appointed a new IT Director. Phil Doughty was confirmed to the role. While he’s already been serving in the department, I’m particularly interested in learning more about his vision for safeguarding public data. Cloud-based systems and outsourced platforms raise questions for me about who controls city data and what contracts we’re locking ourselves into.
  • We received the Rent Board’s annual report. This comes just in time for the Council workshop on Rent Control enforcement happening next Monday. That meeting will explore how well our policies are working and what enforcement gaps may still exist.

We also postponed the final city budget vote to June 23, which gives me a little space to share something else that’s been on my mind: how we think and talk about growth, government, and the role of public institutions in shaping our future.

I’ve been reading three books that are informing how I approach this moment of transformation for Portland. A constituent recommended The Architecture of Urbanity by Vishaan Chakrabarti, and I’m so glad he did! It’s a visually stunning, philosophically grounded book about the role of design in shaping human relationships—how public infrastructure can foster what Chakrabarti calls “positive social friction.” That is: buildings and neighborhoods that invite us to rub up against difference, meet people we might otherwise never meet, and grow more fully into our shared humanity.

I’ve been reading it alongside Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (currently gracing about 1 in every 5 Democratic nightstands, I suspect) and Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman, a deeper dive into the history of American infrastructure policy and our increasingly fractured political psyche.

Each book is part of a bigger conversation: about how we build, what we fear, and who we’re building for.

Abundance and the Seduction of Speed

Abundance makes the case for getting government out of its own way by streamlining approvals, clearing the path for new housing and clean energy projects, and reclaiming the spirit of Roosevelt-era building. It argues that our permitting and environmental review systems, while well intentioned, are now so cumbersome that they paralyze progress.

While I appreciate the urgency of that message, I also share the concerns of many on the Left who worry that this so-called “abundance agenda” is just neoliberalism in new clothes. If we build without equity, we build for gentrification. If we innovate without redistribution, we widen the wealth gap. Abundance skirts these hard truths. It gestures at justice, but avoids the structural analysis that real change demands. It’s an easy read. ( Perhaps too easy.) It packages ambition in the language of uplift, while sidestepping the politics of extraction, power, and ownership. That makes it palatable for a liberal moment desperate for hope but unwilling to confront its complicity. Maybe that’s why it’s so popular. It’s not fluff exactly, but it is politics with the rough edges sanded off.

Why Nothing Works and the Slow Death of State Capacity

Why Nothing Works offers something deeper and more provocative. Dunkelman starts with a premise everyone can agree on: something in our country no longer works. Big, complex public projects that once took years now take decades, if they get built at all. Infrastructure is crumbling. Agencies are hamstrung by bureaucracy. Trust in institutions has collapsed. And despite the fact that most of us agree we want functional schools, safe housing, reliable transit, thriving neighborhoods, we remain stuck, unable to course-correct or rebuild the systems we need to make those things real.

Dunkelman traces this dysfunction to a political over-correction. Progressives, in an effort to hold power accountable, stripped it of its ability to act. We moved too far in the Jeffersonian direction, toward endless checks, veto points, and community input processes that prevent anything from being built at all.

He walks us through a dizzying number of examples: transmission lines blocked for years by lawsuits, a single public toilet in San Francisco that took ten years and $1.7 million to install. These aren’t just punchlines; they’re symptoms of a system that has over-corrected so far toward “saying no” that it’s forgotten how to say yes.

Dunkelman pushes us to confront a harder question: Who decides what gets built, what gets sacrificed, and according to whose values?

He argues that government has a responsibility to build—even when building causes discomfort. That progress always involves burdens. If government can’t ensure that people have access to affordable homes, then we have to question whether it’s doing its most basic job.

It’s a hard message for progressives to hear, but an essential one. As he puts it, progress requires “Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends,” or the hammer of centralized authority in service of universal freedom and opportunity.

The Architecture of Urbanity and the Moral Imagination of Design

That’s why Chakrabarti’s book is so refreshing. He doesn’t just theorize; he builds. Literally. His projects tackle climate collapse, xenophobia, war, and inequality. He offers not just design, but an ethic. One rooted in the belief that public infrastructure—mass transit, public housing, green space—is the social glue that holds diverse cities together.

And he doesn’t shy away from the political tension this work requires. As he puts it: “Rare is the leader who takes the risk of pointing it out when [community push-back] is wrong.”

That line stuck with me because the failure to build—housing, infrastructure, trust—often lies not in technical barriers, but in our political fear of making trade-offs, of offending, or acting. Sometimes, the loudest voices in a room don’t speak for the majority. And while we must always listen—especially when people raise concerns about safety, livability, or displacement—we also have to be brave enough to distinguish between resistance that protects the community and resistance that stalls progress for everyone.

The truth is that cities must grow or they calcify. If we want a Portland that’s alive, inclusive, and dynamic, we have to be willing to make some tradeoffs.

We Are Not Losers or Winners—We Are a Public

And that brings me to the the question that is top of mind for many Portland residents right now: how will the revaluation impact me? Last night during public comment, someone described the revaluation rollout in stark terms: if your property value increased above the 30th percentile, you’re a “loser” because your taxes will go up; if it increased less, you’re a “winner.” That framing misses something essential.

If your home value increased, it means your investment in Portland has grown. Yes, your tax bill may go up, but so has the value of your asset. And those tax dollars fund the infrastructure and services we all rely on and that allow us to grow: schools, roads, housing safety, emergency response. That’s not a loss—it’s a contribution to the public good.

We cannot solve our biggest problems through individual calculation alone. We need to move away from zero-sum thinking and think and act like a public. Because we’re not competitors in a game of winners and losers. We are co-investors in a city we share. The more we embrace that, the better chance we have of shaping a Portland that works—for all of us.

    ksykes@portlandmaine.gov 207-558-5764

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