State housing intervention doing us no favors locally

When McMinnville completed its richly detailed and documented City Center Housing Strategy in March 2020, it assured us it knew exactly where it was going and how it intended to get there, in terms of residential development in and near the community’s downtown core. It even identified two potential pilot projects — the block housing the fire station and the one with McMinnville Cooperative Ministries.

In fact, the city stretched its study area far enough to take in all the older neighborhoods lying between Cozine Creek on the south and Ninth Street on the north, from Highway 99W on the west to Three Mile Lane on the east, including the adjacent stretch of the 99W corridor itself. That’s not to mention the entire Gateway/Alpine district stretching up the Lafayette and Alpine spine as far north as 14th Street.

This comprehensive plan for residential development in the city core was built on the foundation of earlier studies, including the Downtown Improvement Plan of 2000, Growth Management Urbanization Plan of 2003, Third Street Streetscape Plan of 2005, Northeast Gateway Plan of 2012, Urban Renewal Plan of 2013, Parking Management Plan of 2018 and ongoing Housing Needs Analysis, Buildable Land Inventory and Housing Strategy studies. What could possibly go wrong?

Flash-forward just six years, and where are we now? At the point Tuesday night where the city council wasn’t even sure it had the legal authority to hear appellants on a downtown apartment complex destined to replace a historic church long ago vacated by its congregation.

The council waded in anyway, as a packed house had assembled for the opportunity. And we certainly feel that was the right call, no matter how this mess — one largely of the state legislative branch making — eventually gets sorted out by the state’s notoriously slow-moving judicial branch.

Back in 2020, the city thought it was getting out in front of a looming crisis when it noted: “As the Willamette Valley continues its growth in population, towns throughout the region are experiencing the flip side of expansion; as housing supply can’t keep up with demand, prices are rising. McMinnville is proactively seeking to identify how the city can absorb and foster housing, including infill and higher density housing to the city center, while maintaining its existing quality of life, complementing its unique sense of place.” And it managed to notch some notable successes, including the Stratus Village housing complex that opened earlier this year along the Highway 18 corridor.

Then the state stepped in with three bills in 2024, 2025 and 2026 that collectively imposed a vastly less nuanced approach, threatening even the fundamental right of opponents to appeal adverse local land use decisions.

Ironically, it was a heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all approach on the state’s part that set the stage for today’s affordable housing crisis in the first place. And now a heavy-handed one-size-fits-all state tilt in the other direction is tying the hands of local citizens and officials trying to help us dig our way out on some semblance of acceptable terms.

In the end Tuesday night, the city council followed the lead of the landmarks committee and planning commission in doing what it felt it had to in the face of the state’s draconian new mandates. It approved the project with a long list of “adjustments” it would never have agreed to of its own accord.

There are always forces in a community in uncompromising opposition to major new developments, and this one was no exception.

However, we feel confident this project may have eventually emerged on terms more broadly acceptable to the community, had the city’s staff personnel and elected officials been allowed to engage in the normal give and take, finding ground for constructive compromise along the way. If so, we may still have gotten a new complement of inner-city housing, but on a much lesser scale, better matching local values, without such great loss of parking and street safety. In short, a better fit in our treasured downtown historic district.

We have a lot more faith in fair-minded locals to address our evolving housing needs here than we do the fickle political class now assembling annually in Salem.

We wish the state would butt out and let us get on with it in our own way. We could do without drastic mandates serving to suppress due process and fan the flames of dissension.