I just showed you pictures of about 200 houses on 60 acres, all of them within a future five-minute walk of a massively expensive new rail line to downtown and almost all of them requiring mortgage payments of $2,400 or more—which makes very few of them affordable to a family of four making the Portland area’s median income of $81,400.

And these are the prices before a rail line has even been built.

The strangest part of the images above is that these home prices are essentially mandatory. On most of these lots, dividing the land into so much as a duplex would be illegal.

If that’s not a recipe for luxury housing, I don’t know what is.

In defense of Portland’s housing strategy document, it does identify this issue. All told, apartment buildings are illegal on 48 percent of the land near Portland’s potential stations, it notes. Upzoning this currently exclusive land to allow four-to-six story buildings would eventually make the rail line useful to many thousands more people while also triggering the affordability requirements that kick in for buildings with more than 20 homes.

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Here are the document’s proposed remedies: “a corridor-wide station area planning process, beginning in select station areas using a fair housing and health equity lens” and followed by “additional affordability goals and incentives” to get below-market housing built.

In other words, Portland should legalize apartment buildings near its future rail stations, then find offsets that ensure a meaningful number of those new homes are affordable to people who truly need to ride the train.

This isn’t rocket science. And, unlike purchasing the corridor’s old apartment buildings (which, to recap, we the public should also do) it might not even require new dedicated tax revenue.

But it would require big changes to the neighborhoods in the pictures above. And Portland, for all its good intentions, currently has no timeline for making them.

Shawn Fleek, a spokesman for OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, told me Tuesday that the city recommendation to upzone these station areas into mixed-income apartment buildings with community benefit agreements could easily be forgotten, just like “any of those clauses that is going to benefit low-income communities and communities of color.”

“We’re looking for definitive material gains and not just empty promises,” Fleek said.

Every city in Cascadia needs better transit, and any proposed rail line has promise. But unless we make it legal for lots of people to actually live near rail stations if they want to, that promise will indeed be empty—for most of us.