On Wednesday, Portland’s city councilors tripped over one another to spell out their disagreements with a lineup of Northwest Portland homeowners who objected to the height of a proposed new apartment tower.

Then the council unanimously voted to give the anti-housing activists exactly what they had been asking for: no new homes on the site.

“We are a growing city, and there will be more height and there will be more density,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said.

Moments later, Wheeler joined his colleagues to block a tall, dense building, Fremont Place Apartments, that would have given 275 well-off renter households places to live that are not currently inhabited by poorer renters.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Fremont Place Apartments had previously been approved by the city’s staff and design commission, but was appealed to the city council with money from an anti-housing campaign headquartered in a two-year-old condo tower two blocks to the south.

“The city is so desperate for housing that it’s sacrificing the integrity of our city,” opposition leader Stanley Penkin, who bought his newly built Pearl condo in 2016 for $866,603, told Willamette Week in January. “Is it just build, build, build to the maximum at any cost?”

Today, the site of the proposed apartment building is a surface parking lot.

It wasn’t the height or density Wheeler objected to, the mayor said Wednesday, but the building’s proximity to the river. The city requires 25 feet of open space for the biking-walking trail, and the proposed design meets that standard. But the city also requires the building to continue to shift its mass away from the river at its higher levels: