CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Middle Housing: When Neoliberalism Comes to Town

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:........

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