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Public dollars for affordable housing are hard to come by.

鈥淲hen we first became a bureau back in 2010, we had roughly $60 million in development funds, and it has been dwindling from there,鈥� said Javier Mena, assistant director of the Portland Housing Bureau.

This year, the PHB will have just $16 million to offer. To supplement that, Mayor Charlie Hales has proposed redrawing the city’s urban renewal areas. That could potentially provide many more millions of dollars in the coming years.

Tax exemptions on new affordable housing projects, by contrast, provide developers a discount on fees the city has yet to collect. When an exemption expires, the taxes are often exponentially greater than what they would have been without development, but critics contend that such a system allows property owners to shirk fiscal obligations.

In the mid-2000s, Portland offered a tax exemption to multifamily developers to encourage construction of housing in the central city, but it was scrapped over such concerns.