Portland’s wealthy elite is used to plenty of press for their gripes, half-baked policy ideas and attempts to overturn the will of the voters — whether on affordable housing, housing supports, police oversight, a more representative city council or the work of the Portland Clean Energy Fund.
They’re accustomed to big tax breaks and subsidies, not to paying their fair share for popular, effective and desperately needed community investments. Downtown developers and property owners want the government to support their businesses but leave everyone else to the mercy of the market.
Now, the commercial real estate moguls dominating Gov. Tina Kotek’s “downtown task force” are attacking Preschool for All’s small income tax, describing it as a hurdle to the recovery of Portland’s downtown. But modest income taxes on the wealthiest 5% of county families have nothing to do with downtown’s malaise. It’s the pandemic and working from home that’s changing downtown — and lowering the value of downtown buildings.
Nevertheless, some of our local papers — attuned to the desires of big money — are now going after the county’s new universal preschool program, approved resoundingly by the voters in November 2020. You’d never guess that Preschool for All is off to a really strong start and is a powerful economic development strategy.
The roll-out of Preschool for All has been much faster than hoped
Multnomah County faced a huge task in building a new, best practices preschool program, starting with kids with the biggest challenges and least access to preschool. Early childhood education and care were in crisis before the pandemic, hard to find, as expensive as rent and stuck in cheap premises. Teachers are badly paid and rarely offered benefits.
Preschool teachers make half of what elementary school teachers make, and elementary school teachers are underpaid. Preschool teachers quit every year because they can’t support their families. Small providers have been going out of business for at least two decades. Then COVID-19 hit, and one-in-five local providers folded.
Yet some critics assert the preschool rollout should have been faster. That view purposefully ignores the difficulty of building a high-quality, equitable program in an environment requiring big investments in capacity.
Actually, with over 1,400 kids participating in Preschool for All this fall, the program is surpassing its own thoughtfully developed goals, as shown in Table 1.
Preschool for All making big, needed investments in staff and facilities
Public investment in early childhood education and care pays off hugely in an arena where the private sector just can’t deliver. Preschool for All is expanding facilities and a skilled, diverse, multilingual workforce, as well as a reserve fund capable of maintaining service levels in recessions and a contingency fund for the unexpected.
Preschool for All is raising wages to recruit and retain highly skilled, experienced people. The program also provides professional development and coaching to participating child care providers and workers, while working with providers to help them qualify to offer the program in the future. They’re continuously evaluating the program to improve it.
A facilities fund will start granting and lending money in early 2024. Navigators have started helping providers make their way through the complex city permitting system to create more preschools.
Other public programs completely inadequate
Our other public early childhood programs are severely underfunded. Head Start, supplemented by Oregon Pre-Kindergarten, is available for only a fraction of the kids eligible because of their families’ poverty. Oregon’s Preschool Promise is tiny. Just over 5,000 spaces were available statewide in the 2022-2023 school year when more than 83,000 3 and 4-year-olds lived in Oregon.
There were only enough publicly funded child care spots for one-in-eight of Multnomah County’s 3, 4 and 5-year-olds in 2022. And these are too often open only for a few hours a day, part-week and part-year. Preschool for All is free for 30 hours a week for all families and up to 50 hours a week for families with incomes below the Self-Sufficiency Threshold.
Multnomah County is leading in the critical effort to push up the rock-bottom wages of early childhood educators. Head Start’s federal legislation requires payment at market rates, so it will have to follow suit and will benefit from better retention of experienced teachers.
Universal preschool is a strong economic development tool
The local economic payoff to public preschool investments is big and widespread. In the near term, parents can work more hours or get more training. Better-paid early childhood workers spend more at local businesses. For the future, providing preschool is the best way to increase high school graduation rates, leading to higher incomes and college enrollments, while lowering preschool participants’ future rates of unemployment and incarceration.
Eminent Upjohn Institute economist Timothy Bartik found local wages rise with a more skilled workforce, which attracts businesses seeking people more capable of using technology. Property values rise. Tax revenues go up while the need for social services declines.
Defending our voter-approved community investments in an inclusive economy
Flying in the face of all the evidence, Portland’s wealthy real estate tycoons — so powerful in our local politics — are pushing to kill the voter-approved Preschool for All 2026 tax bump of less than 1% needed to take the program to full universality as promised.
The Revitalize Portland group and other big real estate heirs would like us to believe that small, local taxes outweigh the massive federal tax cuts at the top created by Presidents Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
They are used to being subsidized. Portland’s Opportunity Zones, designated for big tax breaks to encourage business investment in poor neighborhoods, are available for the entire downtown. No housing expert thinks Portland lacks sufficient luxury residences, but that’s what we’re getting with the Ritz Carlton Residences, where a 3,000+ square foot penthouse goes for $9 million.
Wealthy downtown property owners are used to getting what they want from the mayor and City Council. They successfully pressured the city to force city workers back into the office for more days than their supervisors thought were needed. They’ve pushed city tax breaks to businesses that require employees to work downtown, wasting their time and money. They’ve shoved the cost of more commuting onto the community in the form of more traffic, worse air quality and faster climate change. Profitable employers pay less in taxes while the city makes big cuts in road maintenance and other essential services.
What local voters want and have strongly backed is universal preschool, more affordable housing, more support for homeless Portlanders, police oversight, climate change action and a more representative City Council. This community put a lot of work into people-powered campaigns to advocate for and win these policies with large electoral majorities.
We’re going to have to fight hard, now and in upcoming City Council elections, to defend what we’ve gained for the community through the democratic process.
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