In his State of the City Address Monday evening, Portland Mayor Mark Dion urged the City Council to reconsider the city’s “Green New Deal” zoning policies in order to encourage housing development, and made a renewed plea for state financial assistance to shelter the city’s homeless population.

Mayor Dion struck an optimistic note at the start of his address, saying that Portland “stand[s] ready to seize tomorrow’s opportunities.”

“I’m convinced without reservation that Portland has the talent, the ingenuity and passion to make a future that we can all be proud of,” Dion said. “A future arriving every day to open the doors of possibilities, to shape a new vision for public, private and nonprofit partnership, that can create a Portland that we all want, but has yet to come.”

The major issues facing the city that Dion touched upon during his address were the lack of affordable housing, public safety and homelessness.

On the issue of affordable housing, Dion requested that the City Council take a second look at how “Green New Deal” environmental regulations and inclusionary zoning policies could be impacting the development of new housing in the city.

“Given that the demand for housing has not abated, I ask the Council to takes steps to reassess the Green New Deal’s inclusionary zone requirement, with a specific focus on the impact this fee has had on the development of residential housing units in this city,” Dion said.

“This standard has been employed long enough for the Council to make an objective evaluation of the effect of this requirement has had on the scale of housing that has or could be built in this city,” he said.

On public safety, Dion spoke to the fears that the people of Portland have shared with them for their safety, as well as quality of life issues like litter and discarded used needles.

“People are fearful from personal experience and from the possibility that they may be personally involved in such an event at any time,” Dion said.

“We can do better meeting the public’s expectation for community safety if we can restore the department to its authorized strength,” he added.

On the city’s homeless population, Dion said that during 2024 the city provided shelter 2,000 unique homeless individuals, about half of whom were from outside the city.

“Frankly, we are doing more than any other community in the state to meet that issue,” he said. “But as I said two years ago, and we are beginning to see it today, we are running out of runway to meet the demand.”

“We are running out of space, our staff is stretched too thin, and we cannot expect our taxpayers to continue to shoulder the financial burden involved in providing these services where half of the unhoused come from outside the city,” he added.

However, it appears as though Dion merely wants to shift that tax burden from the municipal level to the state level, as his next remark was to ask the city’s legislative delegation to request additional financial assistance from the state.

“Therefore, I ask Portland’s legislative delegation to press its influence in Augusta, and secure additional financial relief from the Legislature to address our diminishing capacity to meet the increasing demand for homeless services, which by any objective measurement should be defined as a state responsibility,” he said.