The link has a paywall. Portland ranked third in what?

Third in "desirability for property developers", as if that were some kind of important metric for a city.

It is. Portland went from shockingly massively increasing home prices to declining home prices in no small part due to this.

Isn't it generally better to have affordable housing than shockingly massively increasing home prices?

Clearly not, in the context of this discussion. No city is better off by eviscerated its tax base.

Only if anyone want to live there. Why would anyone want to purchase a house or live in a place how ever affordable it is, where a mob might burn their house down.

The way I read this is that the more desirable a city is to property devs, the lower the cost of housing, which seems true. Affordable housing = Less scarcity, less scarcity comes from building more