Affordable Housing Institute : US

Having already mined Robert Bruegmann’s fascinating Sprawl: A Compact History for disproofs (Part 1 and Part 2) and insights about cities, I want to finish with his examination of Portland, Oregon’s thirty-year experiment in what might be called a monetarist approach to land use:

 

The Portland Postulate

Restrict supply and you will manage growth and prevent sprawl.

What was the Portland experiment?

Not as much fun as the Harrad experiment ….

The longest-running, most extensive, best-documented and most controversial assault on sprawl in this country has been the one launched by the state of Oregon and the Portland urban area.

Page 203.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this radical exercise in growth prevention sprang from the late-Sixties rhetoric of my own baby boom generation:

The campaign for this legislation, led by Tom McCall, the state’s popular Republican governor, was a good example of the slow-growth and no-growth attitudes of the [late 1960s and 1970s]. McCall fulminated against what he called the “grasping wastrels of the land,” which most people in the state automatically assumed to be real estate developers who catered to newcomers, particularly Californians. He decried, with provocative alliteration, the “sagebrush subdivision, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley.”

Page 203.

Of the two products issuing from the government factory — money and laws — which do you think Portland chose?

By law, metropolitan areas were required to maintain a twenty-year supply of land.

Unlike the case in Britain but similar to the way most American cities have set up growth control programs, the principal tool to manage growth was not the purchase of land or development rights but regulations restricting private development.

Page 205.

In those benighted days, the jurisprudence around regulatory takings of property rights was primitive, even largely unimagined, so the government-as-factory was able to enforce blockade without economic or political costs. (In later years a string of decisions, including Nollan, First English, Tahoe-Sierra, and Palazzolo, tested these limits, leading to last summer’s landmark Kelo decision.)

Whether it was compensable or not, Portland did it — froze land development.

Just add extensive land use regulations and let cure.

Did the Portland experiment work?

After more than twenty-five years in operation, the results of the Oregon experiment are controversial and puzzling. Growth control in Portland, like the text of the Bible, seems to provide almost anyone studying it evidence to bolster a pre-existing viewpoint.

According to proponents and many of the journalists writing for the national press, the Portland area growth management system has accomplished most of its goals. These individuals say that the Portland region today remains a highly livable, green metropolis that has managed to control its own destiny by careful planning. They claim that the Portland System has allowed the area to avoid excessive road building, introduce more public transportation, enhance the vitality of downtown, and conserve farmland in the urban periphery.

“A touch, a touch, I do confess it!”

Opposing views from responsible spokesmen?

Other observers range from skeptical of specific claims to adamant that the system as a whole has been a failure, and a fraud to boot. There is no doubt Portland is a beautiful and livable city, many of these individuals say, but much of this derives from its relatively small size, fairly homogenous population, mild climate, and magnificent natural setting.

It also helps considerably that, economically, the city did so poorly in comparison with other American cities and many of its West Coast neighbors during much of the mid-twentieth century. Partly because of this, it has remained a small city with neither the pollution that heavy industry would have generated, nor a large poor and minority population. None of this was the result of urban planning, these critics claim.

Pages 206-207

Urban planning success built on a firm foundation

 

Well, okay, setting aside the economic impact, did Portland’s urban planning restrain sprawl?

 

During the same period [1990-2000, when Los Angeles was reaching 7,000 people per square mile], Portland only edged upward from just over 3,000 to 3,350 per square mile. Critics of the Portland system have suggested that if Portland were able to double its density, which is what Metro’s plans call for, the result would not be to keep Portland distinctly different from Los Angeles. Instead, they say, the result would actually make Portland much more like Los Angeles.

Page 208

If Los Angeles, held up as the epitome of sprawl, is in fact twice as dense as managed Portland, just who is consuming land indiscriminately? And unless one is willing to adopt a population freeze as well, where do the people live?

Takes like chicken!

Meanwhile, did the anti-sprawl growth moratorium have unintended consequences?

 

Portland once had house prices below the national average; now these prices are well above. Defenders of the urban growth boundary argue that this was simply a result of high market demand. (Page 210)

High demand would presumably also be revealed by spillover development, and indeed Portland has hade much of that:

 

Critics also point out that, as in the case of London, the growth control mechanisms have tended to push a good deal of the growth out beyond the boundaries altogether. While none of the three counties that make up the Oregon part of greater Portland grew by even 25% in the 1990s, Clark County in Washington, located across the Columbia River, grew 45%. By 2000, more than 60,000 of these residents, mostly living in the city of Vancouver, Washington, commuted daily into Portland.

 

No ecosystem exists in perfect isolation; interdependence and interactivity are defining characteristics of self-organizing systems. “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it” is a useful perspective, but:

 

Jane Jacobs, certainly no fan of sprawl but even more suspicious of large-scale government and planning, wrote, ‘A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.’ Page 146, quoting from Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.

 

Here Portland, necessarily limited in its reach by both law (the state border) and geography (the Columbia River), has chosen, in much the manner of a township sending its trash elsewhere for landfill, has exported its density problem, only to see it returning every morning in hideous congestion.

 

Among the reasons given by the new residents of Clark County for their move was that they wanted to escape from the high land prices and property taxes on the Oregon side of the river, and also from the density, congestion, and land-use restrictions. Page 209.

You exercise free will, you get expelled from our anti-sprawl paradise

[Continued in Part 2]

Send post as PDF to