Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from last Wednesday’s Part 1]

 

If Portland’s growth management has had the unintended effect of creating work traffic congestion, why don’t Portland’s citizens use its touted mass transit?

 

With transit use accounting for less than 2% of all trips in the region, it remains a fairly negligible factor in the vast majority of the metropolitan area.

 

Finally, [critics] charge, as the population has grown and the region has failed to keep up with the building of new roads, roadway congestion has gotten much worse even on the highways that parallel the new light rail lines.  They say that Metro’s own projections show that there is little likelihood that most people will abandon their cars and use transit, meaning that congestion will necessarily get worse in the future if current policies continue.  Page 212

 

I love Boston’s subway.  I use it twice every weekday, and would go mad if forced to drive.  But the subway, as a transportation mode, requires a city — a high-density solution – for people whose commutes can be measured in a few miles.  When people are more spread out — and Portland’s density restrictions compel them to be spread out — it’s seldom cost-effective:

 

The link with self-interest is often not as clear, as for example in the case of individuals advocating increased mass transit who are very unlikely to use much if it is built.  They assume that someone else will ride it and free up highway space for themselves.  (Pages 161-2)

 

And light rail, friendly though it sounds (one imagines a gleaming streetcar mag-levitating, Jetson-style, along its soaring roller-coaster curves), is the worst of both car and subway because it has to stop (a) for every scheduled stop, and (b) at every traffic light.  It’s ensnarled in traffic without the lane-changing ability of even the electric bus.  Boston has four subway lines, of which one (the Green Line) runs for much of its length as light rail, and so notoriously slow and unreliable (especially in snow!) is it that when we were looking for a house, the Boss insisted (to which I happily acquiesced) that we rule out anything on the Green Line. 

 

[Critics] also point to its slow speed …

 

I love the concept of trams, but have never found them practical.  Amsterdam has great trams, but to get somewhere, you take a bus or ride a bike.  Melbourne, one of Australia’s most delightful cities, has much-praised historical trolleys, which Nancy and I took one day. 

 

Melbourne streetcar

 

It was excruciatingly slow, with walking superior in the center city, and a car essential everywhere else.  So the trolleys, romantic though they be, are evolutionarily inferior.  In San Francisco, the only users of its signature cable cars are pure tourists.

 

… and the fact that it was designed as a way to take commuters in and out of downtown, which houses a constantly declining percentage of the jobs in the metropolitan area.  Page 212.

 

Whereas a fixed-line system is a huge bet on geographic stasis, jobs and people move with protean speed and complexity.  Light rail sounds cheaper than a subway — none of that tunneling — but reality always disappoints:

 

Critics further charge that the light rail system, like virtually every rail system in America the last several decades, not only came in heavily over budget and failed to live up to ridership projections but also siphoned scarce transportation dollars from all other transportation modes, particularly the more heavily used, more flexible, and more cost-effective buses.

 

Every choice to do is also a choice not to do. 

 

Unexpected permissible land uses proliferate.  Portland’s land-use restrictions also exempted farmers — because, after all, they’re bucolic and serene, not box houses.  This too had enduring and substantial unintended consequences:

 

[Portland] urban residents could get around [land use] restrictions by buying land in pieces just large enough to satisfy zoning requirements and calling their land a farm even if it never produced any farm income.  They were then free to erect enormous ‘farm’ houses indistinguishable from suburban McMansions. 

 

Markets are smarter and quicker (in an OODA-loop sense) than regulators, mightily though the regulators try:

 

So widespread was this tactic that the state in 1994 instituted a policy that required potential owners to prove that they had grossed at least $80,000 from the products of their so-called farm for several years before they were allowed to buy a house.

 

The Oregon Farm Bureau has estimated that nearly half of all farms in the state might already be hobby farms.  (Pages 214-215)

 

Marie Antoinette had the idea first.

 

It seems hardly egalitarian to allow second homes only for those who can afford to run an uneconomic farm as a hobby. 

 

Although many opponents of sprawl believe their beliefs are based on a rational and disinterested diagnosis of urban problems, they actions often involve powerful, even if usually unacknowledged, self-interest. 

 

Families who have recently moved to the suburban periphery are often the most vociferous opponents of further development of exactly the same kind that created their own house because it would destroy their views or reduce their access to the countryside beyond their subdivision.  (Pages 161-162)

 

Benefiting the incumbents’ club.  When all is said and done, who has benefited from Portland’s planning approach?

 

Within the built-up area, the winners in the Portland system will continue to be members of the incumbents’ club, that is to say, those current homeowners who already have most of the amenities they want and have the political clout to shield their own neighborhoods from the increasing density and traffic that the system will almost certainly create elsewhere.  They will reap the benefits of growth management with few of the burdens.  (Page 215)

 

If so, the owns have gained at the expense of the own-nots.  More strikingly, Portland’s land use policy has been so contentious that the citizens sought to repeal it by referendum, and have done so (although the repeal’s validity is under legal challenge).

 

I don’t live in Portland and have only visited it a few times — loved it each time! — so I can’t directly evaluate the system’s success, or by whose standards its performance should be judged. 

 

I do believe that the economic pressure of land-use restriction inevitably drives up housing prices, making areas less affordable, widening the cost-value gap, and forcing communities either to embrace their local plutocracy or to increase substantially their funding for affordable housing. 

 

Since I have yet to see a government — any government, anywhere — ever put into affordable housing enough money to achieve the affordability it desires, I suspect Portland is making its problems worse.

 

Any lessons from Portland to share elsewhere?  Even as Portland has been running a thirty-year experiment alongside other competing localities (Seattle, Vancouver WA), across the Atlantic, the entire nation of the United Kingdom has been conducting an even larger, longer-lived, and more tightly bounded experiment:

 

The [UK] Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 and a barrage of related legislation completely changed the rules of the game for development in Britain.  Most important, development rights on land were nationalized.  This mean that existing owners would be allowed to use the land as they had in the past, but they were not allowed to develop it further without the express approval of local authorities.  In return, they were paid for giving up the right to develop at will. 

 

National-scale eminent domain taking!

 

This startling shift in the notion of property right was made possible by what, at first glance, would appear to be an unlikely alliance between the Labour government,  with its avowedly socialist policies, and the extremely conservative great landowners who had a large percentage of the land in the country under their control.  (Page 175)

 

Take me in your arms, and rock me, rock me a little while.

 

In short, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  Whatever we choose costs something — so if we as a society are foolish enough to think we can get overturn market economics at no cost, the invisible hand always slaps us down.  Back in the UK, what has been the result on this fortress built by nature for herself? 

 

Britain has the most congested roads in the European Union. This adds to business costs while making it difficult to reap the benefit of just-in-time production methods.

 

Might it be that the ‘policy antidote to sprawl’ is petrifying greenfield?

 

“Alas, poor Piltdown — I knew him, Horatio.”

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