“A lot of people realize we have something special and want to preserve it as much as possible.”
Those are the words of Ted Allen, a furniture company executive who lives in an upscale suburb of Portland. But almost the same sentiments can be heard from a panoply of Portland-area residents-a farmer, a black elected official, a sports-team mogul, an environmentalist, a home builder, an ad agency chief.
And that community of feeling about their region may explain, as well as anything else, why Portland and its surroundings lead the the country in progressive measures to contain urban sprawl and the manifold evils that go with it.
Some of the measures Portland has taken to combat destructive development patterns can be applied piecemeal to other metropolitan areas such as Chicago.
But the region’s cooperative spirit, supported and furthered by the state government, is key to its integrated effort at rational planning-and that spirit is not something so easily exported.
The spirit is in large part based on a feeling for the landscape, which grows from the green hills surrounding Portland and the snow-capped majesty of Mt. Hood towering in the distance, and on a sense that the region is still small enough for its citizens to affect its destiny.
“Scale and landscape make a difference,” said Mike Houck, director of the Wetlands Conservancy Urban Streams Council in Portland.
Examples of the community spirit can be seen in a survey taken this summer by Metro, the area’s regional government-the only elected body of its kind in the country.
Those answering the survey, which was sent out to residents in the three-county area of Portland and its hinterlands-a region containing 1.2 million people-overwhelmingly backed ideas such as restricting lot sizes of new homes, cutting down on parking for new commercial development and encouraging growth towards center cities and along public transit lines rather than in outlying areas.
Such ideas are considered radical in most parts of the country and would be greeted with howls of protest against government intrusion on private property rights. But in the Portland area they are commonplace.
And a motto that expresses the philosophy promoted by Metro, that the central urban core should be revitalized so that people won’t want to flee to the fringes, can be heard all over.
“It’s like they say, `Build Up and Not Out,’ ” said Kathleen Yunker, looking from her yard in a built-up residential area across the road to a field where a tractor rumbles through a rolling field of golden grain.
Yunker, whose modest lot is all that remains of a 160-acre farm that had been in her husband’s family since 1920, lives about 12 miles northwest of Portland on the front line of the battle against sprawl: the Urban Growth Boundary.
The boundary has circled Portland and 23 suburbs since 1979, dividing land where development is encouraged from land where it is severely restricted. Boundaries have also been drawn around other cities and towns in Oregon in accordance with a state land-use planning law.
On Yunker’s side of the road, high-density building thrives. On the other the land is designated “exclusive farm use.” The contrast is stunning.
Yunker said the development on her side of the road is an inevitable consequence of growth that she accepts. But she likes the fact that growth has stopped there. The farm across the way “still says I’m not right next door to something,” she said.
While the growth boundary is the most dramatic example of the region’s-and the state’s-attack on sprawl, there are other elements of crucial importance that relate to concentrating new development, curbing use of cars and giving new life to the central area. They include:
– A housing regulation requiring that half the vacant residential land inside the growth boundary be set aside for multifamily housing. Reguations also push for single-family homes to be built at higher densities than are common for most new suburbs around the country.
– Completion of a light rail system extending east from downtown Portland using hundreds of millions of federal dollars originally slated for a new freeway. A west leg of the system is under construction.
– Establishment of a free transit zone downtown and imposition of a ceiling on downtown parking spaces.
– A new state transportation rule calling for further regional restrictions on parking and substantial reduction in vehicle miles traveled per capita over the next 30 years.
These and other measures are designed to concentrate development, particularly in areas that are served by public transportation.
The development/public transit link formed the classic pattern of urban growth for most of the country’s older cities, but since the 1950s the auto has broken that link, creating sprawl and bringing congestion to outlying areas.
“Why build a land-use pattern that doesn’t provide any other way to get around” except a car, asks Mark Turpel, a growth management planner for Metro.
The regional government agency is working on a binding plan that will chart the form of the area’s growth for the next 50 years, using estimates that Portland and its core suburbs could grow by almost two-thirds, with adjacent areas also growing significantly. The Metro councilors are due to vote on it this fall.
The plan with the most support calls for slighly expanding the urban growth boundary and basing most new development in centers where jobs and housing already exist and along existing and proposed new mass transit lines. Lot sizes for new single-family homes would also be decreased to add density.
At the same time, a system of parks, rural reserves and protected farmland will remain in place around the growth boundary-a broad greenbelt separating the Portland urban area from other nearby urban centers.
Some neighboring urban centers would be expected to absorb some growth, but road improvements between centers would be designed to protect the greenbelt. People driving from one urban center to another couldn’t have direct access to the rural road system within the greenbelt, Turpel noted.
The plan, called LUTRAQ-standing for land use, transportation and air quality-draws on an overall approach developed by the Portland-based citizens group, 1000 Friends of Oregon.
The idea behind LUTRAQ, which 1000 Friends is trying to promote as a tool for use by urban areas around the country, is to orchestrate development and transportation planning to reduce traffic and pollution. Its key premise is that new development should be in walking or biking distance of mass transit service, a concept it calls “transit-oriented development” or TOD.
The influence 1000 Friends has on Metro as well as on state legislation is typical of the unusual way policy is hammered out on Oregon.
The group was founded in 1975 with the help of then-Gov. Tom McCall to act as an independent body to push for enforcement of the state’s pioneering land-use planning law. It acts as a semiofficial gadfly, citizens’ forum and research group on growth management issues.
Part of its effectiveness has been its ability to build consensus. Whereas growth management is usually an anathema to builders and developers, 1000 Friends has a history of working together with the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland.
There have been disagreements-the extent of the growth boundary, for instance-but the two groups collaborated on a study of affordable housing, and at one point the chief lobbyist for the builders won a Portland City Council seat with the backing of the head of 1000 Friends.
Growth management does have its opponents. Lawyers for 1000 Friends still battle municipalities over state land-use law violations and the Metro regional government, which technically can override local zoning decisions, is blasted for having too much power.
And tensions between the advocates of economic growth and those worried about quality of life still arise in various forms. Some towns try to expand boundaries to get more taxable commercial development, while others try to protect their quality of life with growth cap measures within the boundaries. Such measures are all but banned by state law.
And farmers close to the boundary worry that commercial development inside may affect them even though their lands are protected. The recent announcement that Intel may put a major plant near the boundary was hailed by many as a big economic boost but distressed some farmers.
“What it means is executives buying houses in the area. Eventually the farm community loses control,” said Dave Vanasche, who produces hay and grass seed on 1,775 acres in the same area.
Additionally, a lot of the new development within the boundaries takes the same car-oriented strip mall form seen all over the country, which angers some residents.
“I hate to see the area lose its character,” said Wendy Lane, a Portland public relations executive who lives in a suburb. “All America is beginning to look alike.”
That also worries 1000 Friends.
“We didn’t pay attention to what occurred within the boundary,” said Mary Kyle McCurdy, a staff attorney for the group. “We stopped leapfrogging development, but there is sprawl inside the boundary-a lot of cul-de-sacs and strip malls.
“With our tremendous growth, we should have paid attention to traffic potential and lack of community feeling. The boundary alone is not sufficient.”
A rise in real estate prices that is often feared with the imposition of boundaries to growth apparently has not occurred-or at least not because of a lack of developable land.
A 1991 study by 1000 Friends and the home builders showed that measures taken to reduce single-family lot sizes and encourage multifamily development since the boundary was drawn have kept housing prices “well below those of many comparable-and unregulated-U.S. cities.”
Prices have indeed been rising at a rapid clip recently-some 20 to 30 percent in the last two years in parts of the city and suburbs-but Portlanders tend to blame that surge not on the boundary but on incoming Californians buying up cheap houses and then selling them for a quick profit.
Blaming California and Californians for just about everything is a local craze. Underlying it is a widespread sense that crass Californians have taken their beautiful land and, having spoiled it, threaten to do the same to Oregon.
“People here care about the quality of life. We don’t want to be Californicated,” said 1000 Friends executive director Robert Liberty, echoing a popular phrase.
Liberty’s group also wants to export Oregon planning ideas elsewhere-partly to prevent so many refugees from crowding into Oregon, he says half-jokingly.
The group admits that protecting the land is hard without a tough state planning law like Oregon’s, which has been emulated in only a handful of other states.
But lack of a state law “is no excuse for doing nothing,” says Keith Bartholomew, another staff attorney for 1000 Friends. For instance, some aspects of linking new development with mass transit can be done one neighborhood at a time, he said.
“There is hope beyond Portland,” he added.
