Oregon’s Land-Use Law Undergoing First Test : Growth: Regulation concentrates population in urban areas. One booming county now has 90% of its people living on 15% of its acreage.

Twenty years ago, Gov. Tom McCall invited outsiders to visit Oregon often. “But for heaven’s sake,” he quickly added, “don’t move here to live.”

They didn’t listen.

Oregon’s forested mountains, scenic coastline and clean air have proved irresistible, particularly to Californians fleeing their state’s worsening smog, crime and congestion.

The influx has brought the usual growing pains: clogged freeways, crowded schools and rising home prices.

But unlike other Western states just now waking up to find urban sprawl where farms and forests used to be, Oregon saw it coming nearly 20 years ago. The result: a comprehensive land-use law still unmatched in the West.

The 1974 law required urban growth boundaries around each of the state’s 241 cities--not to stop growth but to shape it, concentrating development in already urbanized areas while preserving the open land that attracted so many people in the first place.

It’s too soon to tell if the law is working across much of Oregon. Most urban growth zones have yet to fill in with development.

But in Washington County, west of Portland, a population boom has pushed development right up to the growth boundary, providing one of the law’s first critical tests.

Traffic now clogs the four-lane Sunset Highway between Portland and Beaverton, the county’s largest city with 53,000 residents. The Beaverton School District--already 2,000 students over capacity--recently opposed a new housing subdivision that will add about 250 students. The district lost.

Here the urban growth boundary is more than just an imaginary line on planners’ maps. In some areas, hundreds of new houses cover the rolling land on one side of the boundary, while on the other, meadows and freshly plowed fields are marked only by the occasional weathered barn.

Washington County has grown by 11,000 people a year since 1988, but the growth boundary has helped keep more than 90% of its 311,500 residents concentrated on about 15% of the land.

The rural land is supposed to be reserved for agricultural or forest use. But that has not stopped developers from snapping up farms just outside the urban growth zone, gambling that the land someday will be included within the zone. Such farmland is selling for as much as $10,000 an acre, triple the price of land farther away.

“Nobody is building new barns, nobody is planting orchards,” said Greg Malinowski, whose 80-acre organic farm straddles the urban growth boundary. “What will happen, I’m afraid, is it will all be bought up by speculators.”

One developer bought 200 acres of forest outside the boundary, cut down the trees and then argued the land should be zoned for housing because it was no longer forested. The state ordered the county not to rezone the land.

Ethan Seltzer, land-use coordinator for the regional Metropolitan Service District, said all the jockeying for position shows the boundary is working.

“Urban growth boundaries are not meant to be great walls of China. They’re meant to be as big as you can demonstrate a need for urban land. The boundary is intended to move,” he said.

Indeed, some believe the boundaries are not flexible enough.

“The system has Oregon in a straitjacket,” said Bill Moshofsky, an attorney for Oregonians in Action, a group seeking land-use reforms to preserve the rights of private landowners. He said planners have set aside more rural land than the law intended.

“While rural living is being outlawed, more and more people are being crammed into cities, thereby increasing traffic congestion, using up green space, driving up the cost of land and destroying the quality of life for many urban dwellers,” Moshofsky said.

Others believe the law has done too little, especially inside the urban growth boundaries.

While the law has slowed the spread of suburbia across rural Oregon, it has not stopped inefficient land use within growth boundaries, said Mary Kyle McCurdy. She is an attorney with 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a land-use watchdog group often at odds with Moshofsky’s organization.

In Washington County, she said, homes go up where schools, sewer lines and good roads have yet to be built. Commercial strips stretch for miles, with each one-story store sitting behind a vast and usually half-empty parking lot.

“Very few cities are forward-looking enough in including zoning and land-use ordinances to prevent such sprawl,” McCurdy said.

Until recently, concerns over unchecked growth in Oregon were largely theoretical. The recession in the early 1980s kept Oregon’s overall population growth during the decade to 7.9%, a small increase compared to California’s 26% jump.

But Oregon is catching up fast. Since 1987, the state’s population has grown by almost 2% a year, with growth concentrated along the Interstate 5 corridor west of the Cascade Range.

The current recession has slowed migration from California, which supplies up to 40% of Oregon’s newcomers. But the long-term outlook is for plenty of growth. Demographers predict Oregon’s 1990 population of 2.8 million will increase by at least 20% by the year 2000.

That has old-timers pining for when a trip to the store didn’t mean an epic battle with traffic and stoplights. But for many newcomers to Oregon, these are still the good old days.

Michael and Tracy Henderson moved last year to Washington County from California. They sold their 1,000-square-foot condominium in Pasadena for $200,000 and paid half as much here for a house twice as big.

“We love it,” Tracy Henderson said. “The people are very friendly. It’s not crowded. Everything sparkles. This is paradise.”