Portland Struggles to Draw Line on Growth
Nanette Watson never met a suburban subdivision she liked. As president of Willamette Valley Development Inc., the woman in faux leopard fur and a floppy knit cap has helped transform the landscape of this graceful old river town--and she’s done it where it hurts, in the heart of its historic neighborhoods.
Watson is in the right place: Portland has done more than any American city to check the poisonous seep of urban sprawl. Where most cities shutter up their aging neighborhoods and bleed into the suburbs, Portland 18 years ago drew a boundary around its borders and pledged to find room for new arrivals inside, on vacant lots, aging street corners and abandoned warehouses.
The result has been what may be the most successful experiment in urban-growth management in America--an experiment now imperiled in part by its own success in establishing Portland as an Eden of the West. By the mid-1990s, its population was nearly 40,000 above original forecasts, fueled in part by fleeing Californians. And with city dwellers increasingly unwilling to shuffle to make room for the newcomers, the siren of suburbia is beckoning stronger than ever.
Now Portland must either prove that high-density redevelopment in established old neighborhoods can work--or give in to the call of the two-car garage.
New Generation of Builders Experiments
With traditional developers proclaiming it couldn’t be done (after all, nobody could make money building on lots a third the size of their suburban counterparts) a new generation of builders has stepped in, people like Watson, a real estate economist and conservation activist who had never developed a housing project in her life.
Watson took a small lot in the middle of southeast Portland’s historic Ladd district and replaced the rambling old bungalow that stood there with six classically styled row houses. Designed with touches like roomy front porches and claw-footed bathtubs, the project sold out before it was built.
Portland has become a model for cities seeking to manage growth without stopping it. A regional transit system now carries 45% of all commuters downtown, and a waterfront park has replaced a downtown freeway. Thanks to redevelopment projects like Watson’s, houses don’t go up on 13,000-square-foot lots anymore, the way they did in 1979. The average lot size now is 7,400 square feet--and plunging--while housing output has doubled in the last year alone. A third of the region’s new jobs have gone not to the suburbs, but to Portland.
Even more remarkably, the treasured forests, farms and orchards outside the three-county growth boundary--the ones that drew most people to Oregon to begin with--look much the same as they did in 1979, when Portland’s landmark growth-management plan took effect. A wilderness hike is still a half-hour’s drive from City Hall.
Yet nearly 20 years into its experiment, Portland is finding itself in the same boat as many other booming cities in the West: overwhelmed by soaring housing prices, now among the least affordable in the nation, and a flood of new residents far in excess of what regional planners had envisioned.
For the first time since what has come to be known as the Great Wall of Portland was drawn up, officials were forced recently to edge the urban-growth boundary outward by about 4,500 acres by 1999, responding to a projected shortfall of nearly 32,000 homes in the next 40 years.
And Portland, which once pledged it would accommodate 70,000 new homes inside its borders, has admitted that it will have to let 20,000 of those slip into the suburbs--boomtown communities where the two-car garage and the big back yard are alive, well and busting up against the edge of even the expanded urban-growth boundary.
Debate Builds Into Regional Controversy
The tumultuous debate that led up to the decision to expand the urban footprint unleashed deep public misgivings about how metropolitan Portland, a region of 24 cities and 1.8 million people, will accommodate nearly 650,000 new residents--a 36% increase in population--in the coming 20 years.
Opponents of the idea of drawing a wall around the urban fringe are preparing to collect signatures to abolish Portland Metro--the elected regional planning council that is the only one of its kind in the country. And many of those who opposed any expansion of the urban-growth boundary convened a conference, the first of its kind in Oregon and representing some of the state’s most influential thinkers, that asked whether Oregonians should simply turn away new growth.
And while Portland has led the charge to welcome growth, not all Portland neighborhoods have been happy to accept high-density development; indeed, neighborhood councils in many quarters of the city have bitterly resisted higher-density zoning.
The original boundary was adopted in 1979, when forecasts showed that the Portland region was in danger of sprawling into a monstrous metropolis extending from the Coast Range to the Cascades, deep into the Willamette Valley and as far north as the Washington border. Hoping to avoid that, regional planners drew a 364-square-mile urban-growth boundary around Portland and portions of three surrounding counties, a huge and largely empty bowl in which all future urban development was to be contained.
Then two things happened: the downturn in the California economy and a high-tech boom in the “Silicon Forest” industries around Portland. New residents flocked in, and the population target projected for 1999 was surpassed in 1995. The urban-growth boundary, planners forecast, would fall short of meeting the projected housing demand by about 32,000 units, even with Portland’s push toward smaller lots and higher densities.
The crunch was driving up home prices, and some national surveys showed Portland behind only San Francisco in the gap between what its housing cost and what its residents could afford to pay.
There were demands for busting out the urban-growth boundary. On the other side, led by Portland city officials and environmental groups, were demands to leave the growth boundary where it was.
Both Sides Wanted to Continue Fight
“In the end, the debate narrowed down to whether we should expand the urban-growth boundary by a range from zero to 10,000 acres. In other words, zero to 4%,” said John Fregonese, growth management director for Portland Metro. Other cities, he said, have expanded their urban footprints by 10 times as much, he said. “But when I would point that out, people would get upset, because people on both sides didn’t want to hear that. They wanted to continue to fight. They weren’t done.”
In a survey of Portland metropolitan residents earlier this year, only 13% urged expanding the boundary enough to build large-lot houses typical of a decade ago. The biggest number, 45%, favored holding the growth boundary tight and increasing densities, while another 32% favored a modest boundary expansion coupled with smaller lot sizes.
Confidence that this was what most Oregonians wanted spurred Portland to aggressively pursue what city planners call the “new urbanism”: a move to mixed residential and commercial development, narrow grid streets, houses on downsized lots with front porches and wide sidewalks to promote walking. Row houses have begun to slip into established neighborhoods; high-rise condos are approved all along the light-rail transit line that, combined with an expanded bus system, now carries 45% of all commuter traffic into downtown Portland each day.
For Portland, it has been an issue not only of preserving the farmlands and forests outside the city, but of making sure the city attracts enough new investment to avoid leaching its lifeblood into the rapidly developing communities on the fringe.
“Our challenge is to try to make sure that enough growth happens in our city that our city center remains vital but we don’t get so much development of the wrong type that it destroys livability. That’s the tightrope that we walk every day,” said city planning director David Knowles.
“The difference between us and, say, Atlanta, is if you want to live in the suburbs and shop at Costco, you can do that. It’s just that there are alternatives here. You can live in a row house and shop on a main street where there aren’t any boarded up stores,” Fregonese said.
“What we don’t have are any acre-lot developments around a golf course. We’ve given that up,” Fregonese said. “We’re on this fat-free diet. We’re more efficient. Houston and Atlanta, they’re eating like Elvis.”
Some Complain of High Housing Prices
Opponents of the growth-management process complain that it is driving up housing prices and forcing all 24 communities in the region to accept the mandatory dictates of Portland Metro. Indeed, many suburban communities are flooded with new housing tracts that they are ill-equipped to service at a time when many of them would have opted to remain largely rural.
Happy Valley, a community southeast of Portland, incorporated in 1965 to avoid the likely spread of development from its urban neighbor. But because Portland Metro included the tiny community inside the urban-growth boundary, Happy Valley expects to nearly quadruple its population in the next 18 years. New housing developments cover hillsides in a community whose center now consists of a fire department, a water district office and a city hall located in a converted farmhouse.
“The real threat of this super-government concept is that it robs local communities of all control over their own destinies,” said Bill Sizemore, who is launching an initiative campaign to abolish Portland Metro.
“A lot of developers here are really split on the issue of Metro and the urban-growth boundary because they’re getting filthy rich off of it. They expand [the growth boundary] by 4,500 acres, and wherever they draw that line, on one side of the line land is $100 or $150 an acre, and on the other side it’s worth $3,000 an acre,” Sizemore said. “But I don’t know any developers that haven’t told me that eventually Metro’s plan will ruin it for everyone.”
“John Fregonese was quoted as saying Beaver Cleaver doesn’t exist anymore, and you don’t need a back yard. Well, Fregonese’s an arrogant jerk,” said Dick Laughlin, a resident of Portland’s West Moreland neighborhood, a district of 1920s houses that, along with nearby Selwood, will see 5,700 new residents in row houses and apartments under Portland’s plan for the next several decades.
Martie Sucec, head of the Multnomah Neighborhood Assn., said many Portland residents laud the region’s growth-management goals but believe that Portland is making a mistake by trying to cram too much of the new growth into old neighborhoods.
“What the city’s map [for Multnomah] called for was to rezone all but eight blocks of the neighborhood to high-density housing, and that’s in a 120-block neighborhood,” Sucec said. “It just infuriated people. All you had to do was show people the map, and you had an army of volunteers [against the plan].”
But on the other side, Knowles points out, are neighborhoods like those in northwest Portland that had been slowly dying before redevelopment attracted people back. Regions like the River District will, through intense urbanization, transform old rail yards into livable neighborhoods of offices, shopping and high-density housing.
Redevelopment May Be the Key
What happens in those neighborhoods, much more than what happens on the urban fringes, says Watson, is what will determine whether the plan fails or succeeds. Her next project will be an attempt to capitalize on the light-rail line running through the Goose Hollow region near downtown. She is seeking design approval for a transit-oriented condominium development, nine stories high on what is now a small, vacant corner lot. Neighbors have raised concerns about the building because it is so high.
“The true test will be people like me and other developers who can focus on redevelopment,” Watson said. “Because if we can’t do that, they’re going to blow that boundary out like no one’s ever seen.”
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Setting Growth Limits
The 364-square-mile urban-growth boundary encompasses Portland and 24 surrounding cities in three counties. It is the area in which all urban development must be contained, leaving outlying farms, orchards and forests untouched. Recently, the Portland Metro regional council voted to expand the urban growth boundary by about 4,500 acres. As a first step, the council designated urban reserves, shown on the map, which are most likely to become part of the urban growth boundary.
