Posted on 07/10/2007 10:08:47 PM PDT by Lorianne
Though many people consider Portland, Oregon, a model of 21st-century urban planning, the region’s integrated land-use and transportation plans have greatly reduced the area’s livability. To halt urban sprawl and reduce people’s dependence on the automobile, Portland’s plans use an urban-growth boundary to greatly increase the area’s population density, spend most of the region’s transportation funds on various rail transit projects, and promote construction of scores of high-density, mixed-use developments.
When judged by the results rather than the intentions, the costs of Portland’s planning far outweigh the benefits. Planners made housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily housing or in homes on tiny lots. They allowed congestion to increase to near-gridlock levels to force more people to ride the region’s expensive rail transit lines. They diverted billions of dollars of taxes from schools, fire, public health, and other essential services to subsidize the construction of transit and high-density housing projects.
Those high costs have not produced the utopia planners promised. Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region’s authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980. And developers have found that so-called transitoriented developments only work when they include plenty of parking.
Portland-area residents have expressed their opposition to these plans by voting against light rail and density and voting for a property-rights measure that allows landowners to claim either compensation or waivers for land-use rules passed since they purchased their property. Opposition turned to anger when a 2004 scandal revealed that an insider network known as the “light-rail mafia” had manipulated the planning process to direct rail construction contracts and urban-renewal subsidies to themselves.
These problems are all the predictable result of a process that gives a few people enormous power over an entire urban area. Portland should dismantle its planning programs, and other cities that want to maintain their livability would do well to study Portland as an example of how not to plan.
Socialism working its timeless, predictable magic, be it Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, or Portland.
My youngest daughter had it right when we first moved out here and she was 3. To her, it was “Porkland.”
Living across the river from that cesspool is bad enough. Little wonder residents and businesses are fleeing the place.
Parts of the city work; parts don’t. Many of the negatives are summarized in that report. On the plus side, though, Portland city actually has a lower murder rate than the NATIONWIDE rate of the US - not the urban average, but just the overall nationwide average. That’s pretty impressive. Not many cities have pulled that off.
Portland, Oregon, is a poster child for the impossibility of liberal elite fantasies.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
New Jerusalem will be perfectly planned community. I hope you know who has the key to get you in.
Well, the SF/San Jose metro region is barely growing anymore. The population growth rate from 2000 to 2006 was less than 2%. The Portland region’s growth rate in that same time period was over 10%, which puts it among the faster-growing regions of the US. I think Measure 36 and its associated land use reforms will help over time.
I'm not saying that SF is okay for families. I'm saying that Portland's transporation concept was nuts even by San Francisco standards.
I just got back from my first time visit to Portland and I absolutely loved the beauty of the area. But I saw real quick road wise that is one effed up area. It’s a disaster. I didn’t see how they could ever get up to speed with their roads. 99W, the road of infamy, that goes everywhere nowhere fast.
I agree, it’s effed up alright. On the bright side, my house is worth 40,000 more than what we paid for it 4 years ago.
Can’t wait to get outta here!
Oregon Ping...
The thing that irritates me about the city of Portland is their opposition to PARKING STRUCTURES!
Heck, the baseball stadium in NW has no parking near it. They FORCE you to take the light rail. And the first season, they actually let a ticket serve as an all day transit pass, but not anymore.
There are THREE buildings going up around the stadium and they are not parking...they are CONDOS! Good grief!
They wonder why nobody likes a day at the ball park.
Light rail is only useful for college students and single-forever hipsters who thankfully won’t be breeding.
I know exactly what you mean. Downtown is an absolute mess with light rail. I’ve never seen anything like it. Such a shame.
there is tons and tons of traffic.....you could get on a freeway and if you happen to miss your right hand or left hand exit, you could circle for days...
How could planning go wrong in the Anarchists' Republic of Portland? This can not be. We have been told over the last 40 years of what a model city Portland could be for the rest of the country. Nothing can go wrong there. This can't be happening, because when the American Intelligentsia puts their ideas to actual implementation, they have to be right. The 'superiors' in the ivory towers have been telling us for 50 years how to run American cities, surely they can't be wrong? <\sarcasmic>
ahem, who snitched me off?
No, but it sure guarantees the liberals in the planning commission with great paying jobs, pensions, lots of paid vacation,holiday and sick pay!
SO -- how can we apply the principles that make the New Jerusalem work here and now? After all, our Lord told us to pray that earth will reflect heaven.
Perhaps, the Kingdom Jesus preached was the status quo ante, the decentralized low-impact patriarchy in place before Saul's coronation, when God Himself was the only King Israel recognized. Tyranny, according to I Sam. 8, happens when human civil government makes itself god by demanding as much, or more, than God does, of our substance.
Societies with taxation rates in excess of 10% are in idolatry.
Our "New Urbanists" are trying the same game, and the "Metro mafia" (and of course the local fishwrapper) are in it up to their hips.
I've seen the videotapes produced by the architectural professional group that was booming this up, when it came out 12-15 years ago. This project is an attempt by the cultural Marxist illuminati (the same people who, three generations ago, brought us Bauhaus Moderne, Le Corbusier, and "the projects" -- like Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini Green, and the Desire and Guste projects in New Orleans) to form an "iron triangle" among the municipal-regional planning commissariat and cultural leadership, the developers, landowners, and architectural firms that benefit from high land prices (and hate cars), and the transit/bicyclist/"alternative transportation" termites who compete directly with your car for appropriations from federal, state, and municipal sources (and hate cars -- well, your cars).
Anna Quindlen wrote a classic op-ed in The New York Times years ago, before Pinchy Sulzberger came to the throne, in which she recounted how she and her husband had been happy metro New Yorkers living in apartments for years, until they started talking seriously about having kids.
Then they started noticing things about urban living that didn't mix with kids -- like discarded hypos in alleys, and traffic. Off they went to Suburbia, which is still what it was in the days of Levittown: a nursery for the young.
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