Conscious Choice: The Portland Model

October 1999 | Citizen at Large

The Portland Model

by Jay Walljasper

The West Coast state of Oregon has long attracted visitors seeking spectacular natural beauty — mountain peaks rising above the clouds, green cathedrals of spruce and fir, a rugged seacoast dotted with cliffs. But in recent years Oregon has become known for its urban scenery, too. Town planners, city officials, environmentalists, neighborhood activists, and tourists from all over America are drawn to Oregon’s largest city, Portland, to see sights like these:

• Tom McCall Park, a pleasant patch of green downtown — with kids ducking in and out of a splashing fountain and couples walking hand-in-hand along the Willamette River — that was once the site of a motorway.

• Pioneer Square, a cosmopolitan town square with art exhibits, streetsingers, brownbagging officeworkers, and an outdoor cafe occupying what was once the site of a parking garage. Light rail trains frequently glide by to take folks home to neighborhoods and suburbs on the east and west sides of town.

• Downtown Portland itself, which was nearly written off for dead thirty years ago and now features block after block of lively storefronts, coffee houses, restaurants, hotels, parks, rehabbed warehouses, office towers, plus a Chinatown and Powell’s, the largest bookstore in America. The number of jobs downtown has doubled since 1971 with no net increase in parking spots, making the area look like the heart of a real city, not another suburban makeover of a central business district.

• Martin Luther King Boulevard, which sports new apartment buildings, new stores, and new jobs along with dropping crime rates in the center of what has long been Portland’s African-American ghetto.

• West Union Road, a two-lane blacktop thirteen miles from downtown, featuring clusters of houses and apartments, with swingsets and grills in the cozy backyards, on one side. Across the road lay rolling pastures and green orchards with only an occasional farmhouse. This marks Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary, a line beyond which suburban development cannot sprawl.

Portland (metropolitan population: 1.5 million) attracts all this interest because it’s the one place doing something more creative and sustainable than urban-planning-as-usual. Instead of accepting ever-escalating levels of traffic, air pollution, sprawl, and inner-city decay, Portland has made a commitment to public transit, environmental quality, compact development, and the revitalization of poor neighborhoods. It offers a different vision of what American cities could look like in the twenty-first century.

Most other metropolitan regions across North America still follow in the tire tracks of Los Angeles, the classic twentieth-century city founded upon an unwavering commitment to motorways and new suburbs spreading as far as the eye can see. Since the 1960s, however, Oregonians have looked south to the sprawling cities of California with a certain horror. They didn’t want to see their beloved forests and farms plowed under by spreading suburbia. Yet it was clear that Portland, with its scenic setting, was going to grow. So discussion around town began to center on how urban growth could be managed to prevent the environmental and social problems popping up in other regions.

Portland took the first step toward a new kind of urban development in 1972 when city officials, responding to intense pressure from community groups in working-class Southeast Portland, cancelled plans for a motorway that would have ripped apart several neighborhoods to accommodate suburban commuters. A light rail line was later built to replace the freeway.

The cause of growth management won another major victory the next year when environmentalists teamed up with farmers and maverick Republican Governor Tom McCall to enact an ambitious statewide program of land-use planning that required all cities, including Portland, to establish an urban growth boundary beyond which development could not take place.

In another significant move, Portland area voters in 1978 approved plans to establish a directly-elected regional government, called Metro, which is still the only one in the country. Metro has proven very effective in administrating growth management policies.

During the 1980s, citizens groups beat back a motorway expansion on the west side by proving to state highway planners that light rail and smarter land use planning could meet future transportation needs. The newly opened west side light rail line was built instead. Eight-hundred and fifty million dollars in new development has grown up up along the light rail lines in recent years, including a built-from-scratch downtown for Beaverton, a standard issue sixties suburb that until now has had no center. "You will no longer be able to say there’s no there there," boasts mayor Rob Drake.

Portland has also promoted public transport and now ranks number one among medium-sized U.S. cities in transport use. Seventy-five percent of all riders own cars, notes G.B. Arrington, director of long-range planning for the local transit authority. It’s not just a system for the poor and the elderly.

All these measures are vindicated by the fact that Portland is attractive as a place to live. Metro officials are planning for 600,000 new residents in the next forty years and plan to add only 18,600 acres of new land to the urban growth boundary — a 40 percent increase in population being accommodated with only 8 percent growth in the region’s area. (By contrast, the Detroit metropolitan region has dropped 4 percent in population over the last two decades but expanded in size by 54 percent.) This means that most of new housing, shopping, and workplaces will be built in existing communities, including the inner city. Suburbia stops on all sides of the city between three-to-eighteen miles from downtown, giving way to green expanses of fields and forests. In part because of the limits placed on sprawl, the municipality of Portland sees several thousand new units of housing being constructed each year in a city that is already built up. This is happening on top of an explosion of refurbishing old homes and revitalizing neighborhood business districts. Some Portland neighborhoods are beginning to approach what residents of Paris or Prague would consider a real city: a place where you can walk comfortably to grocery stores, drug stores, cafes, parks, flower shops, child care centers, and specialty stores of all stripes.

"The Urban Growth Boundary bounces investment back inward," says Henry Richmond, director of the National Growth Management Leadership Forum. "The older suburbs get more investment and so does the inner city. This kind of thing is standard operating procedure in the rest of the industrialized world. Europe’s done this for a century. That’s why their cities look the way they do."

When Portland first adopted a growth management strategy twenty years ago, local and national opponents said it would choke the region’s economic prosperity. They were proved wrong. Portland is booming, and many say that growth management policies deserve some of the credit by making the region a highly desirable place to live, which attracts new residents and new businesses.

What is a problem in Portland, says Tasha Harmon, director of the Community Development Network, an affordable housing group, is gentrification. The new development in inner city neighborhoods displaces some of the people already living there.

That’s where the Coalition for a Livable Future comes in. Harmon’s group, the Community Development Network, is one of forty-eight local organizations ranging from conservation groups to anti-racism activists. The coalition emphasizes the clear link between issues like land use, affordable housing, economic opportunity, green spaces, sustainable transportation, and neighborhood vitality.

Affordable housing has become one of the coalition’s chief issues. Many Portland suburbs practice exclusionary zoning, which prohibits apartments, townhomes, or smaller houses on smaller lots that low or middle-income people could afford. "This is separation by class," says Robert Liberty, of the activist land use group 1000 Friends of Oregon. "You can wait on us. You can mow our lawns. But you can’t live with us." It poses a barrier for low-income people, who might be able to gain decent-paying jobs in these suburbs if they could find affordable housing nearby. It also creates what there is of traffic, pollution, and sprawl, as the coffee shop clerks and school teachers who do work in these areas are forced to live elsewhere and travel long distances to their jobs. This kind of segregation by income also concentrates the poorest people, who have a proportionately higher level of problems and need for government services, in the inner city and blue-collar suburbs. This means that, even in Portland, these communities continue to face higher social stress along with lower local tax revenues with which to address it. The coalition has successfully lobbied for strong fair share housing measures — requiring all municipalities to allow affordable housing — in the region’s long-range plan, which will guide Portland’s development well into the next century.

The Coalition for a Livable Future represent a new dimension in urban politics — adding concerns about social equity to the issues of environmental quality in the debate over how our cities should develop. The case for spending the money to revitalize poor neighborhoods is strengthened by arguments about protecting greenspaces on the edge of town, and vice-versa. Middle class worries about neighborhood livability are tied to broader issues of economic opportunity, sustainable transportation, compact development, and affordable housing. Activists in Portland have successfully spread the message that our current pattern of urban growth — sprawling new development at the fringes and growing decay moving out from the center — is too costly for both society and the environment.

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