Portland, Oregon.
10. Turning Portland into L.A.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Portland was one of the fastest-growing urban areas in America. Environmentally conscious Oregonians worried that this growth would “Californicate” Oregon and “turn Portland into Los Angeles.” Indeed, Los Angeles is the bogeyman for people all over the West who worry about the effects of growth on their community.
“Los Angeles is the granddaddy of sprawl,” says the Sierra Club.1 Data show that Los Angeles is the most congested2 and most polluted3 urban area in the United States. The Sierra Club and other planning advocates blamed these problems on Los Angeles’s low-density sprawl and its extensive freeway network.
In 1992, planners told Portlanders they could save their region from becoming like Los Angeles if only the area’s residents voted to create Metro, a regional government that would write land-use and transportation plans for 24 cities and 3 counties in the Portland area. Voters agreed and Metro immediately began writing its plans.
By 1994, Metro’s plan was mostly written if not yet set into concrete. Although Metro anticipated an 80 percent population increase in the Portland area in the next 50 years, it decided to expand the region’s urban-growth boundary by only 6 percent. To accommodate everyone else, Metro ordered the 24 cities and 3 counties to rezone existing neighborhoods to higher densities. Metro claimed such compact development, the opposite of sprawl, would reduce congestion because people wouldn’t have to drive as far to get to their destinations.
Other aspects of Metro’s plan included the construction of more than 100 miles of light-rail and commuter-rail lines so that people would have alternatives to the automobile. Metro wanted developers to build scores of high-density, mixed-use developments so that people could walk to cafés, shopping, and perhaps even to work. Such transit-oriented developments would be located on major transit corridors so people could ride the bus or light-rail to get to places that were too far to walk. With all the emphasis on transit, Metro proposed to build very little new road capacity, and that would mainly serve industrial areas, not commuters or shoppers.
After reaching these decisions, Metro planners looked at the nation’s major urban areas to see which one was closest to the future Metro planned for Portland. The nation’s most compact urban area— that is, the one with the highest number of people per square mile— also turned out to have the fewest number of miles of freeway per capita, which Metro liked because it proposed to build few new freeways. Moreover, this urban area was also spending billions of dollars building new rail transit lines. It also had an excellent balance between jobs and housing in its various communities, which planners believed would allow residents to minimize driving by living close to work. Clearly, this urban area came closest to representing the future Metro planned for Portland.
What urban area was it? The surprising answer: Los Angeles. While New York City is denser than the city of Los Angeles, New York is surrounded by low-density suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey. Los Angeles, which itself contains the nation’s largest expanse of land with more than 10,000 people per square mile, is surrounded by fairly dense suburbs. Far from being low-density sprawl, the Los Angeles urban area is, according to the 2000 census, 33 percent denser than the New York urban area. Moreover, unlike most urban areas, Los Angeles’s density has steadily increased over the past 60 years.
In addition, far from it being “a great big freeway,” Los Angeles turns out to have the fewest miles of freeway per capita of any major U.S. urban area. While the average U.S. urban area has about 110 miles of freeway per million people, and some have more than 140, Los Angeles has only 53.4 Los Angeles also operates commuter, light-rail, and subway trains on nearly 400 miles of track, and in 1994, it had plans for many more.
It barely occurred to Metro that this might mean there was something wrong with its plan for Portland. Instead, it merely attributed the results to a disparity “between perception and measurement.” “In public discussions we gather the general impression that Los Angeles represents a future to be avoided,” noted Metro. Yet “with respect to density and road per-capita mileage it displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate” in Portland.5
Instead of a disparity between perception and measurement, the real disparity is between how planners think people should live and how people really do live. The characteristics that planners valued, high densities and low per capita road mileage, were the ones that made Los Angeles so unlivable. Los Angeles is the most congested urban area in America because it has so many people crammed into a compact region and they have so few freeways to drive on. It is the most polluted urban area in America because cars pollute more in congested traffic. Construction of rail transit proved so expensive that the regional transit agency was forced to cut bus service, leading to a 17 percent drop in bus riders in the decade after 1985. Urban residents who hate traffic congestion and polluted skies have good reasons to fear that their region might be following Los Angeles’s development patterns.
Yet when asked at a public hearing why Metro was trying to replicate Los Angeles in Portland, Metro’s executive director, Michael Burton, responded lamely, “There’s lots of people who like to live in L.A.”6
The same report that promised to “replicate” Los Angeles by increasing Portland’s population densities casually noted that there were “welfare tradeoffs” for higher densities that “appear to take the form of higher housing prices.”7 While high densities themselves don’t cause higher housing prices, the factors that lead densities to increase, such as high land prices, usually force increases in housing prices.
Some might ask how a plan that was supposed to save Portland from becoming as congested as Los Angeles got turned into a plan that specifically aimed to “replicate” Los Angeles-like congestion in Portland. But the real question should be: why did anyone think that planning was the solution to Portland’s growth problems in the first place? Unfortunately, few people were willing to ask, much less answer, this question.
I first became aware of Metro’s plan when planners came to my suburban neighborhood of single-family homes promising to make it easier to walk and bicycle. Since I encountered no problems walking my dog five miles a day and few problems cycling six miles each way to work, I wondered how they were going to do that. Eventually, the planners revealed that their plan called for
• promoting mixed uses, including residential, retail shops, and offices in the same developments;
• building new streets to reduce the size of the large blocks that characterized our suburb;
• building new four- and five-story complexes among (or replacing) the historic homes, including some of the oldest homes in the Portland area; and
• quintupling the population density of the neighborhood.
These happen to be the four steps that Jane Jacobs said were necessary to “induce city vitality.”8 However, no one in my neighborhood was particularly interested in living in a Greenwich Village, and they loudly said so at several public hearings on the plan. Planners said they were willing to drop the plan, but warned, “If you don’t let us approve this plan now, Metro will impose even more density on you next year.” It turned out that Metro had targeted some three dozen neighborhoods for densification and planners were using mine as a sort of proving ground. What Metro learned from this test was not to hold public hearings that would give people a forum to speak out and organize against the plans. Instead, Portland and other cities created “public involvement committees,” most members of which did not actually live in the neighborhoods being densified. As a result, Metro’s plans succeeded in the other 35 or so neighborhoods where they failed in mine.9
The plan to replicate Los Angeles in Portland dates back to at least 1990, when 1000 Friends of Oregon commissioned a study aimed at discouraging construction of a new freeway in the region. One Thousand Friends of Oregon is a classic example of a special interest group formed to support a plan, or, in this case, a planning law. In 1973, the Oregon legislature passed Senate Bill 100, which required all cities and counties to write comprehensive plans that followed rules set by a seven-member