The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole

each donate $100 a year to a group formed to monitor and enforce LCDC’s rules. While some say he never reached that target, he raised enough money to hire two recent law school graduates, Robert Stacey and Richard Benner.

      For its first 15 years, 1000 Friends of Oregon appealed plans and took cities or counties to court if its attorneys believed their plans did not do enough to safeguard Oregon’s quality of life. Their goal was to protect farms, forests, and open space, and they lobbied LCDC to strengthen its standards, first requiring 40-acre minimum lot sizes in rural areas, then increasing them to 160 acres, then requiring that landowners actually farm the land before allowing even a single home to be built on 160 acres.

      When LCDC approved the last local plan in 1986, all the land in the state could be grouped into one of four zoning categories:

      • Less than 1.25 percent of the state was included in an urban-growth boundary, which supposedly included enough vacant land to accommodate 20 years of growth.

      • More than 94 percent of the state was zoned for a minimum of 40—later 160—acre lot sizes.

      • Less than 1.75 percent of the state, mostly land near an urban-growth boundary, allowed for 5- to 10-acre lot sizes.

      • The remaining 3 percent was mostly parks, public facilities, water, or Indian reservations.¹⁰

      At this point, nearly all the effects of state land-use planning rules fell on rural landowners who were denied the right to use their land for things other than traditionally rural purposes. Since they made up only a small minority of the state’s voters—in 1980, more than two out of three Oregonians lived in urban areas—their efforts to overturn or modify the law were unsuccessful. Few urbanites cared that the LCDC, prodded by 1000 Friends, wrote increasingly stringent rules for rural residents, saying, for example, that 75 percent of the goods sold by farmers’ roadside stands must be locally grown or that farmers must actually earn $80,000 a year from farming before being allowed to build a house on their own land.

      The first hints that the state would become more prescriptive inside the urban-growth boundaries came in 1989, when the Oregon Department of Transportation proposed a new freeway in the Portland area. After recovering from a deep recession in the early 1980s, the Portland area was growing rapidly, with much of that growth taking place in Washington County, which includes the suburbs west of Portland. The new highway would serve those suburbs and the high-tech factories that were providing much of the region’s job growth. However, 1000 Friends of Oregon decided to oppose the highway, partly because a portion of it would be outside the growth boundary.

      To prove that there were alternatives to more highways, 1000 Friends commissioned the Land Use, Transportation and Air Quality (LUTRAQ) study.¹¹ The group claimed that the study proved that alternative land-use patterns, such as higher densities, pedestrian-friendly design, and transit-oriented development would do more to reduce congestion than building new roads.

      As University of Southern California planning professor Genevieve Giuliano observed, however, most of the reductions in driving projected by LUTRAQ were not due to increased densities or urban design. Instead, LUTRAQ presumed that all workers would be given free transit passes and that they would be required to pay for parking if they chose to drive to work. LUTRAQ projected that these two changes would have more effect on driving than all the land-use changes combined.¹²

      In addition, the higher densities required by smart growth more than make up for any per capita reductions in driving.¹³ Doubling density will reduce congestion only if per capita driving is cut by more than 50 percent. The actual reduction in per capita driving that would be associated with a doubling in density is more like 5 or 10 percent, which would mean an 80 to 90 percent increase in driving per square mile. Unless more roads are built, which 1000 Friends would oppose, that means more congestion. Moreover, since cars pollute the most in stop-and-go traffic, the increased congestion in compact cities greatly increases air pollution. Reducing per capita driving by 5 percent but getting 25 percent more pollution from the remaining cars is not a very good tradeoff.

      By glossing over LUTRAQ’s weak findings, 1000 Friends of Oregon persuaded Oregon’s LCDC to issue a 1991 transportation planning rule directing planners in all of Oregon’s major urban areas to change “land-use patterns and transportation systems” so as to reduce per capita driving by 10 percent in 20 years and 20 percent in 30 years.¹⁴ To reach these goals, the rule specified that planners must increase residential densities, promote mixed-use developments, mandate pedestrian-friendly design, and apply other policies that would come to be known as smart growth.¹⁵

      Directing cities to reduce per capita driving is like directing water to run up hill. Since the rule was passed, per capita driving in Portland has increased by 19 percent and would have increased more were it not for the 2001 recession.

      By 1993, land available for development was increasingly scarce and land prices were rising fast. Yet 1000 Friends of Oregon lobbied against any additions to Portland’s urban-growth boundary. Portland-area homebuilders went to the Oregon legislature seeking a law that would force planners to expand the urban-growth boundary to accommodate growth, as they had promised in 1979. But Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, opposed the measure until it was amended to allow Metro to accommodate growth by rezoning existing neighborhoods to higher densities. After the law was passed, Metro gave the Portland region’s 24 cities and 3 counties population targets and required them to rezone land to meet those targets.

      To meet their targets, cities rezoned many neighborhoods of single-family homes to multifamily densities. While past zoning had specified maximum densities—so that homes could be built on acre or half-acre lots in an area zoned for quarter-acre minimum lot sizes—the new zoning was minimum-density zoning, requiring that all development be at least 80 percent of the maximum density allowed by the zone. In some areas, zoning was so strict that, if people’s homes burned down, they would be required to replace them with apartments.¹⁶