The Poster City for Fighting "Sprawl"

The Sierra Club recently issued a new set of prescriptions to deal with the problem of "sprawl". Not surprisingly, their poster city is Portland, Oregon., which they describe as "a beacon for how to manage growth and a best-case example of how to tame sprawl."

The main features of Portland's scheme are an all-powerful regional government, an urban growth boundary, heavily subsidized light rail, "transit oriented development", high- density in-city residential living, planned highway congestion, a ban on malls and large retailers, and subsidizing small shops to locate where the land controllers want them. This model is a favorite of the "New Urbanists", a group which notably includes the Clinton Adminstration's Environmental Protection Agency.

But in two recent Ethan Allen Institute presentations here in Vermont, Portland environmentalist John Charles threw a ton of cold water on the Sierra Club's big-government lifestyle management proposals. Some would regard Charles, the environmental policy director for the Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, as an unlikely critic of government sprawl control. For 16 years he was executive director of the Oregon Environmental Council, lobbying the legislature for curbs on pollution, better forest management, recycling, and watershed restoration. Along the way he discovered the relationship between economics, government controls, and the preference of most human families for space, grass, cars, security, good schools, and lower taxes.

Illustrating his remarks with slides, Charles showed how Portland's commuter rail is a lightly used and costly boondoggle. The city's highly touted "transit oriented development" - compact apartment blocks at light rail stops - is also heavily subsidized. Between the two, the city has spent over $1 billion of taxpayer dollars. That's in addition to the $750 million it took to upgrade the city's storm sewer system to handle all the runoff from the hard surfaces that are increasingly displacing grass.

Portland's air pollution is rising, due to cars operating in stop and go traffic on intentionally congested thoroughfares. Land prices inside the growth boundary have skyrocketed, which is fine for current owners interested in selling out, but a major problem for those least able to afford decent housing. Portland's zoning, Charles says, "is inherently elitist, and has resulted in [many] neighborhoods being zoned to prevent low- or even moderate income people from living there."

Standing astride the lifestyles and opportunities of the people of Portland is a powerful and largely unaccountable regional government called METRO. It is actively enforcing population targets, employment targets, housing targets, tiny lot sizes (median: 1/7 acre), design requirements (such as mandating the square footage of windows visible from the street), and development of the remaining farm land within the growth boundary. It recently made news by charging Intel Corporation $1000 per new job created in Portland as a "growth impact fee."

Portland, says Charles, offers a regrettable example of "government picking winners and losers" as well as enforcing the social engineering prejudices of those in control of the regional government. Charles didn't say, but easily could have, that those fortunate enough to be picked by METRO as winners will do very well - so well, in some cases, that they will assist the picking process by well-aimed political contributions or bribes. Those picked to be losers have little or no recourse. Guess which category ordinary people with ordinary lifestyle preferences fall into.

There are a number of practical and useful steps for dealing with urban growth problems. Charles emphasized electronic peak period pricing of major highways, deregulating transit to allow market-responsive jitney service, and privatized covenant restrictions to keep people from invading the rights of their neighbors. Other non-regulatory techniques include wise capital investment policies that end taxpayer subsidies for scattered development, differential taxation of land and improvements, and public acquisition of land and rights in land.

In the long run the most valuable technique for encouraging growth inside cities will be to diminish the most important reasons why so many people don't want to live there: higher crime rates, higher taxes, too much regulation, overly costly city government, and poor schools. Government has direct control of each of these issues. Real public servants will courageously work to reverse government's decades of mistaken policies and poor performance, and make city living desirable again.

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October 1999