Dear HCN, As a longtime subscriber and supporter of HCN, I was very disturbed by your recent article on Oregon’s land-use planning system (HCN, 11/25/02: Planning's poster child grows up). The writer took way too much of the opposition to land-use planning at face value.

Just about everybody has heard about some land-use bureaucratic nightmare, but that’s because every such episode makes it into the papers. All the thousands of perfectly normal experiences that people have with land-use planning are not “news.” All the people who are happy with the results of planning do not seek out reporters.

Polls consistently show that Oregonians support land-use planning in its current form. After many unsuccessful attempts at destroying our land-use planning through initiatives, opponents finally managed to get a “takings” measure passed. But it required a very dishonest campaign and the measure turned out to be so poorly drafted that the Oregon Supreme Court threw it out.

The dense urban neighborhoods planned around public transportation that are decried by libertarian wackos like John Charles are making Portland an ever more “livable” city. The sprawling exurbs with every house on a five-acre lot (the model that represents some sort of holy grail to libertarians) are wrecking cities all over our country (except in Oregon) and destroying the precious farmland that will be invaluable in the not-too-distant future. Pretty much everybody in Portland loves the urban growth boundary, except developers who want to build McMansions on oversize lots for the upper middle class.

I certainly expected a more pro-environment viewpoint from “A Paper for People who Care about the West.”

Alan Locklear Portland, Oregon