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
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Land-use planning makes Oregon great.
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