Portland’s Planning Oasis

Portland, Oregon constantly wins Best City awards.  CNN named it in their 2010 Best Places to Live.  Popular Science ranked it “The Greenest City in America.” In his essay The Capital of Good Planning, Carl J. Abbott boastfully walks readers through a 30 year history of Portland’s planning and policy initiatives.  But despite successfully executed initiatives, Portland must attribute the bulk of its current urban landscape to a convenient lack of political conflict.

Due to its distance from the South, after reconstruction the northern migration of African-Americans never reached Oregon in the far Western corner of the country.  The greater metropolitan Portland records only a 3% black population.  As a result, Portland never experienced suburban white flight, naturally segregated neighborhoods, nor exclusionary zoning laws.  With racism a non-issue in Portland’s political arenas, mixed income residential zones never encountered paralyzing opposition that so often limits progressive policies. Tellingly, policies force the few existing suburbs to provide “appropriate types and amounts of land…necessary and suitable for housing that meets the housing needs of households of all income levels.”  These regulations mostly pointedly restrict suburbs, quintessential symbols of white flight, from enacting exclusionary zoning laws.  Without this “push-factor,” Portland’s residents never abandoned the center city.*

Portland's Urban Growth Boundary

Without suburbs, statewide political discussions evolved into a system of two distinct powers: rural farmers and city dwellers.  These two demographic forged a usually unexpected coalition.  One side seeks to protect the state’s agricultural economy while the other wants to promote city density.  Agricultural Republicans fight off dominating pressures from suburbs.  Environmentalist Democrats work to limit sprawl’s land consuming impacts.  The two create a powerful alliance with a common goal to concentrate development in the Portland’s center.  State programs advocate for the preservation of farmland alongside strict definitions of urban growth boundaries.  Since agricultural and density ideals are not in conflict, as often times these politically polarizing topics can be, the Farm Bureau and the city-centric Democrats established the Land Conservation and Development Commission, forging a convenient, yet cohesive marriage in Oregon.

Within the city proper, another unlikely union thrives, as both business and community interests benefit economically from a compact Portland.  Portland’s planning initiatives “focus activity on downtown.  In turn, a vital business center would protect property values in surrounding districts and increase their attractiveness for residential reinvestment.”  Property and business owners reap the financial rewards.  But communities also benefit as the central district’s “economic prosperity would support high levels of public services.”

Density inherently keeps infrastructure costs low, so the city can provide more for less.  This circularly keeps residents close to public parks and public transportation networks, which then increases the city’s ability to provide even more public services.  An uncharacteristically high 43% of Portland’s workforce travels to jobs using the city’s bus and train systems.  In another West Coast capital, Sacramento, that percentage drops to 11%.  A survey polling residents about their fears of the future of Oregon found one of top responses “becoming like California.”  Oregonians take pride in the society they have developed for themselves.

Further allying business and residential interests, mixed-use neighborhoods in Portland create a common goal atmosphere in the central business district and in communities.  This leads to the view that anyone within “five miles of the central business district” shares in the benefits of center city development and city-centric allocation of resources.  While highways typically encourage suburban sprawl, Portland’s freeway loops around the central business district instead of connecting the city to a suburban system of outer rings.  This inner-city freeway promotes the further establishment of the prominent city center.  Without adhering to suburban stakeholders, the city’s density mutually serves business and community wellbeing with one single set of jointly beneficial resources.

However, pacified political cohesion keeps the city’s development model and growth strategy from becoming a replicable standard in larger metropolitan contexts.  The same is often used in critiques of similar small cities like Vancouver.  Portland’s demographic make-up discourages suburbanization proponents as those voices get pushed to other cities in the region (the NIMBY, Not-In-My-Back-Yard, problem.)  Existing political coalitions builds unconquerable hurdles for opposition (like when voters “overwhelmingly” opted against paying for a trans-Columbia rail track).  Suburbanization will happen; just not around Portland. 

Hopes of reproducing Portland’s idealistic successes expose questions as to whether or not Portland’s growth model could sustain larger scale implementations.  Conventional thinking would suggest that a city that wins so much praise should provide an example of development and growth that others try to emulate.  But with a unique ability to build with a single, cohesive political vision, Portland efficiently invests its resources back into a city center – a home to businesses and residents alike, a home to one of America’s “most livable” cities.

*“Pull-factors,” such as the post-WWII economic boom that generally led to US suburbanization, also failed to reach Oregon, as the state experienced an industrial decline during this pivotal time period.

Portland’s Planning Oasis