Portland Shows Why Measure A is Wrong for Contra Costa
As voters consider Measure A, the extension and tightening of Contra Costa’s Urban Limit Line, Steven Greenhut (a recent CoCoTax speaker) offers some words of warning about this type of land use restriction. Steven is the director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center, which originally published the following essay. Learn more at our online event on Tuesday, 5/5 at 7pm.
Planners across the country have long viewed Portland as a mecca for urban-planning concepts thanks to its imposition of the nation’s most-stringent Urban Growth Boundary [known as an Urban Limit Line in Contra Costa]. In 1973, Gov. Tom McCall signed Senate Bill 100, which mandated that every Oregon city and county create a UGB [which we call a ULL] to restrict development outside of an established green line — as well as a process for local governments to approve the slow expansion of the boundaries.
The “landmark” measure — imposed at the behest of environmentalists and agricultural interests — was designed to stop urban sprawl, protect open space and promote transit use. “Observing the loss of farmland and greenspaces, as well as poorly planned development in other states, Oregonians saw that they could no longer take for granted the state’s cherished natural beauty,” the Oregon Environmental Council explains. In the midst of a population boom, Oregon officials saw this as a means to stop the state from resembling Southern California.
In 1978, Portland voters then approved a measure that created that region’s Metro — an elected metropolitan land-use planning agency that, among other tasks, manages the region’s growth boundary. When I covered Southern California governments, I frequently heard about local officials traveling to the Portland metro area to learn about this supposedly wonderful planning system. But as with any regulation that transfers power from individual property owners to government planners, the results have caused more problems than solutions.
As a frequent visitor to Portland, my anecdotal observations include: massive leapfrog development as new developments provide farther-out sprawl (to the Salem area, for instance) and longer-distance commutes; soaring home prices as these boundaries limit home construction; rapid suburban growth across the Columbia River in Vancouver and Clark County, Wash., as commuters choose to skip the boundary altogether by moving to a neighboring state. (These problems are well documented in every major city with a growth boundary.)
There are a number of reasons for Portlanders to flee across the river — e.g., the city’s crime and homelessness problems, and the lack of state income tax in Washington — but one of the big ones involves the opportunity to buy bigger and less-costly homes because Clark County’s growth controls are less severe than those in Metro Portland.
Research bears out my observations. A 2014 study in Sage Journals found: “Inter-metropolitan comparisons do not support the conclusion that Portland’s UGB has been effective in slowing down suburbanization, enhancing infill development and reducing auto use. A significant level of spillover from the counties in Oregon to Clark County of Washington took place during the 1990s, indicating that the UGB diverted population growth into Clark County.” Currently, more than 20% of Portland’s metro population is in Clark County.
Scott Beyer, who has contributed articles to the Free Cities Center, further explained in a 2018 Forbes article that, “Although [Portland’s] boundary has been expanded 35 times, its total land area … has grown by only 14%, while population has jumped 61%. That led Portland’s home prices to soar far beyond the normal rates of inflation. Another part of the problem, he notes, is that the city didn’t sufficiently deregulate land uses within the boundary, leaving “parochial NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) battles and anti-density scaremongering” restricting the development needed to pick up the slack. The median listing price in metro Portland is now $575,000.
Decades into this UGB process, Portland is finally trying to deal with the latter problem. Last month, The Washington Post reported that Portland has a “wonky secret” to affordable housing that other cities are mimicking. Basically, the city has made it easier to build duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes and six-plexes:
Portland determined that the key factor was square footage, specifically a measure known as ‘floor-area ratio.’ In most of the city, the updated regulations limit the size of a single-family house to half the square footage of its lot — so on a typical 5,000-square-foot lot, the house can be a maximum of 2,500 square feet. But if developers build something with multiple housing units, they are allowed to go bigger.
As a result, the city is seeing a surge in smaller infill construction, with the article noting that the city permitted 1,400 of these smaller units over three years. This approach is similar to California’s Senate Bill 9, which allows property owners to build as many as two duplexes on a single-family-zoned property. California and Oregon have in fact basically outlawed single-family-only zoning, meaning that cities must also approve multi-family units within single-family neighborhoods. It’s a useful market-oriented idea, but ultimately most home buyers want something bigger than 850 square feet.
A study last year by California-based YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) Law found that SB 9 and similar pro-housing laws haven’t produced nearly the amount of housing as anticipated. That’s no surprise given that these new laws come with myriad strings attached, local planning departments can still impose costly fees and conditions on their Accessory Dwelling Unit construction, and construction costs remain so high that adding units is feasible only for a small subset of property owners.
Portland’s “floor-area-ratio” approach is more permissive than California’s approach, but these new rules — however praiseworthy — still aren’t the panacea for Western cities’ housing woes. Around 85 California cities have growth boundaries. Every Oregon city has one. Twenty-eight Washington cities have UGBs. They dramatically reduce the availability of land for housing construction and therefore significantly increase the cost of existing homes.
It’s taken decades for these West Coast states to begin to deregulate urban land uses. Let’s hope it doesn’t take additional decades before officials realize the connection between UGBs and high housing costs — and begin to roll back these boundaries that don’t even accomplish the intended goals.
Related Event
Please join our Online Session About Measure A - Tuesday, May 5th at 7pm. Our speakers will be:
• Randal O'Toole — Thoreau Institute, author of American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership and a leading critic of urban growth boundaries
• Jennifer Hernandez — Holland & Knight partner, author of In the Name of the Environment: Litigation Abuse Under CEQA, and one of California's most prominent land-use attorneys
• Tara Sullivan — Holland & Knight partner with 20 years in San Francisco land use and planning
This event is free and online.
🔗 Learn more: https://saynotomeasurea.com