Ethan Seltzer (image courtesy Portland State University)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
May 29 of this year marked the 40th anniversary of the passage of Senate Bill 100 in the Oregon Legislature, which for the first time required cities and towns to plan for growth. I'd already planned to interview Portland State University urban studies and planning professor Ethan Seltzer, Ph.D. about the anniversary and the state of statewide planning today, but Seltzer instead reached out to me - with a correction. In a recent post about visiting three European cities, I'd casually noted that the Portland metro area's urban growth boundary, while more than worth having, did raise property values. Seltzer quickly emailed to explain that this is not true - at least not necessarily and not directly. The following is a transcript of our conversation, the length of which means it will be broken down into this post and a second post to follow in the days ahead.
Portland Architecture: So the urban growth boundary doesn't increase land prices?
A lot of people use a really primitive economics 101 conception of the urban growth boundary being kind of like a balloon, the idea being, ‘Well, if demand increases but the balloon doesn’t increase…” But the reality is it’s much more complicated. Reason number one: urban growth boundaries aren’t Great Walls of China. They’re required by state law to contain about enough land needed to meet a 20-year demand for projected land supply. At any time within the urban growth boundary, there is land available for other uses, including housing or industrial or whatever. But fundamentally the idea that the UGB contains this place that is completely urbanized and built up and will never change is misguided. Depending on taste, markets and a lot of things, there may be a lot of land or a little land.
For example, when the UGB was adopted in 1980, along with the comprehensive plans done by the jurisdictions within it, the capacity for new residential development went from 160,000 units to 310,000 units. By taking a closer look at the land supply and what it was capable of—and realizing this is all within the context of local tastes and values and desires—it was found there was essentially twice as much capacity for residential development as people thought there was. This idea that there’s this absolutely rigid relationship between the UGB and what happens with land supply and price is very difficult to sustain.
The other part of it is that people’s tastes have really changed significantly over time. When the 2000 census came along, there was one child in the Pearl District. By the time the 2010 census came along, there was enough that there was an elementary school in the Pearl. The conventional wisdom was that people with kids wouldn’t want to live in the Pearl. That was shattered in 10 years because people wanted to live there badly enough that they figured out a way to make it work. Things which seemed intractable and never changeable actually are quite flexible. Because of that, attributing housing costs solely to the UGB is really wrong and misguided.
It’s also inaccurate to say that the UGB has no impact on price, by the way. But when you look at the peer-reviewed literature, essentially what they find is they can’t make a determination—it’s not significant enough—or alternatively that there are other factors which have a bigger impact on the median house price than the growth boundary, or regulation.
A study was done 20 years ago to nail this down when median housing prices were rising rapidly. The conclusion was there were a number of factors, and one of the most significant was that the structure of the home building industry in this region is comprised of many small builders. By being unable to capture economies of scale, that alone was probably having a bigger impact than the presence of the UGB itself.
Even so, land inside the UGB is a lot more valuable from a market point of view than land outside the UGB, right?
That’s been demonstrated and shown. But that’s kind of as it should be. The whole notion is that when we started down this road with Senate Bill 100 that we would take the pressure off of rural land to provide a place for urban development. That taking the pressure off takes a couple of different forms, but one of them clearly is to try to ensure that the market doesn’t begin to inappropriately speculate on rural land for urban purposes. In essence, what that research has shown is that’s true: the land-use planning program in Oregon actually has done a pretty good job of taking the speculative pressure off of farmland.
And the amount of overall farmland has only marginally decreased, right?
Compared to other places, yeah.
But nonetheless, is there rural land speculation? Of course there is. Is that something we should be concerned about? Yeah. Because fundamentally at the end of the day, if there isn’t a viable rural economy, if farming isn’t economically viable—if there aren’t processors and suppliers, if there isn’t a whole infrastructure to support the production and processing and marketing of crops—we aren’t going to be able to sustain growth boundaries for very long. And I think that’s largely for political reasons. I think we actually as urban residents have a huge stake in seeing that there is a viable economy associated with the working landscape, because that’s the only way we’ll be able to maintain this notion of an urban growth boundary. I think we have a number of things to be concerned about moving forward. One is not just, ‘What form do our cities take?’ It’s also, ‘What shape is our rural economy in?’ And how do we ensure that what Oregon is really good at in a lot of ways, which is the incredible abundance of the natural landscape, maintains itself as an important economic element in the nature of the state?
The big issue for us, I think in a lot of ways, is to not get too focused on things that are too subject to the inevitable change that’s going to occur. What are the things that we know about this place? Well, it’s incredibly beautiful. The landscape is incredibly abundant. This has been a great place for people to live for 14,000 years, one of the oldest continually inhabited places in North America. It’s the northern temperate rainforest; it’s a high degree of biodiversity. We have a fly-by-wire relationship with the mountains to the east and the ocean to the west. It helps to kind of shape our kind of sense of the landscape. There’s a strong sense of place. And in a lot of ways, I think that’s kind of where we need to have our focus: not get too uptight about what things look like, maybe, or trying to feed particular choices about industry or commercial activity or even residential development, but actually to pay much more attention to these larger framing issues and make sure we protect them.
Can beauty be quantified, and how much does policy try to address that?
If you take a look at the statewide planning goals and do a word search, the word ‘beauty’ doesn’t appear. That’s kind of an interesting issue. If you talk to lots of people in this state—urban and rural, progressive and conservative—there’s a kind of consensus that beauty is part of Oregon. And not only that, but we can agree on what some of that beauty is about. How do we bring that into the way in which communities, through government, affect the way things happen? And not only that, but how do we apply that to public agencies and public works? I’m interested in the inattention we pay to the way we build infrastructure and the way it looks and the kind of relationships that it creates that last for a very long time.
Of course on the other hand, people will say, ‘We’ve got $11 billion worth of transportation projects in the metro region and $3 billion to pay for them.’ All I can say is thank goodness we don’t have more than $3 billion, because think of what we would have built if we had all that money. The answer is a lot of stuff that not only may we no longer need but which would have profoundly affected the development of the region in ways that may not have been all that beneficial. There’s nothing magic about infrastructure. When people begin to suggest that there’s a kind of scientific and economic and sociological imperative behind the construction of roads and other major infrastructure projects, I think you really need to question why they are saying that. What are they trying to accomplish? How does that have to do the interests that they represent? Because the fact of the matter is there’s no magic there.
This May brought the 40th anniversary of the passing of Senate Bill 100, which required a lot of public outreach to get passed. How do we accomplish planning goals and managing growth today in such a divisive political climate?
Two things are absolutely certain. One is that in America we have provided tremendous support for private property and local control. When the Supreme Court decided Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company back in the ‘20s, what they fundamentally decided was that each individual unit of government could have its own zoning. We’ve been on that path ever since. What that means is no matter what we want to do, no matter what we set out to do, it will always be framed by those two facts. There will always be tension about the articulation of a community view of what ought to happen to private property. And there will certainly always be tension about a state or regional view about what ought to happen in local jurisdictions. The stage is set for tension and controversy. For the rest of our lives and forever after, I suspect that will be the case and we’d be crazy to think otherwise.
That’s kind of where we start from. What did Senate Bill 100 do and what did its supporters do after its passage that really helped? They did do a tremendous amount of public outreach: barnstorming the state, on the road, just really out there. But I think more than anything else, it made what the goals were about really authentic. It was about what people actually said. It wasn’t about what architectural or design or planning pundits said it should be. It wasn’t about what paragons of the market said it should be. It wasn’t about what faux policy institutes said it should be all about. It was about what the people of Oregon said it should be about. That kind of participation was everywhere, and it involved a tremendous number of people, at a time when the population of the state of Oregon was less than half of what it is today. It was a tremendously authentic statement about what Oregon was going to try to accomplish with this new planning system.
The other thing to remember is Senate Bill 100 didn’t appear overnight. It was preceded four years before by Senate Bill 10. It was preceded by 25 years of county planning, by 50 years of city planning, by a number of different efforts to address the way the state was growing and which were not succeeding. There was a long run-up to Senate Bill 100, and it was also occurring in an environment where the nation and the world were becoming aware of the impact of human activity on the environment, and where the idea that we would do some things—some extraordinary things—to protect environmental quality and address the damage that had been done to environmental quality in the past would take place, and it’s an unbelievable time. You put these pieces together and you have to say, wow: there was this amazing confluence of things, and they had the wisdom to proceed in a manner that enabled the response to be as authentic and close to the ground as it possibly could. Huge issues, authentic and very personal response.
Today, we’re confronted with similarly huge issues, massive issues: climate change, the coming growth in population in Oregon and the pacific northwest, the pressure on resources—that continual need to respond to the changes that have affected everything form salmon and insect populations to human health—the changes are no less dramatic. But the environment is quite different. The fact that Oregon did what it did has drawn the attention of those who don’t believe that any community should have the kind of say over what happens to it that Oregon communities do. We’re a battleground for even bigger issues than were confronted back in the day when Senate Bill 100 was rolled out. Which is to say that you can’t just repeat history. You can’t just do it the same way. You can’t hit the road with a barnstorming show and expect that same result. But I think one thing we are absolutely sure of is that fundamental notion of engagement, to create an authentic and recognizable response, is crucial. I’d say if there was an area for innovation and for a recommitment and for new passion on the part of everybody who cares about these issues, it’s engagement. How are we going to do it? What’s it going to be like? Frankly, I’m not really optimistic that Facebook is the citizen involvement of the future. I am over and over impressed by the power of people encountering and engaging each other face to face. How do you do that in a world that’s increasingly becoming less face to face, more distant, more mediated via smart phone technology? We encounter that with our students. It’s really interesting. Today some people don’t use email. They only use texting. Some people only use Facebook. Some people only talk on the phone. Everybody is communicating using different modes. It’s inconsistent. So expand that now to the question of something like, “What’s the future going to be for our community?’ How does that communication take place? How do people get brought together so that face to face they can understand each other as people and then understand their community as something that is common to them all? Id’ say if there was a place for innovation, the design of engagement would be a wonderful place to start.
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