Beaverton Round, a transit-oriented development in a Portland suburb, is going bankrupt — again — for the third time. It has already received more than $10 million in subsidies, and some people want to give it even more.
The Beaverton Round. Photo by John Charles.
“All residential construction is subsidized,” says Portland planner Carl Hosticka. So he sees nothing wrong with throwing more good money after bad.
Most city residents don’t want density. But they also don’t want urban sprawl. How do we deal with this conundrum? The obvious (but stupid) answer is to put all new residents in a few extremely high-density developments. That solution prevents sprawl without densifying most existing neighborhoods.
So I was not surprised when Jim Karlock pointed out to me that Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams proposed in a speech last week that Portland “should plan to accommodate our share of projected regional growth — Metro anticipates 300,000 more Portlanders by 2035 — within 1/4 mile of all existing and to-be-planned streetcar and lightrail transit stops.” This would, he said, “encourage responsible, transit-supportive development while protecting our existing single-family neighborhoods from undo growth.”
By which, I presume, he means “undue growth.” (I previously mentioned a news report of this speech but had not read the complete text.)
Recently I downloaded an environmental report by a city planning agency and was appalled to find that the table of contents alone was 20 megabytes. The entire report totaled 170 megabytes. The city’s web site didn’t even have the decency to warn users how big each file would be.
Anyone who has made PDFs should know that they are quite easy to shrink by reducing the resolution of photos and other graphics. Commercial sites tend to keep files as small as possible or to provide multiple resolutions so that they are accessible to as many potential customers as possible. For example, the trailers pages for web sites advertising most movies offer “small,” “medium,” and “large” formats.
Once upon a time there was an urban planner who traveled around the world and looked at urban plans and discovered they were disasters. For this, he received a knighthood from the Queen.
Sir Peter Hall is a planning professor at University College in London, and he also taught and did research for a time at UC Berkeley. Though he believes in planning, his books provide an excellent case for antiplanners. In fact, whenever I get frustrated with some planner talking or writing about the wonders of planning, all I need to do is read a portion of one of these books to get a breath of fresh air from an objective observer of the profession.
Click on the image of each book to get information about purchasing a copy.
I got so involved in writing about the history of San Jose last week that I neglected to make some important points about the planned development in North Bethany, near Portland, that set me off on that rant. Fortunately, some of these points are brought out in an article in the Beaverton Valley Times.
First, planners are projecting that North Bethany will have about 10 homes per acre, which is fairly dense considering that a lot of acres will be devoted to streets, parks, etc. “Net” density — the density of the land actually used for residential — is generally about 25 to 50 percent denser than “gross” density, which means planners are thinking of average lot sizes of 3,000 to 3,400 square feet. Nearby developments built in the 1970s average 6 units per acre, while more recent developments have 7 to 8 units per acre.
Deals like this always make you suspicious. Someone bought some land in Lakewood Colorado for $650,000, and eight days later sold it to the city of Lakewood for $1.1 million.
The city, which thinks it got a good deal, plans to use the land for “affordable housing” next to a projected light-rail station. But why didn’t the city buy it eight days earlier when it could have saved almost half the cost? Does the previous landowner feel ripped off when they could have made $1.1 million if they had sold to the city instead of the middle-man?
Last week, I wondered “how many planners today are salivating at the chance to plan the reconstruction of Greensburg, Kansas.” The answer was not long in coming.
The governor of Kansas has announced that she wants to make the reconstructed community “the greenest town in rural America.” She says she wants to “rebuild a better footprint.”
If I had to live in a major urban area, I would like to live in a place like the Woodlands, a master-planned community north of Houston. The difference between the Woodlands and the town plans I’ve critiqued earlier this week is that the Woodlands was planned by a developer, while the other town plans were written by government planners.
Flickr photo by HJPotter.
The Woodlands is a 28,000-acre development that began in 1974. Like other “master-planned communities,” it differs from smaller subdivisions in that it was designed as a complete community, with offices, stores, hotels, schools, parks, and residential areas. Although it includes a mix of uses, it is not, for the most part, “mixed use.” That is, the nine “villages” that make up the residential areas are separate from the retail and commercial areas. But the employment areas provide more jobs than the number of workers living in its residential areas.
The near-complete destruction of Greensburg, Kansas brings to mind the September 1936 fire that burned my hometown of Bandon, Oregon. As shown below, all but about 16 of the town’s 500 buildings burned to the ground.
This was in the middle of the New Deal and planning was all the rage. Oregon even had a State Planning Board, which viewed this disaster as a great opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of sound land-use planning. To give planners maximum flexibility, the board convinced 80 percent of the property owners in the city to put their land in a property pool. Landowners were given temporary building permits to replace homes and businesses during the emergency, with the understanding that they would have to be rebuilt when the plan was completed.
Imagine the state you live in is 98 percent rural open space. Moreover, almost half of that open space is owned by the federal or state governments and will probably never be developed.
Although your county is one of the more urbanized counties in the state, at least 90 percent of the county is rural open space, and well over a third of that is federal or state land. In fact, even though your town’s population doubled in the last ten years, there is still more than one acre of permanently protected open space for every resident in the county.
Boulder in the moonlight.
Flickr photo by Molas.
