“We are in a new century where we need to rethink single-family zoning,” says Robert Liberty, the man who is more responsible than anyone else for Portland’s unaffordable housing. The question any sensible person should ask is just what is behind Liberty’s obsession with and objection to single-family homes?
As of 1989, Oregon law required that Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, maintain housing affordability by regularly expanding Portland’s urban-growth boundary. In that year, Liberty — then head of 1000 Friends of Oregon — conceived of the “land use-transportation-air quality” (LUTRAQ) project. Based on analyses by pro-density consultants, LUTRAQ purported to show that increasing urban densities would lead people to drive less and help clean up the air.
In fact, as USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliani pointed out in 1995, LUTRAQ really showed that density had very little to do with driving. Instead, the LUTRAQ model reduced driving by assuming that every business in the Portland area would charge parking fees at their offices or shopping areas equal to at least one third of downtown parking charges. Of course, the region still has free parking almost everywhere except in downtown Portland.
Nevertheless, Metro was inspired by LUTRAQ to persuade the Oregon legislature in 1993 to allow it to meet housing needs by upzoning neighborhoods to higher densities instead of expanding the growth boundary. But people don’t really want to live in higher densities. So, not only do neighborhoods object to upzoning, but the market for higher densities is limited enough that Portland and other cities have to subsidize such development.
Metro, for example, plans to ask voters to allow it to sell $652.8 million worth of bonds that it will use to build high-density housing. Supposedly, the purpose is to provide more affordable housing. But we know that’s not true because high-density housing costs more to build, per square foot, than low-density housing. Besides, the bonds will be repaid out of increased property taxes, which in turn will make housing less affordable.
Liberty implies that “we need to rethink” single-family zoning because it isn’t affordable. But almost every city in the country except Houston has single-family zoning, and most of them are affordable. What makes housing unaffordable is restrictions on development at the urban fringe. As Matthew Ridley explains it, the regulation that’s harmful is that which defines “whether you can build,” not “what you can build.”
Moreover, as Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox recently pointed out, no city in the world has ever become more affordable by growing denser. In fact, the reverse is true: density policies make housing less affordable, first by driving up the cost of land and second because mid-rise and high-rise housing costs 50 to 68 percent more to build per square foot than low-density housing.
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So what has Liberty got against single-family housing? We were once friends, and when I told him in 1995 that I lived on a third-of-an-acre lot, he solemnly replied, “I grew up on a 50×100 lot, and what was good enough for me should be good enough for anyone else.” This arrogant attitude suggests that, while he may object to large lots, he isn’t necessarily against single-family housing.
In fact, as his name suggests, he believes everyone should have the liberty to choose whether they live in a single-family home or a multi-family complex. But he also believes that he and his planner friends should have the liberty to influence people’s decisions by driving up the price of single-family housing. In 1997, Metro was inspired by LUTRAQ and 1000 Friends to adopt a plan that set a target of reducing the share of Portland households living in single-family homes from 65 percent to 41 percent by 2040.
Originally, Oregon’s land-use laws were passed to protect farmland. But Oregon and the United States both have huge surpluses of agricultural lands, while cities occupy a tiny share of the country. USDA’s 2012 Natural Resources Inventory found that only 2.3 percent of Oregon had been developed, while just 1.4 percent was urban. Well over 97 percent of the state remains available for farms, forests, and open space.
Despite this, as Portland State University planning professor Gerard Mildner points out, Liberty and Metro have an obsession with “density at any cost.” Mildner has clearly explained how Portland’s growth boundary makes housing expensive, but it has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, he is demonized by the powers that be as some kind of radical. In fact, the real radicals are those who take away people’s property rights and make housing expensive with the goal of creating what has been described elsewhere as the ideal communist city.
Some of the two dozen cities in the Portland area do want to expand the urban-growth boundary. But even if Metro approves any of these expansions, you can be sure that 1000 Friends will challenge those decisions in court, which at the very least will delay the process for years. Even after lands have been added to the boundary, Metro red tape has prevented development for another decade or more. That’s not the way to make housing affordable.
The bottom line is: why should Portland deliberately make housing unaffordable to protect abundant rural land when doing so doesn’t provide any real benefits for air quality or anything else? There are no good answers to that question except that Robert Liberty and his planner friends have obtained a lot of power in the region. Having lost sight of their original goals of cleaning the air, reducing congestion, and improving the region’s quality of life, they are now solely focused on the objective of increasing density whether it does any good or not.
We could not find a better example of a totally incompetent government:
FIRST, Metro intentionally makes land prices increase to the point that rents increase to make high density the only economic choice in the region. For the key Metro study (which they took down from their web site) , see http://www.debunkingportland.com/mindset.htm
Second. That plan works – rents rise – high density appears everywhere. House prices also rise. Close to double. Quiet neighborhoods become jammed with apartments, more traffic and McMansions. Affordable houses are torn down to make room for million dollar houses. EXACTLY WHAT METRO DESIRES AND EXACTLY WHAT METRO PREDICTED!
Third.. The idiots that run Metro discover that people don’t like higher rents and that people are being forced to move out of their homes because of Metro’s high rents.
Forth. Metro decides to fix their problem by raising property taxes to give subsidies to the people they hurt with their higher property prices.
UTTER IDIOTS!!! – Why not simply stop making land prices higher? And reverse their policy of creating a shortage of land.
Worth remembering what a friend once told me – “residential densities do not take transit.”
“I grew up on a 50×100 lot, and what was good enough for me should be good enough for anyone else.”
That’s double the width of a standard 25-foot city lot. He should be ashamed of himself for using up so much of the People’s resources.
Robert Liberty? Seriously? The juicy irony.
Perhaps even more ironic (although “hypocritical” is likely a more apt descriptor) is that Mr. Liberty lives in a single family home on a double lot in SE Portland. One lot is 0.10 acres, and the county assessor lists market value at $245k, but its assessed value is $18,250, meaning Mr. Liberty only pays $456 a year in property tax for this parcel. The other lot, where the house is built, is also 0.10 acres, meaning that Mr. Liberty is living in a SFH on a fifth of an acre in Portland.
Why don’t these slimy government bastards live the life they try to force upon everyone else?
With the 1,000 Friends crowd it’s kulaks and wreckers all the way down.
He really should change his name.
The real problem for me is that places like Portland can’t house all the progressives who would like to live there, so they move to my part of the country instead. As you might expect, these folks favor the same policies that made where they came from unlivable.
High densities are perfectly attainable with single family detached houses. 50 by 100 foot lots actually yield a higher density than Portland currently enjoys(4375 persons per square mile). A five thousand square foot lot yields 8.6 lots per acre or 5504 lots per square mile. Even if you slash 1500 lots for roadway and sidewalks and park space, that still leaves 4000 lots per square mile. At 3 persons per, that’s about 12,000 people per square mile.
‘no city in the world has ever become more affordable by growing denser’
Almost every city is denser in the center than in the outskirts. The center is also usually more expensive, although this pattern is less common in the US due to white flight and degradation of inner neighborhoods.
Any growing city will gradually expand the dense / expensive area in its center, and push the cheap housing outside the city proper. Take New York: it’s obviously denser (more people in the same area) and more expensive than a hundred years ago. But that only means the expensive / dense area has become bigger over time, thus taking up an ever-larger part of the city proper. Perhaps by the year 2500 the five boroughs will all look like today’s Manhattan, but surely that won’t mean density has caused high prices!
Any city proper in which density is increasing is by definition one in which population is increasing, and that usually means a metro area that’s growing as well. What looks like density-induced price rise is simply a reshuffling of people due to population growth. Bigger metro area = bigger downtown = bigger expensive area.
Thus the question is not whether any city has become denser and simultaneously cheaper, but whether allowing greater density can mitigate price increases. (Does anyone imagine New York would be cheaper if it was forced to have *less* housing density?)
Anyway, even if you want cases of cities that get cheaper in absolute terms while simultaneously getting denser, there are tons of examples – including the biggest city in the US.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-housing-is-getting-gasp-more-affordable-1520449102
Might this price decline have something to do with the supply boom?
http://newyorkbuildexpo.com/nyc-apartment-construction-highest-30-years/
And if anti-density regulation has no impact on housing affordability, how do you explain Austin?
Jardirino1,
Good point, but residential areas occupy only about a third of the Portland area. So average densities of residential has to be about 13,500 per square mile for the density of the entire area to be 4,500 per square mile.
Behind You,
Thanks for pointing out the WSJ article, which does seem to indicate that cities can become more affordable by growing denser. In response to your other points, by “city” I really meant “urban area.” Many post-war urban areas, such as San Jose & Phoenix, are denser in their suburbs than the central city. This is probably because a larger share of the central city is devoted to non-residential purposes.
Making cities affordable by being denser………..Look no further than Los Angeles which contrary to popular belief is very dense thanks to small lot sizes, houses still fetch. A house smaller than 1,000 sq feet can fetch over $300,000 on the market.
Old retirees cashed in on selling their post war ramrods, shotguns and ranchers.
The center is also usually more expensive, although this pattern is less common in the US due to white flight and degradation of inner neighborhoods.
The 1960s called and want their demographic relocation phenomenon back. In the past 30 years it’s been the opposite: rich people of every color are moving into city centers and gentrifying them.