33. Winning the Battles, Losing the War

After winning the battle of Oak Grove, I wanted to help other neighborhoods in the Portland area that were facing similar densification plans. One of the first things I did was call a meeting of people who were fighting densification in their own neighborhoods. Quite a large number of people showed up, and the group decided to call itself Ortem, which was Metro spelled backwards. Ortem never became very powerful but it did help people throughout the region network together and get access to resources and expertise.

About this time, two students from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University came to Portland to work for me as interns. I hadn’t looked closely at Portland’s light-rail system, so I asked them to study it. Their first response was, “We love light rail!” I told them to look at it with an open mind.

They came back a week or so later and announced, “It’s awful!” They had interviewed some critics who convinced them that it was a huge waste of money. It cost far more than buses and most of the people riding it were former bus riders. In fact, the share of Portland-area residents taking transit to work dramatically dropped after Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, built light rail because it had to cut bus service and raise bus fares to help pay for rail cost overruns.

One of them happened to mention the term “Golden Triangle,” which they said they had learned about at the Maxwell School. I asked what it was. “That’s politicians, interest groups, and public administrators, with the public administrators at the top of the triangle running everything.” I asked if the Maxwell School thought that was a good thing. “It’s an ideal to be achieved,” they said, “but we haven’t gotten there yet.”

Of course, this was the same as the “iron triangle” of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups who work together to build power and divert tax dollars to projects that enrich them even though they do little public good. The idea that our government was run by an iron triangle was first proposed in the 1950s, but other than some bureaucrats no one considered it to be ideal.

In November, 1996, Oregon voters had a chance to decide the future of Portland’s light-rail system. TriMet wanted to build a line from Vancouver, Washington in the north to Oregon City in the south. This North-South line was expected to cost $3 billion and required the state to provide some of the funding. When the state legislature failed to do so, the governor called for a special session and strong-armed the legislature into funding it using state lottery revenues.

A state representative from Lake Oswego named Bob Tiernan thought this was a waste of money. So he wrote a petition and gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot to reconsider this funding proposal.

On behalf of “Oak Grove Neighbors for Better Transit” — neighbors of mine who contributed to the cost — I wrote an argument against the measure for the Oregon Voter’s Pamphlet. Among other things, I pointed out that light rail was associated with densification. In fact, I quoted John Fregonese, Metro’s chief transportation planner, who told a Wisconsin reporter that light rail “is not worth the cost if you’re just looking at transit.” Instead, he admitted, “it’s a way to develop your community to higher densities.”

Supporters of the proposal paid for a dozen pages of ads in the voter’s pamphlet while opponents could only afford five. Supporters also had an extensive mailing campaign under the name of “Oregonians for Roads and Rail,” even though the measure did little for roads except blockade them. Despite proponents outspending opponents by at least ten to one, the measure lost by 53 to 47 percent.

After the election, I submitted an op-ed to the Oregonian arguing against Oregon’s densification policies. This caused such a stir that the newspaper took the unusual if not completely unprecedented step of reprinting my op-ed in full along with two responses from planning advocates. It was clear I had struck a nerve.

A similar thing happened in 1999 when Reason magazine published an article I wrote titled “Dense Thinkers.” This article may have generated more responses than any article Reason had ever published. At least, instead of publishing a few letters to the editor, they turned responses (and my replies) into an entire second feature article in a subsequent issue of the magazine.

I also wrote papers for the Cato Institute, which had invited me to become an adjunct scholar in 1995. One paper criticized the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), which Congress passed in 1991 and which dedicated billions of dollars to building light-rail lines all over the country. A second papert, with I co-authored with tollroad advocate Peter Samuel, criticized the Environmental Protection Agency for giving millions of dollars to advocacy groups that promoted densification and anti-automobile policies. Congress responded to ordering the EPA to stop such grantmaking, but it continues to fund rail transit.

Although Robert Liberty turned out to be on the opposite side of this issue, I soon realized I had an ally in the environmental movement: John Charles, who had been the executive director of the Oregon Environmental Council (OEC) for more than 15 years. OEC didn’t do a lot of work on federal land issues, so I knew him in passing but hadn’t worked closely with him. But it turned out that we were making parallel transitions from environmental activists to free-market activists.

Around 1994 or 1995, he had invited me to an OEC board retreat to debate free-market environmentalism with one of his board members, who happened to have been one of my best friends when I was working in the wilderness movement. She argued that people were like little children and needed government to tell them what to do. I found that revolting. Environmentalists like the two of us had spent our careers showing that government usually got things wrong; why would we want to give it the power to tell people what to do?

Soon after the light rail defeat, John quit his job with OEC, saying that he couldn’t stand to work for an organization that was working to reduce personal freedom. About that time, I called a meeting of some interest group leaders, including representatives of the Portland Home Builders Association, commercial developers, and Steve Buckstein, founder and CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s own free-market think tank. I also invited John to the meeting.

At the meeting, I proposed that we create an umbrella organization that would work to fight Metro’s land-use plans and TriMet’s light-rail plans. Steve said, “And you would be the director of this organization?” No, I said, I was thinking of John Charles; he’s the one who is unemployed.

Steve had never met John before that meeting. Within a week, he hired John to be Cascade’s environmental policy director. A few years later, Buckstein stepped down as Cascade’s CEO and John filled those shoes. While I effectively moved out of Portland in 1998, John has remained one of the strongest and most consistent voices for land-use and transportation sanity in the Portland area.

In the meantime, my idea for a group focused on fighting Portland’s land-use planning went nowhere both for lack of money and lack of a director. As one of the commercial developers later mentioned to me, I was too late anyway: if we had started a few years before, say around 1992, we could have stopped Metro’s plans, but by 1997 the plan was set in concrete.

In fact, Metro’s council had approved the 2040 plan for the region in 1996. This plan identified neighborhoods and corridors to be densified to provide housing for the region’s growing population. The plan observed that 65 percent of Portland-area households were in single-family homes in 1990 and set a target of reducing this to 41 percent by 2040. Although Oak Grove was no longer among the neighborhoods to be significantly densified, those that were still on the list were too late to change the plan.

In the winter of 1996-1997, I published everything I knew about New Urban planning in an issue of Different Drummer called “The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths.” The title referred to planners’ implicit assumption that, if they could just properly redesign existing cities, people would stop driving their cars and start riding transit and bicycling and walking more.

The issue focused on Portland but I pointed out that this kind of growth management was either now or soon would be an issue in growing regions throughout the West and South. I was right about that, as since then it has become a serious problem throughout Washington state (which was nearly two decades behind Oregon in passing growth-management legislation but quickly adopted even more inflexible planning rules than Oregon’s) as well as California, Hawaii, Colorado, Montana, the Twin Cities, and Salt Lake City. While most of the South has remained immune, Florida, Austin and some smaller cities such as Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana have passed similar plans.

In many of these places, Portland has been raised as a shining example of how to write a wonderful plan. It became my goal to provide an alternative view showing that Portland’s plan was, in fact, a disaster and was based on complete absurdities.

As “The Vanishing Automobile” pointed out, it was absurd that “people in one of the least populated parts of the world [are] so panicked about running out of land that they support costly boondoggles and unpopular restrictions on freedom of choice.” It was just as absurd for the region to spend two-thirds of its transportation dollars on a transit system that will never carry more than 2 percent of the region’s passenger travel. These have since become major issues in cities throughout the country.

Although Oregon voters had rejected the use of lottery funds to build Portland’s north-south light-rail line, voters in the Portland area had supported the measure. So Metro and TriMet put a measure on the ballot in 1998 that would allow them to build the line without the state’s support. To their chagrin, this measure failed as well, winning in the inner city but losing in the suburbs. When added to the fact that voters in the city of Vancouver, Washington had rejected funding to extend light rail across the Columbia River, voters had rejected light-rail funding three times in a row.

Despite these results, TriMet built it anyway. The federal government, of course, paid half, and local governments hustled to find the other half so the region wouldn’t lose “its share” of the pork barrel. For the line south to Oregon City, the state provided lottery funds despite voters’ rejection of that method of financing. For the line north to the Columbia River, the city of Portland used tax-increment financing, the one way Oregon cities could raise money without a vote of the people.

Tax-increment financing is based on the fiction that improvements such as light rail will increase property values, and that increase can be captured to help pay for the improvements. In fact, it represents a theft from schools and other entities that depend on property taxes, as they have to provide services to residents of any new developments that are built. If the taxes paid by those residents go for light rail, then everyone else will have to pay more or the quality of schools and other services will decline. Portland was clearly willing to accept a decline in its schools to build light rail, with the result that today Oregon has some of the lowest high-school graduation rates in the nation.

TriMet first built a line from downtown Portland to the Columbia River. Vancouver never could persuade its voters to pay for light rail on its side of the river and the bridge needed for light rail to cross the river was also never funded. As a result, ridership on the northern line remains well below expectations.

Later, TriMet built a line to Milwaukie, which included an expensive bridge across the Willamette River. The total cost of the line was $1.5 billion. Ironically, a majority of residents of Milwaukie and Clackamas County in general had voted against light-rail funding the last two times it was on the ballot. But a Clackamas County commissioner, Lynn Peterson, was a strong proponent of light rail and Metro’s land-use planning and argued that it was only fair to build a line into Clackamas County since the other two counties in the Portland area already had their light-rail lines. The 2015 opening of the $1.5 billion line led to no increase in riders as TriMet lost more bus riders than it gained rail riders.

So we won but we lost, a pattern that would become familiar in these kinds of battles across the country. Rail transit especially was so expensive, meaning so profitable for its builders, that proponents could come back to voters over and over, spending more and more money, until measures finally passed.

The same thing happened with land-use issues. In 2004, a statewide land-use group called Oregonians in Action put a measure on the ballot that would allow people whose land had been devalued by downzoning since they bought the land to ask the cities or counties to either exempt them from the rules or pay them compensation. Dorothy English, a 92-year-old woman who had lost the right to divide her land among her eight grandchildren, recorded a radio ad that tugged at the hearts of voters throughout the state, and the measure easily passed.

Over the next couple of years, however, planning advocates such as 1000 Friends built up a campaign claiming that the measure would devastate Oregon’s quality of life. A replacement measure that allowed people such as English to divide their land into ten parcels — whether they owned 10 acres or 10,000 — passed voters in 2006. This helped a few people but did nothing to make housing more affordable.

In any case, my own involvement in Portland politics tapered off as I instead began a campaign to warn people that Portland’s system wasn’t working, unless your goals were unaffordable housing and increased traffic congestion. But before then, I had one last major forestry project.