Today’s Washington Post has a story that Oregon is “rethinking” ballot measure 37, the property-rights measure that voters approved by a 61-to-39 margin in 2004. But all the article really points to is the gripes of a few planning advocates.
The article points out that claims under measure 37 (which allows landowners to ask for compensation or waiver if land-use rules reduce the value of their property) cover less than 1 percent of the land in the state. Yet some blogger interprets this as “For Sale: Oregon, Most of It.” I don’t know where that blogger learned arithmetic, but when I went to school, “less than 1 percent” is not “most of it.”
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My fear is that measure 37 won’t lead to widespread development. Oregon’s urban-growth boundaries have made housing unaffordable for most of its urban residents. Despite the national deflation of the housing bubble, home prices in Bend (which is covered in the article) grew by 23 percent last year. We need relief from such high prices.
Unfortunately, Hunnicutt sounds like he is willing to compromise measure 37 to put restrictions on the ability of “big, greedy multinational corporations” to subdivide their land. Don’t compromise, Dave! We need those greedy subdividers to make Oregon housing affordable again.
Why do we classify developers who provide a service as greedy while the government that wants to control the uses of land for free as harmless?
Oregonians in Action should realize in public policy discussions the words greed and greedy are worthless. If those big multinational corporations weren’t filling a need there would be no buyers to fill their bank accounts. One man’s greed is another man feeding his family.
But all the article really points to is the gripes of a few planning advocates.
No.
Demonstrably, again, false.
The actual article that Randal liked to stated:
Oregonians have been especially riled up about the law, packing legislative hearings in the State Capitol here
Buyer’s remorse, see. The benefit for OR’s pain is that other states learned OR’s lesson [1] in the 2006 and defeated similar measures.
And Freedom? Many OR homeowners have less freedom.
Why? Gone is some public review [2], due to this Initiative.
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M37 takes away property rights of existing homeowners, which is the cause of the backlash. The ‘fairness’ frame was shown to be a bad frame.
Homeownership is usually the major investment for the middle class and homeowners seek to protect their investment. NIMBYism comes from seeking this protection and is a natural outcrop – as is rezoning to protect a new neighborhood from further development – of people afraid to lose their major (or only) investment.
I worked on part of the debate message for Washington’s anti I-933 initiative, and once we got past the Private Property Rightists’ (PPR) emotional and generally contentless appeals, it was easy to do the next step, and point to our neighbors to the south and how screwed up that law is, and oh, by the way look at the voter’s remorse down there.
This post is typical of the PPR movement, overlooking what the WaPo points out that Oregonians have been especially riled up about the law, packing legislative hearings in the State Capitol here and this rhetoric of trying to cram a small minority’s ideology down a vast majority public’s throat. The majority public does not want their property rights subsumed for a minority’s emotional appeal that socialism is coming and everyone should be scared.
Certainly there is a need to address the well-known fact that all parcels within 1 hour of a CBD have had decisions made on them, and all parcels within 2 hours of a CBD have had plans made for them, and government plans that thwart people’s plans should address this fact . Few governments know how to handle this. And we can see the result in Prineville, where the old couple doesn’t care about everyone else and wants to build, even though their development rights were bought out. This is no way to develop, but that’s the unintended consequence.
The M37 throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not the way to go, the public knows it, and the defeats of the Private Property Rightists’ initiatives in WA, CA, and ID (AZ only passed because anti-Kelo legislation was attached to it) signal an end to this current round of attempted legislation that went too far, as nothing at the federal level can pass. I predict M37 will be repealed in the 2008 election or a special election in 2009. I also predict the PPR will have to retrench and scale back their future legislation, as this idea is a non-starter. The letters to the editor in response to Jennifer Lang’s op-ed that Randal edited is testament to the fact that thinking people are paying attention.
DS
[1] http://tinyurl.com/2hgjoa
[2] http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1168395955260760.xml&coll=7
Dan, I have a real problem with how you use the term “property rights”. When I use the term, I refer to *my property*. When you use the term, you’re talking about *other people’s property*. When a bunch of people get together to decide how to stop me from building a house *on my property*, that isn’t “property rights”, since you should have no right to make decisions about my property. Nor should you have any right to views across my property. That’s pure out and out socialism and a repudiation of private property. This kind of doublespeak will not go unchallenged.
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