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.

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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.

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In our continuation of Anti-Town Planning Week, we turn to San Ramon, California, where the city council wants to build a new “City Center.” Incorporated less than 24 years ago, San Ramon is a thriving suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that is built around an office park started in the 1970s.

Flickr photo of San Ramon by Jeff L. Used by permission.

The city is the world headquarters of Chevron-Texaco and also has North American or California headquarters of such companies as Toyota, AT&T, and UPS. Local retailers include Costco, Whole Foods, Borders, and the usual collection of supermarkets and other shops. The average household income in 2000 was $96,000, putting it well above the rest of the country.

But the city is suffering from an acute case of “downtown envy,” a disease the strikes many Sun Belt cities. Many people, including most urban planners, think that a city can’t be a real city unless it has a distinctive downtown or city center. But in today’s automobile age, developers no longer build distinctive city centers, so cities that have grown up since 1945 often feel they have to subsidize them.

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The American Planning Association celebrates November 8 as “Town Planning Day,” so the Antiplanner will celebrate calendrically opposite May 8 as “Anti-Town Planning Day.” In fact, this is Anti-Town Planning Week, and each day the Antiplanner will present an example of bad city or town planning.

Vancouver skyline. Flickr photo by mureena.

First up is Vancouver, BC, a city of 580,000 people. Under British Columbia law, every city in the province must have a city plan, and those plans must meet a variety of goals, including supporting “the unique character of communities.”

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