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2. Planning for Growth
- University of Arizona Press
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2 Planning for Growth Oregon is hands down the most visible and successful example of the comprehensive, regulatory approach to land protection and management. —John Echeverria, Professor of Law, Vermont Law School, 20091 Oregonians hate two things. They hate sprawl. And they hate density. —Mike Burton, Portland Metro executive officer, 20012 In this chapter, we begin by placing the Oregon land use planning system in the context of other planning systems and growth management efforts in the United States and the American West.3 Our discussion touches on the system’s relationship, first, to the emergence during the early 1970s of new land use controls and the political and economic forces that shaped debates about land use regulation at the time. By necessity, we provide only a thumbnail sketch of the development of land use controls in the United States.4 Next, we discuss the relationship of the Oregon system to the wider landscape of land use regulatory approaches, and we discuss the overarching “goals” of the system, the way the system is structured, how it is supposed to function, and its key actors and decision- making mechanisms. We focus on key goals of the Oregon system that are most relevant to the book’s subsequent chapters. These include an extended discussion of one of the Oregon system’s key growth management tools, the urban growth boundary (UGB), and the general philosophy or logic behind the Oregon system and its approach to growth management. Growth Management: A Comprehensive System Oregon’s approach to planning offers a comprehensive and systematic approach to limiting sprawl by regulating the land development process. To Planning for Growth 23 do so, the state establishes specific criteria and guidelines that oversee the creation, “acknowledgment” (i.e., approval), and updating of mandatory local comprehensive plans, including a process of administrative review by state planners and requiring zoning for the entire state (Knaap and Nelson 1992). In doing so, the approach brings together attention to particular elements (e.g., land use, natural resources, affordable housing) and enumeration of specific process elements (e.g., administrative review, approvals, updates). As a result, the Oregon system’s program implementation has become “the model for state growth management” nationally (Randolph 2004: 185) and exemplifies many “best practices” in planning implementation theory (Calbick, Day, and Gunton 2003; Randolph 2004). Still, Oregon’s approach is characterized by a top- down and interventionist philosophy of land use regulation, which places greater authority in the hands of the state than with officials in local communities (Popper 1981; Mason 2008). As such, Oregon stands out among those limited number of states in the United States, and particularly among states in the American West, that embrace statewide planning approaches (Knaap and Nelson 1992). In the United States, urban sprawl—a distinct pattern of low- density suburban development—has long been a concern among planners, conservationists , environmentalists, and even a number of developers (Nelson and Duncan 1996; Hoch et al. 2000; Rome 2001; Randolph 2004). This type of growth is often seen as “wasteful of land and resources, costly to serve, damaging to the environment, and among other things, unsightly” (Nelson and Duncan 1996: 1–2; see also Rome 2001). In addition to urban sprawl, there is a growing pattern of, and concern about, a parallel form of sprawl in rural areas. In the American West, these transformations are at the heart of what some have called “a new settlement frontier” (Jackson and Kuhlken 2006), where new in- migrants seeking a better quality of life are occupying urban fringes and beyond, fueling a new resort geography, and gentrifying the range (Travis 2007). Exurbanization , or “rural sprawl,” is said to share the same problems as its city cousin described above, with additional concern about the conversion of natural areas and productive farmland to residential or commercial uses (Knight, Wallace, and Riebsame 1995; Duane 1999; Furuseth and Lapping 1999; Brown et al. 2005) and ecological damages, including losses of biodiversity (Stein et al. 2000; Maestas, Knight, and Gilgert 2003; Brown et al. 2005). 24 Planning Paradise Supposed efforts to control sprawl—or at the least to determine the appropriate siting of new land uses—is almost as old as this pattern of land development itself (Platt 2004). These efforts are most often attributed to the advent of zoning during the 1920s in Ohio and its subsequent conceptual embrace by a growing number of states through so- called state- enabling acts that authorized local communities to use zoning in dealing with growth...