No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Light rail costs too much, does too little
That’s not saying much. The percentage of people in the Portland area as a whole
who use transit is higher than the national average. Lewyn even admits that there
are single-family neighborhoods in Portland with even higher rates of transit ridership
than the TODs, which doesn’t say much for transit-oriented development.
I have argued all along that transit-oriented developments will attract people who
want to ride transit. As a result, they may generate more transit ridership than
some lower-density neighborhoods. But this does not mean they have changed anyone’s
travel habits. Yet such change is supposed to be the real goal of Portland’s planning.
Lewyn does not claim that any such change has taken place.
Lewyn says little about my refutation of Portland’s claims that rail transit has
stimulated billions of dollars worth of economic development. Press reports about
this so-called “development-oriented transit” rarely note that the city is investing
well over a billion dollars in subsidies, via tax-increment financing, tax waivers,
below-market land sales, and direct grants, to developers of high-density and mixed-use
projects along the streetcar line and near light-rail stations.
Lewyn’s only response is to claim that tax-increment financing is not a subsidy because
the development pays for itself through its taxes. But Portland’s diversion of taxes
from schools, fire, police, and other services to real estate subsidies resulted
in a real loss of urban services to the region. Someone has to pay for the schools,
fire, police, and other services used by people in the tax-increment financed developments.
This either means increasing other people’s taxes or reducing the services they receive.
In Oregon, tax increases require a vote of the people, so cuts have been the usual
choice. My paper shows that cuts in Portland’s urban services has sometimes had tragic
results, as when police killed a mentally-ill man who would probably be alive today
were it not for cuts to both police and mental health budgets.
Is Portland Effectively Reducing Sprawl?
Lewyn argues that Portland’s urban-growth boundary has successfully prevented sprawl.
As evidence, he points to census data showing that (unlike Denver, Salt Lake City,
and Seattle), the city of Portland grew as fast as its suburbs between 1980 and 2000.
This is a strange definition of sprawl since it makes no accounting for the often-arbitrary
setting of political boundaries: Portland grew in large part by annexation, something
not available to some other cities locked in by their suburbs.
A much better measure of sprawl is population density. Between 1970 and 1990, the
density of the Portland urbanized area hovered around 3,000 people per square mile.
In 2000, the Census Bureau reported a density of 3,340 people per square mile, or
an 11 percent increase from 1990.
But between 1990 and 2000, the Census Bureau changed the way it defined urbanized
areas, deleting many parcels of vacant or relatively vacant land. During the same
decade, the Census Bureau reported a 90 percent increase in density in the Oklahoma
City urban area, a 52 percent increase in Las Vegas, a 37 percent increase in Minneapolis-St.
Paul, 34 percent in Phoenix, 33 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth, 26 percent in San Antonio,
24 percent in Salt Lake City, and 20 percent in Denver. It is difficult to tell how
much of these changes are due to real density increases and how much to new definitions,
but Portland doesn’t look so good when compared with these other cities, most of
which are not known for having strong antisprawl programs.
My paper also points out that Portland’s urban-growth boundary drove up housing prices,
forcing many people to flee well beyond that boundary to places like Vancouver, Washington
and Salem Oregon. As evidence, I cited the low percentage of people under the age
of 18 in Portland in 2000. In response, Lewyn says that the number of people under
age 18 actually grew between 1990 and 2000. “Thus,” he claims, “it is no longer the
case that Portland is losing children to the suburbs.” But the growth of under-18s
in the period he cited was only 16 percent, while the city’s population grew by 22
percent and the region’s by 40 percent. So the percentage of Portlanders under 18
declined, just as my paper stated.
When I was growing up in Portland in the 1960s, I went to two different high schools.
One, Grant, had 3,000 students when I attended. Today it has less than 1,700. The
other, Jackson, had 1,300 high-school students. Today it has none.
One of the reasons why the under-18 population increased, as reported by Lewyn, is
that Portland annexed a lot of residential areas. But this hasn’t prevented Portland
Public Schools from closing 3 to 5 schools a year. As reported in the Oregonian on
October 13, 2003 (no longer available on line), “cheaper homes and more stable school
funding are drawing more Oregon families to Clark County” Washington.”
Does Portland’s Planning Make Housing Unaffordable?
My paper shows that, between 1990 and 2000, Portland housing affordability declined
by more than in any other urban area. Lewyn responds that my use of 1990s data is
“puzzling.” But I used those data because the decennial census provides us with the
best available information on housing affordability. Inter-census data are available
but are not as reliable.
Lewyn compares housing affordability in Portland with other urban areas, mostly in
California and Florida, to show that Portland is far from the least affordable region
in the country. But he fails to note that most of these regions, including all of
California and Florida, have urban-growth boundaries and other land-use regulations
that are as strict or stricter than Oregon’s. I’ve shown elsewhere that growth management
and unaffordable housing go hand in hand.
Lewyn claims that California’s housing prices are higher despite that state having
a weaker land-use planning system. In fact, that state’s land-use rules are far stricter
than Oregon’s; they are just enforced on a county-wide level, not regionwide as they
are in Oregon. Lewyn says developers can leapfrog to another county, but virtually
all the counties in California’s major urban areas have adopted very strict rules
that force any such leaps to be very long. Many San Jose commuters, for example,
live in Modesto, nearly 100 miles away.
Lewyn also notes that Portland housing prices did not grow as fast between 1995 and
2007 as prices in some other regions, again mostly in California and Florida. But
he fails to note that Portland suffered a severe recession during this time period.
Throughout 2001 through 2003, Portland had one of the highest if not the unemployment
rates in the country. This severely tempered the region’s housing prices.
Tomorrow I’ll conclude with comments on a few other issues raised in Lewyn’s critique.
Debunking Coercion Part 3
Does Forcing Density on People Improve Livability?
Is Portland’s land-use planning process reducing sprawl and auto driving? The Congress
for the New Urbanism wants to think so, but they ignore the high cost that planning
is imposing on Portland-area residents.
Are Transit-Oriented Developments Changing People’s Travel Habits?
My critique of Portland’s transit-oriented developments (TODs) argues, “there is
little evidence that they have significantly changed people’s travel habits.” Rather
than respond to this, Michael Lewyn says that the percentage of people living in
these developments who use transit is higher than the national average.
Reprinted from The Antiplanner