No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Portland to Vancouver: Join Our Misery

Sep 6

2007

For nearly two decades, Vancouver Washington has been an escape valve for the Portland area. Growth management has made Portland housing unaffordable, so families have fled to Vancouver. Transportation planning has made Portland congested, but Vancouver traffic is far better.

Now, the Portland Oregonian suggests that Vancouver should voluntarily come under the umbrella of Portland’s growth management. Metro, Portland’s regional dictator planning agency, is in charge of growth management, transportation planning, and greenspace administration. “We can’t envisage three more critical, and more connected, responsibilities,” says the Oregonian, without admitting that Metro has screwed up all three of them.

So the newspaper (no doubt speaking for Metro itself) thinks Vancouver should join some sort of bi-state commission. This may “scare some in Clark County, especially those who still think of Metro as an agency stuffed with bicycle-riding, light-rail-loving, in-fill dwellers who are deeply suspicious of anyone who actually grows grass in a big backyard. For them, we have a message: You can hide, but you can’t run.”

Can you imagine paraphrasing the language that Ronald Reagan used to threaten terrorists to try to attract a neighbor into marriage? That’s bound to work!

Let’s look at some facts. Portland-area home prices on the Oregon side of the Columbia River are significantly more than in Vancouver. Moreover, median prices disguise the fact that a home in Vancouver is far more likely to include a decent yard, while increasing numbers of homes in Portland are built either sans yard or as multi-family dwellings.

As a result, families have fled Portland and many have ended up in Vancouver. In 2003, the Oregonian noted that the suburbs were “draining” Portland’s schools. “Middle class people are moving to the suburbs for bigger houses,” said a city commissioner. “Younger couples with kids have moved out,” said a Portland State University demographer.

Vancouver was on the receiving end of much of this move. In 1990, Vancouver was only 10 percent as large as the city of Portland. Over the next decade, Portland grew by 22 percent, while Vancouver grew by 210 percent, actually gaining more new residents than Portland. Between 2000 and 2006, Vancouver gained two new residents for every one in Portland. Today, Vancouver is 30 percent as large as Portland.

Affordable housing is only one of the attractions to Portland. According to the US DOT’s 2005 Highway Statistics, Portland freeways carry 70 percent more vehicle miles, per lane mile, as those in Vancouver. That means they are (roughly) 70 percent more congested.

Of course, Metro is doing its best to make life miserable for the traitors who moved to Vancouver. The Interstate 5 freeway connecting Portland to Vancouver is six lanes from Battleground, Washington (north of Vancouver) to Salem, Oregon (50 miles south of Portland) — except for one one-mile segment just south of the Columbia River bridge, which shrinks to five lanes, meaning only two southbound lanes. This is the source of endless congestion. Metro could fix this bottleneck in a few months for, at most, $10 million. But it refuses to do so until Vancouver ponies up hundreds of millions of dollars for “its share” of a worthless interstate light-rail line.

Vancouverites should not give in to this terrorist-like blackmail. They should resist all efforts to follow Portland’s growth-management planners into unaffordable housing and congestion hell.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner