No Light Rail in Vancouver!

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.

The board then gave Harry Freeman, a Portland planning consultant, a free hand to plan a completely new town. After the plan was approved, former landowners would be allotted properties of comparable worth to the ones they had put into the pool.

In March, 1937, Freeman presented his plan to the town. Freeman said that the previous arrangement of homes and businesses was “uneconomic” because they were so “scattered” across the landscape. In other words, the town’s density was too low because people didn’t build on adjacent lots but often left many lots vacant between homes. The planner considered it “obvious” that such “haphazard development” imposed higher costs “than in a reasonably compact, well-designed community.”

Green is open space, yellow residential, red industrial, and blue retail/commercial/government; the solid red line is Highway 101. Prior to the fire, homes were scattered in many of the open spaces, while the cross-hatched area shows the pre-fire business & industrial district. Click on the above map to view a larger version.

Accordingly, Freeman’s plan called for a much more compact development with 450 homes located on quarter-acre or smaller lots inside of a green belt. Most lots were 60 by 125 feet. For people who wanted gardens or small livestock, Freeman envisioned as many as 100 more “garden homes” located on half-acre or larger lots outside of the greenbelt. The new town would be about twice as dense as the old.

The plan called for many other changes as well. In 1936, the town’s business district was located along the Coquille River, reflecting the town’s history as a major port. Freeman moved commercial businesses a mile south, while leaving industrial businesses on the river. The former commercial area was turned into a residential area. All buildings in the business district were to be built to a similar architectural style.

By 1936, Bandon was connected to the rest of the state by U.S. Highway 101, which went through town on ordinary city streets. The highway intersected at least seventeen streets in its journey through Bandon. Freeman proposed to turn 101 into what he called a “traffic ‘freeway’ through the city,” with only six connections to other streets. To maintain the beauty of this freeway, no private land would front on the highway.

In another effort to preserve scenic beauty, all waterfront property would be left in the public domain. While many lots would have ocean and river views, Freeman’s drawings show most of those views obscured by rows of trees planted in front of every major street — but that just may be an drafting convention.

“The greatest danger ahead in the rebuilding of Bandon is in possible deviation from the town plan,” Freeman immodestly claimed. “No leeway should be granted any individual to allow a variance or approve any change, minor or otherwise, from the plan. Likewise, no non-technical group should be allowed to decide upon changes affecting the town plan.” Freeman recommended that only a technical advisory board, including Bandon’s mayor but dominated by planners and architects, should have the power to change the plan.

When Freeman’s plan was presented to the public, the local newspaper urged everyone to “forget any selfish aims he might have and work together for the common good.” In a report submitted to the state in November, 1937, Freeman claimed that 300 Bandon property owners unanimously approved the plan at the March, 1937, meeting.

Yet the plan was never implemented. Though Freeman worked fast to produce a plan in just five months, builders worked faster and many homes and businesses had been rebuilt within a month of the fire. Building permits were supposed to be for only one year, yet many of those buildings remain today. This includes Bandon’s city hall, which was used as such for thirty years and has now been turned into the museum where I found Freeman’s report.

Apparently, local enthusiasm for the plan waned by mid-summer, 1937, as people realized that implementing the plan would require the destruction of many buildings. The city also realized that it did not have the resources to do its share in building Freeman’s community centers and other public facilities.

Bandon today as seen by Google Earth; the red line marks the approximate outline of the above map. The area that Freeman proposed be the commercial center of town is dedicated to schools. Many businesses remained in the original commercial area on the Coquille River waterfront, while others line highway 101. Homes spread out at the comfortable low densities. The green spaces are all still there, but most of them are called “backyards.” Click on the photo for a larger version.

Today, Bandon old timers lament the town’s failure to build a model city. Bandon’s unofficial historian, Dow Beckham, wrote that if the plan had been followed, “city planners would likely have journeyed to the area to take pictures and notes of how the job was accomplished.” But even without the plan, “today’s Bandon is unique and has a special appeal to tourists and retirees. Who knows whether well-drawn plans would have been better?”

In fact, it is clear that Freeman’s plan would have been much worse than the Bandon that exists today. First, Freeman did not expect the town’s numbers to grow, so he planned for a stagnant population. Today’s population of 3,100 is more than twice as great as that of 1937, and nearly all of the new people would have been forced outside of the plan’s limits.

Second, the idea of turning 101 into a freeway, with no private businesses fronting on the road, would have lost Bandon an enormous amount of its tourist business. Most people would have driven through and never seen the town. In 1937, tourism was a distant fourth after timber, agriculture, and fishing, but today it is the city’s leading industry. Without tourism, Bandon today would probably not even support the 1,500 people who lived in it in 1936 (making Freeman’s first error a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Third, Freeman’s plan to separate the commercial and industrial parts of town, which were adjacent to one another in 1936, ignores important synergies between these two areas. The increased cost of moving between the two would have imposed even higher barriers to the fishing and timber industries that are barely hanging on today.

Fourth, the plan to make all waterfront land public would have destroyed an important attraction to potential residents of Bandon. Today, ocean-front lots are worth twice as much as ocean-view lots and ten times as much as ordinary lots. River-front lots are worth nearly as much as ocean-front lots. Taxes on these lots provide an important revenue source for the city. It is not likely that ocean-front landowners would have been satisfied with the land allotted to them by planners from the property pool.

I would roughly estimate that 10 to 20 percent of Bandon’s ocean-front land is publicly owned today. While that may not sound like much, these areas are rarely crowded, especially since all of Oregon’s beaches are also publicly owned. For Oregon as a whole, most ocean-front property is publicly owned, so there is plenty of public ocean-front land outside of Bandon’s city limits.

Finally, Freeman’s basic premise — that it is “inefficient” and wasteful to not force people to build on adjacent lots — has not been proven by time. Despite the higher population, Bandon’s population density today is lower than it was in 1936. Numerous lots and blocks remain vacant as most people choose to live near the water or in splendid isolation from everyone else. While Bandon has suffered from declines in fish and timber supplies, there is no indication that it has suffered from low densities. Indeed, higher densities might have made it unattractive to people who wanted to get away from crowded urban areas.

The idea of getting private landowners to pool their property and let planners decide how it should be used must have seemed awesome in 1936. Today it feels faintly communistic. Unfortunately, planners in Oregon today have almost as much power even without property pools.

After Katrina damaged much of New Orleans and nearby areas, planners proposed that the region be rebuilt following New Urban principles. I wonder how many planners today are salivating at the chance to plan the reconstruction of Greensburg, Kansas.

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Anti-Town Planning #4: Bandon’s Post-Fire Plan

May 10

2007

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.

Reprinted from The Antiplanner