No Light Rail in Vancouver!

We Can Envision It for You Wholesale

Mar 23

2007

Urban planners have a special talent no one else has, and that is the ability to detect the sense of a community, even if the community consists of millions of people. Our loyal friend, Dan S., has demonstrated this ability for us at least a couple of times.

First, Dan knows that enough Oregon voters have changed their minds about measure 37 (which passed in 2004 by a 61-39 margin) that he predicts that it “will be repealed in the 2008 election or a special election in 2009.”

Second, even though Denver voters (who supported a 2004 rail transit ballot measure by 57 to 43) now know they were lied to repeatedly by the promoters of that ballot measure, Dan confidentally says that “Nonetheless, the community does not want cuts to the program.” What is particularly amazing is that Dan himself appears to be from Cleveland, hundreds of miles away from either Denver or Portland.

One way that planners use this special skill is through visioning processes. They invite a group of, perhaps, a hundred people out of a neighborhood or town that may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands to meet together to plan the future of that town. Another amazing thing is that the people who participate in these visioning processes all end up agreeing that they want more mass transit and farmland preservation.

A group called Envision Oregon recently came to my town of Bandon for such an visioning process. By an amazing coincidence, Envision Oregon has the exact same street address and phone number as 1000 Friends of Oregon, a group that happens to support more mass transit and farmland preservation.

The people who run Envision Oregon are so interested in your opinions that they have developed some site rules for constructive dialog. Just what “site” the rules are for I can’t tell, since I can’t find any place on their web site that allows comments or other dialog.

In the interests of research, instead of going to the Envision Oregon meeting for Bandon, I stayed at home reading The Greatest Game Ever Played, about the 1913 U.S. Open golf tournament. Although Bandon is home to some of the nation’s finest golf courses, I have absolutely no interest in the game of golf. But somehow, reading this book seemed like a better use of my time than going to a five-hour meeting about my town’s future. (It is a good book.)

Still, I wonder if the planners who run Envision Oregon ask people questions such as:

Do you want to

• allow people to urbanize 1.75 percent of Oregon, which would keep housing affordable enough that at least two thirds of Oregon families could afford to own their homes; OR
• keep Oregon urban areas contained within 1.25 percent of the state, which will drive housing prices so high that only an elite group of perhaps 25 percent of the wealthiest families will be able to afford to own their own home?

Would you prefer that Oregon

• build more light-rail lines that will allow 1/2 to 1 percent of commuters to save ten minutes a day getting to work; OR
• use the same amount of money to build more freeway lanes that will allow 80 to 90 percent of commuters to save ten minutes a day getting to work?

Would you rather that

• all of your property taxes went to schools, police, fire, libraries, and other services traditionally funded out of property taxes; OR
• a large chunk of your property taxes went into a slush fund to be used by your city council to fund favored developers and property owners, most of whom (if you live in Portland) are friends of Portland’s greatest ex-mayor, Neil Goldschmidt?

Somehow I think these sorts of trade offs are never made clear by Envision Oregon or most of the other planners who whold visioning charettes. At least, not in Oregon or Utah.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner