No Light Rail in Vancouver!

The Problems with Infill

Feb 7

2007

For many years, Salem — Oregon’s capital — was a sleepy, slow-growing town. The legislature met in the capitol building (designed, some say, to look like a tree stump) only six months every two years. So the city did not attract a lot of the high-powered lobbyists that you find in Washington, Sacramento, or other capitals with full-time legislatures.

Oregon’s capitol building in the state capital of Salem; photo from salemoregon.com.

When Portland housing prices started climbing in the early 1990s, Salem — located just 45 miles away — was one of the relief valves for people needing affordable housing, the other being Vancouver, Washington. Vancouver remains affordable, but now Salem is rapidly losing its affordability.

Between 1990 and 2000, Salem overtook Eugene as the state’s second-largest city by growing at 2.4 percent per year (compared with 2.0 percent for Eugene). This rapid growth is due mostly to Portland workers looking for affordable homes. Like every other city in Oregon, Salem has an urban-growth boundary, and this (despite claims to the contrary from planners who believe that nothing bad can come from their work) means higher land and housing prices.

Salem’s response is infill development, which in this case means that the city is freely allowing property owners and developers to subdivide lots in single-family neighborhoods into parcels as small as 4,000 square feet. Such partitions, say planners, “delay the need to expand the urban growth boundary,” as if such expansion was some terrible thing (which it is to Oregon planners).

Of course, partitions are bound to make neighbors upset. I don’t really have any sympathy for someone who wants to stop home construction on a vacant lot because they are used to using the lot as their own private park. But I can understand how people living in a neighborhood of nice homes on quarter-acre lots would be disturbed by someone subdividing their lot and putting up two or three “skinny houses” on the new parcels. Planners can pious talk about the value of mixed-income neighborhoods, but residents in many areas can justifiably say that such houses don’t fit in with the character of their streets.

Portland encourages developers to partition quarter-acre lots into four parcels. The existing home on this lot was torn down so they could build four of these “skinny houses.”

But even beyond this, the whole question of infill development is based on a series of myths that are demonstrably false.

• Myth: We can’t expand the urban-growth boundary because we are running out of farmland. Reality: A study commissioned by an Oregon smart-growth group found that eliminating growth boundaries and all other planning rules would lead to the development of only 1 percent more land in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the next 50 years.
• Myth: The costs of sprawl are so great that infill is cheaper.Reality: The Costs of Sprawl 2000 found (using someone questionable techniques) that sprawl added $11,000 to the cost of a new suburban home. Meanwhile, my research has shown that Oregon’s land-use planning has added at least $60,000 to the cost of a Portland home and $23,000 to the cost of a Salem home (and that is every home, not just the new ones).
• Myth: Sprawl imposes higher urban-service costs on cities.
• Reality: At some point, when you increase densities, you have to completely replace the water, sewer, and other infrastructure to serve those higher densities, as is happening in the Portland neighborhood shown below. This costs far more than extending services for greenfield development on the urban fringe.

When Oregon first began land-use planning in the early 1970s, I was acquainted with one of the state’s first members of the Land Conservation & Development Commission, which wrote the first rules requiring urban-growth boundaries. I asked him what happens when the boundaries fill up. “Then we breach the boundaries,” he said. At the time, I was naive enough to worry that this meant the state would eventually be paved over.

Of course, all urban areas in Oregon only cover 1.25 percent of the state. Without land-use planning, this might be 1.5 percent. Not a big deal for open space. But it is a big deal for homebuyers, because regular expansion of the boundaries could have kept housing prices affordable.

But drawing the boundaries gave people a sense of entitlement. In the late 1980s, 1000 Friends of Oregon joined with some city leaders (who wanted growth to take place in their cities instead of in some suburb or unincorporated area) to form a “zero-option committee” that opposed any expansion of the boundaries. While some modest expansions have taken place (most of them challenged by 1000 Friends), they have not been enough to meet the demand for housing.

Unaffordable housing plays into the hands of planners who think we should live in more compact cities. In 2005, Portland planners were elated to announce that the city’s urban-growth boundary — which they claim has not made housing unaffordable — has driven up land prices to the point that developers, without any subsidies, will buy suburban homes, tear them down, and replace them with skinny houses, row houses, or some other denser form of housing (see October 20, 2005 Oregonian, no longer on line).

That is not something to be happy about. It is something to be ashamed of. Infill can play a role in urban growth, but when it is motivated by artificially high land prices, it is more likely to be destructive than constructive.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner