No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Light rail costs too much, does too little
High Rises Protect Single-Family Homes
Portland needs more high rises and other high-density housing developments to protect
neighborhoods of single-family homes, says Portland city councilor and leading mayoral
candidate Sam Adams. Adams admits that Portland’s major high-rise development, the
South Waterfront or “SoWhat” District, is floundering despite having received close
to $300 million subsidies, so he proposes that Portland lobby the state and federal
governments to provide even more subsidies.
The Antiplanner’s friend, Jim Karlock, videotapes Portland-area political events
and, in this case, taped himself asking Adams about the financial future of the SoWhat
District. You can read some of the reactions of Portland residents to Adams’ reply
at Jack Bogdanski’s blog.
How do subsidized high rises protect single-family homes? Adams’ reasoning, as he
previously stated in a speech to Portland’s City Club, is that Metro, Portland’s
regional planning agency, has given Portland a target of accommodating 300,000 new
residents (up from 529,000 in 2000) by 2035. To Adams, this give Portland a choice:
spread those new residents around to all neighborhoods or concentrate them in high-rise
and other high-density development in a few sacrifice areas.
So Adams proposes that all new residences in Portland should be “within 1/4 mile
of all existing and to-be-planned streetcar and lightrail transit stops” (previously).
By only building housing within a quarter mile of rail stops, Adams says, Portland
will “simultaneously encourage responsible, transit-supportive development while
protecting our existing single-family neighborhoods from undue growth.” Since people
in established single-family neighborhoods don’t like density in their vicinity,
Adams can heroically support density without appearing to impose it on most people
in the city.
Of course, Adams would never consider the third alternative: expand (or get rid of)
the urban-growth boundary so that people can live where they want, at the densities
they want. Letting people live on 7,000-square-foot lots would promote “auto dependency”
(ignoring Portland’s experience showing that people living in transit-oriented developments
drive just about as much as people in single-family homes).
Can Portland achieve Adams’ goal of packing 300,000 people into a few rail corridors?
Anyone familiar with Vancouver or Toronto, both of which have focused on high rises
in transit corridors, would be inclined to say yes. But Americans are not as sheep-like
as Canadians (sorry Canadian readers). Rather than live in high rises, many Portland-area
workers will live in Vancouver Washington, Salem Oregon, or other more-or-less distant
suburbs that are outside of Metro’s authority.
Which explains the subsidies: you have to bribe Americans into living in density.
The SoWhat District is supposed to have “up to 5,000 housing units” at a subsidized
cost of $300 million (some of the subsidies are for office space, but the total isn’t
proving enough). If we figure 2 people per housing unit (since very few children
live in Portland’s dense developments), the cost of bribing 300,000 more people to
live dense developments rather than flee to the unregulated suburbs will be a mere
$9 billion.
To “protect” itself from density, each single-family household in Portland will have
to pay roughly $40,000, or nearly $1,500 a year in taxes between now and 2035. No
one is going to vote for that kind of tax increase, and tax-increment financing (which
is already hurting fire, police, and other services) won’t cover the cost either.
There are so many other things wrong with Adams’ idea that it is hard to know where
to begin.
1. High rises require vast amounts of steel and concrete, the production of which
generate huge amounts of greenhouse gases. I haven’t done the research yet, but I
suspect single-family homes are far more environmentally friendly.
2. Since there is little evidence that transit-oriented developments significantly
reduce driving, putting 300,000 people in high-density developments will greatly
increase traffic congestion, which will further add to energy consumption and greenhouse
gas emissions.
3. Then there is the sociological question: is it fair for one generation to tell
the next, “We are going to make sure that you will not live as well as we do”?
Ultimately, I have to wonder if people like Adams have become so focused on the tools–density
and rail–that they have forgotten the goal, which is to make Portland a better place
to live. Are they building rail transit in order to justify coercing people into
living in high densities? Or are they building high densities in order to get a few
more people to ride rail transit? And what is the point of either one of those goals
if the resulting city is more congested, more expensive, more polluted, and suffering
from more crumbling infrastructure?
Reprinted from The Antiplanner
