The NIMBY syndrome
Written: Oct 21 '03 (Updated Dec 28 '05)
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Pros: Location, laid-back attitude, and weather (for half the year, anyway).
Cons: Self-congratulatory, insular, and increasingly prone to all the traditional big-city flaws.
The Bottom Line: Warning: highly biased polemic follows.
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| sundogg99's Full Review: Portland |
Not in my backyard.
Face it: we all suffer from it. Even the most idealistic campus crusader for, I dunno, Guatemalan baby seals, has it. Regardless of how we might stump for this or that political or social cause, at the end of the day, when we retire to home, we want our little patch of real estate to be, uh, nice.
Granted, "nice" comes in lots of forms - for DINKs in Portland, it might be the jaw-droppingly overpriced but undeniably chic environs of the Pearl district. For those less affluent, the old urban neighborhoods of Hawthorne, St. John's, and Multnomah offer funkier appeal. For midlifers like me, the 'burbs combine comfort, safety, good schools, and conveniences that compensate, sorta, for the occasionally numbing sterility of our neighborhoods.
Each of us, to the degree that we can afford it, selects for our home that place which best combines the qualities of niceness that meet our needs. And woe to that person or entity who presumes to mess with our nice turf.
Thirty years ago, the State of Oregon passed landmark legislation that established a wide-ranging set of laws governing land use. Among other requirements, the laws compelled local jurisdictions to set "urban growth boundaries" around their cities. These boundaries were intended to contain urban development, to minimize sprawl, and protect farmland from the encroachment of urbanization.
Indeed, the laws have done precisely that.
Kansas City and Minneapolis/St. Paul are two American cities that have, over the past 20 years, grown at roughly the same pace as the Portland metro area. Between 1982 and 1997, Minneapolis/St. Paul's population increased by 25 percent but had a 61 percent increase in urbanized land. Between 1990 and 1996, Kansas City had a 5 percent increase in population and a 70 percent increase in urbanized land.
Think about what this means: in an unconstrained environment, there's an appalling multiplier between a relatively small increase in population and the resulting sprawl of urban development.
By comparison, between 1979 and 1999, the Portland Metro area had a 40 percent increase in population, with only a 20 percent increase in urbanized land -- most of that within the established urban growth boundaries.
Looked at another way, the urban growth boundary, in addition to minimizing the footprint of urbanization, is intended to preserve land for agriculture. The urban growth boundary concept is an artifice, to be sure - it interferes with the "natural" growth of a city - growth that can most economically be supported on those nice, flat, well-drained pastures and fields owned by the local farmer who is more than happy to trade in his 24/7 job for a big handful of cash. But, as the saying goes about real estate, they're not making any more of it, and once farmland has been paved over, there's no reclaiming it.
Between 1982 and 1997, Florida lost over 8 percent of its farm acreage. Pennsylvania lost more than 7 percent. California lost almost 4 percent. But Oregon only lost 1 percent - and three-quarters of that farm acreage was inside urban growth boundaries and not part of the lands we were trying to protect.
Pretty cool, huh? Establish a UGB and presto! your city is well on the way to being the model of liveability for which Portland is so often touted.
Um, no.
One thing that the UGB concept fails to acknowledge is the NIMBY syndrome. Like communism, which is another great idea on paper, the UGB concept gets incredibly messy once you start dealing with actual people.
Let's take that hypothetical farmer who owns a few dozen acres on the edge of the city. If he is fortunate enough to have been included inside the urban growth boundary, he's in luck: he's holding title to an increasingly scarce resource, and will be a wealthy man when he sells his land to a developer. On the other side of that invisible line, however, is a farmer who can only look in dismay as his neighbor packs up and heads off to Cancun for the winter. The unhappy farmer's land is outside of the UGB, and not only does he face the prospect of another year on the back of his John Deere, he can't even console himself by parceling off his farm and selling it - the law prohibits him from dividing his property into parcels smaller than 40 acres.
Whoa... sounds kind of like Soviet Russia, doesn't it? The damn guvm't gots no bidness interfering in what a man does with his own property, right? In Oregon, we decided otherwise, and have taken the position that in matters of land use, the public's interests outweigh those of the individual. Thus, we have some very happy farmers and an equal number of very unhappy farmers.
In Portland, after a ton of contentious wrangling, the UGB was established about 25 years ago. It was intended to support projected growth for the next 20 years. Actual population growth during that period exceeded the model, and by the mid-1990's there was enormous pressure to expand the UGB boundaries. Portland's housing prices had been increasing rapidly, traffic and other services were suffering, and home builders and others were arguing that the UGB was at fault for too tightly restricting the supply of developable land. Enter the NIMBY syndrome.
Everyone agrees, we need to open up more land for development. But if you're currently sitting atop a suburban split level you're unlikely to want to trade in your view of cows and fir trees for one of a thousand identical ranch houses. Likewise, if you happen to be the farmer who owns those cows and fir trees, selling out is second only to hitting the Powerball lottery. If you own an inner city house, you're not thrilled at the prospect of a high-rise apartment building going up across the street. Unless, of course, the developer wants to buy your property...
Emotions run high. Everyone's got an axe to grind. After all, we're talking about our backyards here.
Make no mistake: the UGB concept is controversial. There are many articulate opponents, people who argue against the statistics and for individual rights. Likewise, there are those who point to the demonstrated benefits of the concept: despite substantial growth, Portland has avoided many of the problems faced in other growing urban areas. Take a trip through the endless strip mall hell called Phoenix, Arizona, and you'll see what the alternative to UGB looks like.
Portland faces enormous challenges - much of our service and utility infrastructure is undersized for the densities we're projecting, and retrofitting an already urbanized area is way more expensive than laying out a greenfield development. In an era of financial malaise, in a state that continues to rank among the worst in terms of unemployment, it's difficult to find the resources to finance enlightened land use policy.
Too many Oregonians are content to rest on the laurels of thirty years ago, and our vaunted quality of life is at risk because of that. Maintaining the benefits of progressive land use policy will take another generation of forward-thinking politicians and voters, and we'll need to find a cure for the NIMBY syndrome too - a tall order indeed.
If you've managed to read this far, it may mean that you're interested in this topic. In no particular order, here are some resources you may find of interest:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june00/sprawl_5-30.html: an interesting PBS segment on Portland's growth policy
http://www.demographia.com/db-portlandugb.htm: a self-described "pro-choice with respect to urban development" site
http://www.rppi.org/urban/pb11.html: another critic of the UGB concept
http://www.mi.vt.edu/Research/PDFs/Lang.pdf: a particularly well-balanced and thoughtful discussion of the issue
Copyright 2003 Sundogg99
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