About time. And we should give real consideration to banning future expansion of the urban growth boundary. We don't need more people. Especially when we don't have enough jobs for the people already here.

It's important for the state to look into purchasing private forestland that comes up on the market. By doing so, the state can increase its forest acreage and maintain the current cut levels in terms of board-feet while setting aside more of our state forestlands for conservation and recreation purposes.

You might want to consider looking at the issue of housing affordability and as to who can and cannot afford a decent home at a decent price.

See this http://www.nlihc.org/doc/lalihdOregon.pdf

As well with all the folks who argue about buying locally it is worth pointing out that a lot of mortgage notes are held by overseas institutions. When mortgages are forced up by government rules that means money leaves the local community and in many cases is going overseas.

BCL:

Sorry to break it to you, but the often parroted idea that measures that encourage more compact growth (of which the UGB is only one) has a negative impact on housing affordability has repeatedly been shown to be, well, bunk. Denver, Seattle, almost all of California and lots of other areas with sprawl as far as the eye can see have see as much, or more (California? WAY more) increase in housing costs. Plus, add the cost of commuting via single occupant auto 100 miles each way and you've got not just unaffordable, but unsustainable in spades.

For a decent survey (from Pamplin's loons, no less), see here: Urban growth boundary’s bad rap may be bunk

Carla, thanks for this. I only hope that Metro has some spine when it comes to rolling back some of the insanity in the "draft." I mean, come on. The next 50 years (he said, shaking his fist at the patsy legislature for gifting the homebuilder's lobby the stupid 20 year supply mandate) will see exurbs being abandoned in the face of a one-two punch from peak oil and climate change. We need to preserve any and all open space, both to suck up carbon and to potentially grow food closer to where people live.

Let's hope Metro wakes up and gets a clue before they let developers pave over places we're very likely to need left as they are, sooner rather than later.

jaybeat: Sure market demand largely determines prices - that's true of most any commodity. But an UGB that artificially constricts the availability of homes that many buyers might prefer (rather than the high-density housing metro development planners want people to live in) puts a price premium on the 'in-demand' homes. So, regardless of Portland Tribune news article titles and someone's interpretation of a study that may be taken out of context and/or not include all relevant findings/variables, it's foolish to say that UGBs have no impact on home pricing.

As for Denver, Seattle, California (BTW, housing isn't necessarily expensive EVERYWHERE in California), etc - citing examples of high-population density areas with high housing costs despite the lack of an UGB does not prove an UGB cannot increase home prices... imagine what home prices might be in those areas if there WERE UGBs? And I can point out Phoenix where no UGB has allowed home prices to remain comparatively affordable relative to other similar major metro areas.

alcatross;

If you like Phoenix so much I would suggest you move there ASAP please- if you think Phoenix is the place to emulate I think that borders on mental illness really- what an ugly stinking pile of crime and pollution. That's the best argument I ever heard for stringent UGB.

Developers are only concerned with turning a profit- in the metro area many have chunks of land they have speculated on in hopes of over coming present restrictions and of course it is outside the present UGB's.

In fact there is a glut of housing and developable land in Oregon now thanks to a spineless legislature and weak kneed local governments.

Preserving high value resource land is only one necessity if Oregon hopes to prosper. The logic the developers use is that if they can operate unrestricted housing prices will drop- now look they are in the business of making money off housing- why would they support dropping prices? To make up the loss on quantity? I don't think so. The argument is a hoax. Really it means higher prices, higher taxes and higher utility rates.

The irony is that it barely makes a difference because the real estate development industry will never be the cash cow of years past. Sorry boys the boom is over and soon your cheap ticky tacky suburban McMansions built with toxic laden glue psuedo wood, phony brick, Chinese drywall and plastic will be crumbling around the long-term mortgages as the suckers that bought in will be wondering where they are going to live.

Peace out like the kids say.

Carla is correct that at least at the bottom of the market, condos and apartments and townhomes cost less than single family detached properties. The top end properties in the Pearl or South Waterfront probably cost more than comparable single family detached residences, but I'm not sure about that and cost is a factor of location so your 3000 square foot cottage on SW Vista may or may not be less expensive than a 3000 square foot condo in the Gregory building in the Pearl.

To repeat myself from other posts, a forced increase in urban density = class warfare. Too many folks have been raised to believe that the "American Dream" is a detached single family home with room in the back yard for their 2.2 children to play on a swing set. Convincing them that they should aspire to live in a high density environment is going to be an extremely difficult and painful job, especially as the "upper middle class" continues to enjoy the comforts of Ladd's Addition or Irvington or wherever.

Greg D.: "increase in urban density = class warfare"

I could not disagree more- the under class is already victimized by housing policies and most poor people are not looking for a yard to keep up.

The fallacy is that maintaining current density and allowing future sprawl will benefit the under class. In reality it will lead to more urban decay because or urban flight.

In fact increased investment via increased urban density will benefit the under class because it will help insure a continued investment in the infrastructure and services in their communities. Go into vast areas of America urban centers now where abandoned housing is prevelent amidst the ruin of communities.

This argument would never be advanced by a poor person- because anyone can see it is bunk except a person trying to confuse liberals- which isn't hard to do I will grant you.

Carla, one minute you're trashing farmers and now you're defending them?!?!? The hypocrisy in your arguments is nauseating.

John Silvertooth,

You bring up an interesting point considering White Flight, urban decay, and rotted out urban areas.

Look at St. Louis, Detroit, LA, Atlanta, and many other big cities and what do you see? A decaying urban center populated by minorities who cannot find jobs due to spatial mismatch (Whites taking their businesses with them when they move to the Suburbs and Exburbs).

Your argument then, is spot on for racial fairness and justice.

The catch, what means do you employ to boost the livability of urban centers? Conservatives would argue gutting those apartment projects from the 1960s and converting them into industrial land. Liberals as evidenced by Portland, OR would cite a UGB, an unaccountable (to the voters) regional government ala Metro, and a focus on increasing density via TIF financing and sweet heart deals with developers.

I can see the need for more industrial land. Hell, compared to Seattle and San Francisco, Portland is the red headed step child who got beat with 3 ugly trees when it comes to a solid blue collar tax base.

I am fairly certain that more industrial land for a variety of purposes from office space for engineers, architects, white collars who want an industrial loft as office space, to metal pipe making and shipping would be a good thing for any city's economy.

Every city in the US would kill to have that middle class, blue collar tax base that was so prevalent from the 1950s through the 1970s.

As a native of Detroit, MI, and a high school graduate of Carmel High School in Carmel, CA (which many people never heard of until Clint Eastwood became Mayor) Chico State, CA (farmland all around, much like Salem) I wish to take issue with Ryan Leo.

Food has to be grown somewhere. Wineries are a private sector employer.

Many years ago, there were people of the OIA persuasion backing building on "secondary lands" --those not suited for major crops.

Except what were then called "secondary lands" are now called Oregon's wine industry.

Detroit was an industrial city (built mainly around Detroiter-begun car companies: Ford, General Motors, Chrysler).

Detroit NEVER had Oregon's land use laws. But then Michigan had Northern Michigan which was (and probably still is) quite rural, along with industrial cities like Flint and Detroit, the cereal city of Battle Creek, and a variety of businesses that started locally in Gerald Ford's home town of Grand Rapids. All that without saying farmland should be industrial land or we will have no jobs in this state.

Urban and suburban areas in the Metro area are already very large, taking up huge amounts of land. Who knows when or if any significant amount of that land will ever again grow a field, a forest, or become some other kind of natural land. Each outward expansion of urban development adds to the amount of infrastructure that's got to be maintained.

With each expansion, under the dominant 'spread-out' development model we've operated with for so long, the complexity of that infrastructure seems to get more complicated too...and more expensive. Could the metro area, between the points of and including Gresham to Forest Grove...Vancouver Washington to Wilsonville gradually become a continuous urban-suburban area on the order of L.A.?

As updates of deliberations amongst members of Metro's 'core-four', and related planning process panels and committees are heard, it's hard to rule that unpleasant possibility out.

As Silvertooth noted, not everyone likes or feels the need of a yard to keep up. I myself have a sliver of one that goes wanting. What I do like though, is, from an urban center, being able to hop on the bike, ride for 10-15 minutes or so and find fields and woodlands awaiting..forests...some relative peace and quiet. I suppose not everyone feels the need to regularly seek out that kind of resource, but it's certainly nice for it to be available, which it can't be if it's covered by asphalt, concrete and buildings.

LT,

There ain't much to take issue with unless you want to argue for the sake of arguing.

My point is that Urban areas instead of putting in blocks of condos so that upper middle class and upper class individuals can live in such as the Pearl District, Sam Adams and his crew should be looking at rezoning undesirable residential land into industrial land.

As for the whole urban/rural debate, a lot can be said. Does it strike you as amazing that the proponents of Measure 49 were overwhelmingly from urban and suburban areas? Many of my friends who supported it in Portland, OR were East Coast trust fund types who still do not know a dang thing about living through your own means without Mommy ready to drop $2000 in your bank account if the barista job ain't paying good enough.

If Measure 49 was intended to protect land for the use of farming and future generations, then why rural folk not at the vanguard of Measure 49? Big hint, because Measure 49 was never intended in a Gifford Pinchot conservationist sense. It was meant as a John Muir preservationist measure where land is locked up indefinitely for the pleasure of Portlanders to view on their weekend outings.

This is where we fundamentally differ. I believe in preserving land for economic use now and in the future. You don't, but try to use the same rationale. Be honest because I was not born yesterday and know the "for future generations" argument is just code word for "I want to dictate how rural folk can live."

Logan is right, imho. The idea that a private individual can possess large tracts of the earth is obscene. All the dickering about the market is just a nice, western way of saying, "and BTW, they can't afford it". Or maybe they can and just want to make more money.

Paul must be new. He doesn't know that population control is always off the table. Maybe times are changing.

Posted by: edhardy | Dec 28, 2009 12:05:14 AM

thanks a lot~~!

Oh, look, the link spammer made it to this topic before I ever got to read it.

Posted by: Carla Axtman | Dec 27, 2009 7:24:52 PM

Alactross: there are things besides supply and demand (the general market factor) which affect housing prices.

I guess you could call rampant fraud a factor.

You know, Greg, it would be a lot easier to have a coherent conversation with dittoheads if you ever spoke your own mind instead of repeating right wing cliches, like they're data. White flight is and has been the class warfare, and it's been going on since the end of WWII. Is the desire to be the first to make tracks through a field of fresh powder a war on snow? Did we leave footprints on the moon because as an example of interplanetary war? No, both are examples of how we mark our territory like a dog, just to do it. It's the same motivation for moving into a new place, on newly developed land. I think my uncle put it best. He used to say, "My greatest dream in life is to have a house in the middle of nowhere, where I can get up every morning, walk outside and yell at the top of my lungs 'Fuck!'". Most anti-progressives are slaves to their primate drives.

LT, agricultural land in the midwest is worth about twice as much as here, so there's a bit of push back.

That's about all I can handle of this. I find the sight of apes using their technology to fill the world with bananas to be intensely disturbing.

Posted by: parça kontör | Dec 28, 2009 12:57:39 AM

I hate natural disasters

Make that two link spammers. Took too long to look up property values. Still not willing to consider that ignoring it has led to this being the most spammed blog on the planet?

Here's a tip--for coverage about urban sprawl and the current state of some of the exurbs, take a look at Yasha Levine's articles about life in Victorville over at The Exiled Online.

"If Measure 49 was intended to protect land for the use of farming and future generations, then why rural folk not at the vanguard of Measure 49? Big hint, because Measure 49 was never intended in a Gifford Pinchot conservationist sense. It was meant as a John Muir preservationist measure where land is locked up indefinitely for the pleasure of Portlanders to view on their weekend outings." ryan leo

I doubt most supporters of M49 had any such name dropping preservation or conservation models in mind when approving the measure. I suspect the motivation to support the measure was simply to avoid having the conjoined metropolis of Portland and all its suburbs be duplicated rampantly across the rest of the state...in the process...obliterating vast areas of the natural world we live in.

The EPA just announced their awards for best City Planning for 2009. Curiously, no Oregon cities were mentioned. Could it be our vaunted, centralized, high density driven state system isn't as neat as we think?

The problem with Washington County suburbanites fighting new "growth" is that, if they manage to stop growth, they either 1) produce skyrocketing housing prices, which is to the benefit of existing residents (e.g. Santa Barbara), or 2) destroy the local economy (e.g. Scranton).

That's why "listening to the people" on the issue of growth isn't always such a great idea.

"...is that, if they manage to stop growth..." urban planning overlord

I expect growth, at least some growth...to continue. It just doesn't, to me...seem like a very good idea any more for growth to be allowed to take the form of continued spread out over open land. That's just sprawl. It's time to accommodate or deal with growth a different way.

The problem, ws, is that the same people (at least in Washington County) who oppose expanding the UGB ALSO oppose any "infill" development in their own neighborhoods. It needs to go "somewhere else," or nowhere at all.

UP olrd...one of the people likely objecting to urban reserves expansion is featured in the Oregonian today. That would be 75 year old Sharon Cornish, who'd rather not see her 103 year old house knocked down so that a 5 story apartment buildings could perhaps take its place.

Reading about her situation and that of her old house brings to mind the many acres in the Hillsboro area (and elsewhere) that have been given over to urban development in the last two to three decades. How effectively has the concept of infill been applied in those comparatively recently developed areas?

Have buildings there been built to accommodate anticipated population increases; five story and taller residence buildings? How about some towers such as Portland has? And about the electronics industry companies that Hillsboro actively recruited to the area with 'affordable land'; how efficiently, with infill (why shouldn't infill apply to companies as well as citizens?)in mind, have these companies used the land they bought? Did they make their factories multi-story? Did they build multi-story parking structures to meet their parking needs?

A little drive out exploring Hillsboro will reveal how wastefully these comparatively recently developed lands have been utilized. And yet, some people still want to drag more open land into this mess to create more of this kind of land use...or for 'infill', go after so called 'urban blight' designated neighborhoods such as the one Sharon Cornish's house is in.

That's not good land use or good planning for the present population or for the million more that people in this state seem, so far, resigned to accommodate.

Housing Shortage? Greedy Developers can't even sell trendy downtown Bend Condos at auction- look to raid federal low-income housing tax credits for bail out- our champions of free enterprise?

http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091230/BIZ0102/912300335/1041&nav_category=

Condo project shifts direction Unable to sell any units at auction, developer aims for affordable housing

By Andrew Moore / The Bulletin Published: December 30. 2009 4:00AM PST

Redmond-based Housing Works did not sell any of the 10 condos it put up for auction last month in its Putnam Pointe development in downtown Bend and will instead try to convert them into affordable-housing units, according to officials with the nonprofit.

Tim Cox, the agency's chief financial officer, said the condos were well-conceived but a victim of bad timing. To avoid defaulting on a construction loan, the agency hopes it can turn the condos into affordable housing units for the benefit of the community, Cox said.

“In our eyes, this is the best resolution there could be,” he said.

Cox said Housing Works plans to apply for federal Low Tax Credits. Housing Works would then sell the credits and use the proceeds to finance a traditional loan that would enable the agency to pay off the construction loan it took out to build the condos, located on the project's fifth floor... cont.

RyanLeo: "for future generations" argument is just code word for "I want to dictate how rural folk can live."

I love the way the pro-development people want to play off "rural folk."

In fact the larger owners of rural farm and forest lands are not your mythical "rural folk" on the family farm.

The larger owners of rural and forest lands are surprisingly perhaps the same interests that are the big owners of urban real estate.

For example, the largest owner of rural lands in the area where I live, Southern Wasco County bordering Jefferson County is none other than that old country bumpkin RB Pamplin- and believe me nobody tells that old hay seed how to live.

Much of the other land in our area and pretty much anything of size that comes on the market is gobbled up immediately by Metro area and Willamette Valley investors such as Mike Kelly (who for example purchased the Oregon State Bar Center in Lake Oswego for $8 million two years ago), Jeff Auxier (Auxier Focus Fund) and Walt Wells (Shopping Center Developer, Real Estate Investor).

Before the real estate bust in Jefferson County almost all of the available acreages in both the most rural and more urban centers were being sold to metro area and out of state investors.

This is the case all over rural Oregon.

For example there's that poor old hick Shilo Inns hotel owner Mark Hemstreet who has large holdings in Wallowa County. Several paracels of Hemstreets lands were sold to development LLC's and subject to Measure 37 claims. In 2001 Hemstreet sought to have 46 acres of farm and forest near Hawkins Pass in the Eagle Cap Wilderness in Union County rezoned as residential.

Then the implication is that "rural folks" were somehow leading the charge against Measure 49- what a joke. Here's the list of 9 Eastern Oregon counties that approved Measure 49: Crook, Deschutes, Gilliam, Hood River, Jefferson, Umatilla, Union, Wasco and Wheeler. And in Morrow and Wallowa a shift of 50 only votes each would have passed 49. In Baker a shift of only 91 votes would have passed 49. Only 6 of the counties were overwhelming opposed to Measure 49 were: Grant, Harney, Klamath, Lake, Malhuer and Sherman. (I know county Hood River as an Eastern Oregon county is a little dubious.)

So when we talk about the poor "rural folks" the baristas and trust funders are stepping all over I invited critical thinkers to look at reality and shed a tear in your beer for the oppressed classes like Robert Pamplin for example.

Measure 49 Vote

18 Eastern Oregon Counties (include Hood River Co.)

YES- 72065 NO- 72309

Margin 244 votes

Just in case you think this is influenced by including larger counties...

15 Most Rural Counties

Subtract three most urbanized counties: Deschutes, Klamath and Hood River.

YES- 36244 NO- 36501

Margin 257 Votes

Hardly a huge rural mandate against Measure 47- a shift of 123 votes in ALL of Eastern Oregon would have passed Measure 47 in the region.

<h2>Um... last two references to "Measure 47" obviously I meant "Measure 49."</h2>