The Antiplanner, Randall O'Toole, is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and an Oregon native. Though his subjects draw from aall over the US and abroad, Oregon, and especially Portland are frequent. Perhaps because Portland claims to be a leader in urban planning, and at one time it may have been, it is still a fertile ground for examples of what is wrong in government planning today.
This is from a recent post, concerning the professor at PSU who wrote a critique of Portland's Growth Plan titled, "Density at Any Cost." A blog post and links appeared on this website also.
Excerpt:
Mildner in fact agreed that his views were unrepresentative of others at PSU’s urban planning school. “Hiring in the School of Urban Studies and Planning self-selects for people sympathetic with Oregon’s urban planning system,” he suggests, so it’s clear his views aren’t going to align with others in that school.
In a Cato Institute journal, O'Toole wrote a book review for "Sprawl: A Compact History," titled "The Perils of Planning."
Excerpt:
Urban planners and other sprawl opponents believe
that Americans waste land by living in low-density suburbs and that they waste energy by driving too much. The
planners’ goals are to reduce driving and
promote “efficient” land use by increasing
the share of people living in multi-family housing and reducing average lot sizes
for single-family housing.
To achieve their goals, planners in Portland, Ore., Missoula, Mont., and elsewhere
have imposed minimum-density zoning
codes that effectively force the conversion
of existing single-family
neighborhoods into apartments. If a house in one of these zones burns down, the homeowner may be required to replace it with an apartment building. To further discourage large-lot subdivisions, planners have used urban-growth boundaries and other tools to drive up the cost of land from a few thousand dollars an acre to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars an acre. To discourage driving, planners have increased congestion by putting barriers in roads and using highway user fees
to build expensive but little-used rail transit projects.
neighborhoods into apartments. If a house in one of these zones burns down, the homeowner may be required to replace it with an apartment building. To further discourage large-lot subdivisions, planners have used urban-growth boundaries and other tools to drive up the cost of land from a few thousand dollars an acre to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars an acre. To discourage driving, planners have increased congestion by putting barriers in roads and using highway user fees
to build expensive but little-used rail transit projects.
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