San Diego should avoid growth boundaries
Excerpts:
Urban growth boundaries may be one of the hottest land-use planning tools to break onto the political landscape in 30 years. State and local officials across the nation have extolled the virtues of using them to contain suburbanization and revitalize city centers.
In California, San Jose and about a dozen other cities have already adopted some form of a growth boundary to limit new development, and the idea is picking up steam.
In almost all cases, advocates point to Portland, Oregon as the pioneer and most successful example of a growth boundary's effectiveness. There, says the emerging conventional wisdom, foresight and a strong planning ethic have forged an urban policy that has netted one of the nation's healthiest and most livable communities.
The growth boundary is already significantly impacting local housing prices. A Portland State University economist found that Portland's housing prices rose by 63.8% from 1990-95, faster than the U.S. median of 18.2% and 50 other large metropolitan areas including Denver, Nashville, San Antonio, Chicago, Charlotte, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Orlando and Houston. Land prices in Portland have more than doubled since 1990.
This raises another troubling aspect of regional planning: Portland's regional plan represents a vision that does not square with the obvious preferences of many citizens. Portlanders, like residents in other parts of the country including San Diego, clearly prefer lower density residential living.
This poses a serious challenge to the ethical foundations of regional planning. If Metro's plan is fully implemented and boundary is not expanded, residents will be forced to live in more crowded cities, smaller houses, and more congested neighborhoods in order to conform to Metro's vision of what Portland "ought" to be.
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