Contrarian unabashedly bashes Portland
The Monday Profile: Randal O'Toole
Monday, December 10, 2007
ANNA GRIFFIN
The Oregonian
In a fancy Portland ballroom, economist Randal O'Toole plugs in his laptop and fires up a PowerPoint presentation about how Portland is growing.
This isn't, however, your usual dry slideshow of land-use laws and zoning codes. This is an accounting of a smart-growth apocalypse.
Slap a Bible in his hand and O'Toole could easily pass for a frontier preacher. He has the look, if not the Good Book: a stern, tight-lipped expression, an impressive display of graying facial hair, a wardrobe that tends toward simple black suits and looping Western-style bow ties.
He has quite the homily to tell with his slides, a story of righteousness vs. sin, of good guys and bad guys and the long-term consequences of bad judgment and poor choices.
Bashing Portland has become a cottage industry, and O'Toole is its leading figure.
Click. Here's a slide showing a big house on a lush, green yard. This is in Houston, a plump 2,300 square feet for $170,000.
Click. Here's a skinny house in Portland, maybe 1,200 scrunched square feet on a sliver of a yard. Asking price: $260,000.
It's like looking at a diet company's before and after photos. The crowd -- a room of like-minded libertarians and conservatives -- quakes with laughter.
"You'd better hurry. They just dropped the price," O'Toole says. "It's got granite countertops and hardwood floors. Who cares if you barely have enough room to turn around in it?"
Times are flush in Portland. Planners and civic leaders from around the world come to see how we do it. The New York Times can't stop writing about how great we have it, whether we're sipping tea, buying big vacation homes or biking to work. Although the housing market has cooled, Portland hasn't suffered the same steep decline as the rest of the country.
Still, not everyone is thrilled with where things are headed.
O'Toole, a Rose City native and professional thinker with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, is the loudest voice among a small but rowdy group of writers, political activists and professional contrarians who say Portland is actually a mess -- a place where planners impose their will on the people, where city leaders mortgage the future for toys such as streetcars and trams, where the working class disappears a bit more every day.
These critics have their own magazine, Brainstorm NW, their own bloggers and their own think tank. Yet the people in power say they don't take this would-be shadow government very seriously.
Homer Williams, one of the city's most prominent developers, called O'Toole "an idiot" in the Daily Journal of Commerce. Ethan Seltzer, head of Portland State University's urban planning department, wonders why anyone would waste time writing about O'Toole -- or even listening to what he has to say.
Still, O'Toole does have an audience. The Cato Institute recently gave him a job -- the first time in decades he's worked for somebody other than himself -- and has flown him around the country to tout his new book, "The Best-Laid Plans: How Smart Growth Makes Housing Unaffordable."
In recent months, he's spoken against light rail and urban planning in places such as Denver, Pittsburgh, Tucson, Ariz., and Charlotte, N.C., where he failed to persuade voters to end a 9-year-old transit tax. He says he's helped kill plans for light rail in Winnipeg, Manitoba; a sales tax to help pay for mass transit in San Jose; and the Seattle region's Proposition 1, a multibillion-dollar transportation tax package that voters rejected last month.
His arguments are simple: Government planning is bad. People should have the freedom to choose how they live. Smart growth is actually quite dumb.
Natural migration
It's a national problem, O'Toole says, as cities try to combat what he considers the natural migration of the middle class to the suburbs by building mass transit and offering builders and property owners tax breaks to help lure people back to the urban core.
"Planners think Americans should live in higher densities and get around on mass transit and bicycle," he says. "Surveys show that most Americans want to live in a house with a yard and have two cars in every garage and get around on the highway."
Even though he abandoned the big city for Bandon, where he works out of his home, several years ago, O'Toole saves a special place in his heart for his hometown. He's crafted a complicated narrative to explain the Portland region's evolution into a national smart-growth darling:
Once upon a time, neighborhood activists persuaded the City Council to kill the proposed Mount Hood Freeway. Instead, then-Mayor Neil Goldschmidt took advantage of a loophole in the federal law that allowed cities to reroute highway money into mass-transit projects. Adding buses, O'Toole says, would have made the most sense but would have left some of the millions set aside for the southeast freeway unspent. Rather than leave cash on the table, Goldschmidt and his cadre of young planners invested in light rail.
Out of that came what O'Toole calls "the Light-Rail Mafia," a collection of politicos, planners and private developers who continue to use government subsidies and restrictive land-use laws to circumvent the will of the people and turn Portland into a high-density hub of condo towers and transit lines. As a result, he says, housing prices have gone up, the streets are more congested, and Portland has become a less pleasant place to live.
O'Toole began his career as an environmentalist, earning a degree in forest management and geology from Oregon State in 1974 and joining the private sector to analyze state and federal plans for forest maintenance. In that work, he began to question the role of large bureaucracies.
"Randal has been a skeptic of authority from start to finish," says Andy Stahl, executive director of the watchdog group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Stahl has known O'Toole for three decades. "He hasn't really evolved as much as he's changed targets."
O'Toole turned to land-use planning in 1995 when planners tried to rezone his Oak Grove neighborhood in unincorporated Clackamas County. Planners wanted denser construction. Neighbors objected and won.
Today, he calls himself an economist -- he spent three years studying the subject at the University of Oregon, but didn't complete his degree -- and spends much of his time telling his version of the Portland story.
The Houston way
When O'Toole casts an eye toward the future, he fears his hometown is headed toward becoming another Vancouver, B.C., with "condos as far as the eye can see." Instead, he wants us to look toward Houston for inspiration.
"They're actually building roads in Houston," he says with a sigh of pleasure. "They know something in Houston that we haven't figured out here. You can build your way out of a traffic problem."
Vancouver is, of course, the urban planner's dream city, sleek and sophisticated, laid out as carefully and creatively as blown glass. Houston is the planner's nightmare, a sprawling monster of a town with no zoning code and a love affair with the automobile.
Judging from recent elections, most Portlanders would rather trade in their Keens, give up their microbrews and swear off fleece than live in Houston. Portland's annual survey of residents suggests that most like where the city is headed, even if they might prefer a quicker commute or cheaper real estate.
O'Toole points to the fact that the suburbs are growing faster than the city as proof that Portland has it all wrong. Planners, who accuse O'Toole of using old data and drawing incorrect conclusions, say that's not surprising: Of course the population will rise in the area that has more undeveloped land ripe for new construction. The point is that Portland keeps growing.
"What people like Randal seem to assume is that we're claiming Portland is perfect," says Seltzer, the PSU professor, who has served on Portland's Planning Commission. "It's not that Portland has it all together. It's that so many other places have so many bigger problems."
Some of O'Toole's concerns and criticisms are the same ones that keep city planners up at night: Portland is becoming too expensive for working-class families. Traffic jams are becoming more frequent. Tax breaks used to build neighborhoods such as the Pearl have taken money away from core government services such as the public schools and care for the mentally ill.
O'Toole and his targets disagree wildly, however, on the solutions. Urban planners and their bosses at City Hall say government must do even more -- by building affordable housing near underused schools, providing more services for poor residents and rezoning large swaths of property along light-rail lines to encourage higher-density development.
O'Toole, on the other hand, says Portlanders should start to address their problems by dismantling Metro, the regional planning agency. The Legislature should blow up the urban growth boundary and build toll roads. Neighborhoods should be allowed to opt out of local zoning laws. TriMet should halt construction of new light-rail lines.
Even admirers agree that O'Toole's proposed remedies veer into the implausible, particularly in a place where he's distinctly outnumbered.
"His analysis of the problem is always much more interesting than the last chapter," Stahl says.
Still, O'Toole sees hope. Even after Oregon voters approved the property rights limits of Measure 49, Portland isn't a lost cause. No, we're not Houston. But we're also not San Francisco. At least, not yet.
"People need to listen," O'Toole says. "They may not like the message, but they need to listen. For your own good."
Anna Griffin: 503-412-7053;
annagriffin@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...830.xml&coll=7
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