this certainly is not accolades, unless you consider having 'I'maToole hating Portland the worst' as a badge of honor...in retrospect maybe it is an accolade!
New national praise brings city new criticism
Portland’s growth and transit efforts receive scrutiny from a prominent national think tank
POSTED: 06:00 AM PDT Wednesday, October 3, 2007
BY TYLER GRAF
Portland is internationally recognized for its devotion to urban planning and its love of public transportation, having received glowing coverage from the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner and the BBC. But backlash against Portland’s urban growth policies exists, and in recent months those policies have gotten national attention from two prominent think tanks.
Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, is leading the charge. A native Oregonian – originally a Portlander, now a Bandon resident – O’Toole believes Portland’s public transportation system is too expensive and too coercive to be effective.
In June, O’Toole authored a Cato Institute study titled “Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn’t Work,” a refutation of the city’s planning schemes, namely, its long-held goal of smart growth and public transportation, along with its newfound desire to solidify its dense urban core.
According to O’Toole, the system is inherently corrupt.
“(Portland planning) was manipulated by a cabal of politically connected businesses seeking to divert the flow of tax dollars into their own pockets,” O’Toole wrote in his study.
O’Toole’s criticism extends to how proposed public transportation and urban growth development projects will affect Portland’s population.
“What I see is a sorting of the population,” O’Toole said from a Cato Institute-sponsored conference. “Higher educated people live in the city, while less educated, less well-off people are pushed to the suburbs.” According to O’Toole, this marginalizes suburbs and exports crime to peripheral neighborhoods.
On Sept. 7, O’Toole published a second critique of Portland’s public transportation system as an opinion piece in the pages of the Hawaii Reporter. The article came after the Portland Bureau of Planning’s Debbie Bischoff spoke to the Honolulu City Council about the positive effects of MAX light rail on metro Portland.
“To date, the city has given out about $1.5 billion in subsidies, and more subsidies have been granted by various Portland suburbs,” wrote O’Toole in his Hawaii Reporter piece. “Without these subsidies, there would be almost no transit-oriented development in Portland.”
Portland developer Homer Williams disagrees with this assessment, saying that public transportation – the streetcar in particular, for which he was a signatory – is an engine for urban revitalization and economic growth. Without it, Williams argues, the Pearl District and the South Waterfront would be islands, disconnected from the city.
So how does Williams feel about O’Toole and his study?
“He’s an idiot,” Williams said. “His arguments don’t make any sense, but he gets published a lot.”
O’Toole’s critiques have not passed unnoticed. With more than $300 million coming from the federal government for light-rail expansions, and with TriMet positioned as a symbol for other transit agencies across the country, Portland’s urban growth and transportation issues garner national attention.
In September, Michael Lewyn, an associate professor at Florida Coastal School of Law, published a rebuttal of O’Toole for the Congress for the New Urbanism. In it, Lewyn countered O’Toole’s claims that light rail is needlessly expensive and that people are moving to the suburbs to escape Portland’s coercive planning and transport schemes.
“What makes Portland unique is the survival and growth of its regional core: while many central cities have grown very slowly or declined in recent decades, Portland’s central city has grown almost as fast as its suburbs,” Lewyn wrote in his study, “Debunking Cato.”
Lewyn believes Portland has succeeded where other cities have failed – in retaining, even expanding, the urban core. Nonetheless, his views remain tempered.
“I think that on all sides, people tend to view Portland as being more unique than it is,” Lewyn said.
Adding to the defense of Portland planning is TriMet Project Planning Director Phil Selinger, who published an 18-page official city response to O’Toole’s piece during the last week of September, written at the behest of the American Public Transportation Association and other transit authorities.
Selinger said TriMet is taking a new look at the 2040 Plan and public transportation for the region will continue to evolve. “Transit in the region has to be integrated with the plan in order to fulfill its goals,” Selinger said. “We want increased options for more people.”
For Selinger, Portland’s public transportation initiatives – particularly light rail – must go forward because they connect the city. Light rail may appear to be expensive, he said, but the costs will defray over time.
“You have a great upfront cost for rail modes,” he said, “but over the long run they are cheaper to operate, and they are cleaner because they run on electricity.”
O’Toole, however, remains unmoved.
“I have no problem with people choosing to live in this dense urban area, but Portland is creating an elite group living in the city,” O’Toole said. “Some of these things I’d object to even if they were free.”
http://www.djcoregon.com/articleDeta...eive-scrutiny-
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