ww.16bethany.112.ob.3/07/06

Author and transit activist Benjamin Ross says the urban growth boundary -- coupled with a timely recession -- made Portland a national model for smart growth.

(Olivia Bucks/The Oregonian)

Benjamin Ross’ new book is all about the end of suburban sprawl and the rise of smart growth, so the spot at which I reached him on his cell phone the other day seemed especially ironic: He was sitting in his car, air conditioner humming, outside a McDonald’s somewhere in California’s Central Valley.

Ross, a writer, consultant and the former president of Maryland's Action Committee on Transit, the nation's largest grassroots transit advocacy group, is on the West Coast swing of a book tour to promote "Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism," an optimistic look at the United States' tilt back toward walkable neighborhoods and urban living.

The Portland region is a major player in Ross’ book -- “a model for what cities should do,” -- so I talked to him earlier this week about what he sees in Oregon and what lessons we have for the rest of the country. Ross will appear at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne Monday at 7:30 p.m courtesy of 1,000 Friends of Oregon, Portland Transport and Oregon Walks.

Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

Ross will talk about his new book Monday at Powell's on Hawthorne Monday at 7:30 p.m.

Portlanders are so used to being described as a model for smart growth, I think we take it for granted. What's the national perspective on Portland?

People do see Portland as a model. Portland has accomplished things, especially in the area of infill and your urban growth boundary, that no one else has accomplished. That’s the widespread assumption, that the growth boundary is the distinguishing feature.

What I don’t think people appreciate either nationally, or in Oregon maybe, is the depth of the impact it’s had on how your area has developed. It’s not just stopping the sprawl. It’s also had this enormous indirect effect of changing the nature of the inner parts of the city.

There's a lot of Portland in your book. Why?

So many people have written about Portland and what happened that I relied on them. What I thought I could add was context, especially about what didn’t happen. In a lot of other cities, you started getting resistance to infill development in the late 1970s, places like New York and San Francisco. That didn’t come in Portland until the 1990s. In those years in between is when the structure of Portland’s smart growth was set up.

What happened in New York and San Francisco that didn't happen here?

There were two waves of gentrifiers. The first wave in the ‘60s and early ‘70s more or less was what happened in Portland. These people were politically progressive, in favor of allowing affordable housing in; they wanted to live in a mixed income environment. In New York and San Francisco, by the end of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, you got a second wave that came in at a higher price point and acted more like people in the suburban neighborhoods -- the ones who that have always been against infill development, who were against any change after that arrived. That didn’t happen in Portland, at least not as early as it did elsewhere. House prices didn’t go up the way they did in New York and San Francisco. That started happening in the 1990s after Nike and Intel moved in, but it happened later than in other, larger cities.

You make the point that it was an economic slump caused in part by the collapse of the timber industry that prevented housing prices here, which are certainly going up now, from rising earlier. It's fascinating to think of an economic downtown as being ultimately good for a community.

It’s astonishing. I was really surprised.

So we just got lucky?

Well, you had visionary leadership, and then you had two pieces of luck: One was tying the expansion of the growth boundary to infill housing, to allowing more housing closer in, which was thought of as a concession but I think turned out to be a great strength. It was thought of as a weakening of the growth boundary, but turned out to be something that made it work much better. The second thing was the recession.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted it work out that way. It was very fortuitous.

Do you think we're going to look back at the recent recession and say the same thing about suburban sprawl, that the downturn kind of put the brakes on the spread of suburban-style development?

Oh, that’s a good question. I think the boom before the crash is the bigger influence. That was, not in Portland so much because of the boundary, but everywhere else it was this crazy outward spread. You had all this money, all these people looking to spend money, no sense of the cost of sprawl.

To me the recent recession looks more like, in terms of the outer suburbs, the necessary cleaning up of the mess. We could not keep growing the way we were -- out, out, out -- but it took some financial troubles, unfortunately, to help make that clear.

In talking about Portland and other cities where smart growth became the model, you point out that one reason a different approach became the communal vision is that new political coalitions formed. What did those look like?

In Portland, you had a coalition between political progressives and downtown business interests. They recognized the common interest in having a successful healthy city, especially a successful and healthy central city. That’s a unique combination. Those are not two groups that always see eye to eye.

Does it help that Portland was a younger city?

What really helped was that, compared to other cities in the West, you have this great advantage of a large area with a logical street grid. Jeff Speck in his book on walkability talks about that in great detail, how it's an incredible advantage to have that good street layout.

What are the basic elements of a good street layout?

Small blocks is the biggest. That gives you so much more flexibility.

At The Oregonian, we're in the midst of a large project looking at east Portland and why it hasn't developed the public services and walkable neighborhoods as the old streetcar neighborhoods. Block size is one of the biggest underlying issues, that in places that were annexed more recently, the basic street structure is much more suburban with these big, hard-to-develop blocks.

That’s the big unsolved problem of urbanism today, really. We’ve figured out some ways of rebuilding these super-block suburbs but they’re so expensive. We need to figure out how to do that at a reasonable cost so that we can fix the middle-class suburbs as well as the high-end suburbs, the ones that were built to mimic walkable urban neighborhoods. No one has figured that out yet, so you’re not alone.

I want to ask about something you wrote that raised my eyebrows: "Light rail was now Portland's point of pride. Its renown as the symbol of the city's renovation surpassed its role in the region's transportation network." That's really the point of light rail, right, that it's more about dictating and guiding land use than about moving large numbers of people?

I think you’re overstating it. Light rail only really fixes the land use when it fulfills a good transportation function. I can point you to Newark, where they have this mile and a half light rail that, jeez, it’s quicker to walk. But even the Portland streetcar is a long enough distance -- it’s over to the eastside of the river now, right? -- that it has a transportation impact. Over the river isn’t a trip people walk, at least not casually. Rail is the key but it’s got to be a real transportation function, not just a sort of tourist attraction. The Portland light rail system clearly carries enough people to change the character of downtown.

That said, I come to this from Washington D.C., where we have more people taking transit to work than driving within the city limits. Portland hasn’t achieved that.

That's because it's much harder to find parking in D.C., right?

It’s easy to find parking -- you just have to pay $15 an hour! What happened in DC, and I’m not clear if this is happening in Portland, since our Metro opened, all of the downtown garages have been knocked down and replaced with office buildings.

You don’t find surface lots and parking garages, at least not easily. Parking in downtown D.C. is what’s underground beneath buildings, and they charge whatever they can charge. As a result, most of the D.C. residents who drive to work live in the district and work in the suburbs.

In your book, you talk quite a bit about the urban growth boundary's role in Portland's development. Where would Portland be without the boundary?

Probably it would look like more like the San Francisco Bay area, on a smaller scale, where you have this very expensive downtown gentrified area and all these sprawling suburbs around it, and lots of people forced into very long drives to work.

It’s very hard to imagine. There were certainly enough people moving into Portland who wanted to be in the walkable parts of Portland that if you hadn’t allowed things to get denser and hadn’t put in all that new housing closer to the central city, the existing housing would be sky high all over.

The big debate here now is over infill, or refill, in older neighborhoods. We're writing a lot of stories about rising rents and property owners tearing down older homes to put up larger ones or multiple houses on a lot that only had one. How do you ensure future affordability when that happens?

Inclusionary zoning is really an important thing because part of this debate is if you try to do infill of affordable housing in less expensive neighborhoods, they say why do we get it all? Inclusionary zoning ensures that every neighborhood gets its share of affordable housing. The political effect of that is as important as the practical one: It creates a civic compact that everybody is going to share in creating a community that is a good place to live for all kinds of people.

You describe the neighborhood where you grew up as "a museum of suburbia," Cape Cod homes built by Levitt and Sons -- a precursor to Levittown. What do you say to people today who argue, "I like my car, I like my half acre, I like Costco and driving to work, so please don't tell me how to live?"