Portland Attracts the Creative Class by Increasing Congestion and Demolishing Neighborhoods
18th August 2015
Because that’s what ‘progressive’ governments do.
Joseph Rose, the Oregonian reporter who proved that streetcars are slower than walking, has left the paper’s transportation beat. So it took another Oregonian reporter, Andrew Theen, to make the brilliant discover that Portland highways really are at or above capacity.
Of course, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who lives in the Portland area. According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s latest urban mobility report, Portland has more congestion today (measured by hours of delay per auto commuter) than Los Angeles did 30 years ago, when LA was considered to be about the worst congested city in the world.
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Speaking of housing, Portlanders are now joining Seattleites in protesting the demolition of single-family homes to be replaced with higher-priced condos. But few of the protesters seem to understand that the real cause of their problems is the urban-growth boundaries that create artificial shortages of land for development, thus forcing builders to redevelop existing neighborhoods to higher densities.
Markets work even when you don’t want them to.
August 18th, 2015 at 07:09
Yet if the “urban-growth” boundaries are relaxed or eliminated, the immediate result will be more “urban sprawl”, leading to more congestion on the streets and highways as more people take to their cars to commute back and forth to work, as happened when the Interstate system was implemented. So we enter an endless spiral of more people using the roads, which leads to more/wider roads, which leads to more people using them as access to formerly difficult-to-reach places is eased, etc., etc.
Until something happens, like a catastrophic loss of jobs, that causes people to stop coming and those already there to start leaving. As has happened in Detroit.
The fact is that when a polity’s population expands it does so circumferentially, growing outward from a center, but when their population shrinks, it declines uniformly; the footprint of a city never shrinks, it just becomes less and less dense until the population is no longer able to sustain the infrastructure. As has happened in Detroit, which should be an object lesson for all urban planners everywhere.