We got some things right. We got some things wrong.
Land use planning: Looking back 40 years.
Forty years ago I was chair of the Jackson County Board of Commissioners. We had just passed an Omnibus Land Use Ordinance that laid out the master plan for meeting high-minded goals for Oregon. Protect Oregon's natural beauty. Shape growth and development so that it avoided inefficient sprawl. Keep the forest and farm land from being made uneconomic or impossible to farm. There was a housing goal, too, but we didn't pay much attention to it. Housing took care of itself. The market system seemed to work.
I had gotten elected as the pro-land-use-planning candidate. My Republican and Libertarian opponents were four-square in opposition to land use planning, saying land use planning was tyranny forced on us by the heavy hand of do-gooders upstate. The Republican candidate was openly endorsed by the local Chamber of Commerce, by realtor groups, by forest and agricultural industry leaders, and everyone in my local Rotary Club of 100 people, except the one other Democrat. Yet I won, notwithstanding the Reagan landslide of 1980. I got elected because was the candidate of "livability," the young un-bossed reformer, and the people aligned against me represented the powerful forces that threatened livability.
We tried to protect forest land. We got something right. Forest fires back in 1980 were nowhere near the threat they are today, but we understood the problem. We attempted to address the now-well-understood "interface" problem of houses built in and next to fire-prone forests. People start fires. People also expect fire-fighters to defend their homes, not "mere trees." It makes fire suppression more difficult. We made forest-adjacent homes harder to build by stopping division of forest property into small parcels designed for homesites.
We tried to protect farm land, and we got something right, but mostly by accident. Back in 1980, commercial agriculture in Southern Oregon consisted of hay and pasture plus pear orchards in 100-acre-plus blocks. Southern Oregon grows excellent pears. Harry and David, the "Fruit of the Month" people, advertise that fact to the world. The county ordinance defined even the most marginal of land as "agriculture" on the premise that someone could grow pears there, even if no one ever had or ever would. The goal was to protect that land from development.
Forty years passed. Pear orchards are being pulled out. Five years ago they were pulled out to plant hemp accommodating the cannabis boom. It also turns out that the very marginal farm land we protected from development is suitable for wine-grapes. Southern Oregon is becoming wine country, not pear country. Some of the wine grape agriculture looks like industrial farming, with large blocks of grapes, but more typical are boutique vineyards. The money in grapes is in the transformation of commodity grapes into branded wine. A successful operation combines tasting rooms, wine clubs, and often an on-site owner who is in a mixed business of wedding venue, event center, wine manufacture, and agriculture. It is the small-business agriculture that we thought would kill real agriculture. Now thatisthe real agriculture.
We got something wrong, though. Rural housing. An article of faith among those of us writing ordinances was that people living near farms would destroy the adjoining land's farm-ability. Neighbors would complain about dust, sprays, and the noise of frost control propellers. Most important, if homesites were possible then farmland would be valued as homesites, not as industrial cropland. We prohibited nearly all new farm-area dwellings. But now we have an unmet need for housing on or near farm land. Farms--especially the new crops of cannabis and grapes--need employees. The zoning laws made rural land "livable" for boutique vineyard/winery owners, but not for the workers necessary to operate the farm.
Local residents were shocked to learn cannabis workers were living under sheets of plastic, in tents, and in cars, all without water or toilets. The luckiest were in RVs, yet RVs are illegal to place on farm land, as is housing people in the open air or in hoop houses of plastic. The media attributed this to the fault of cartels who lacked regard for employees. The guilt is closer to home. We made farm housing illegal. We got that wrong.
Our notion of urban-centered growth is not working as we had hoped, either. We didn't have a visible "homeless" problem back in the early 1980s. Now we do. Back then the notion of hundreds of people sleeping in tents alongside roadways was inconceivable. Our zoning steered people to live inside cities, which made the land there more valuable, which we anticipated. We did not expect that we were making affordable housing too expensive to build. We aren't getting the efficient "infill" we expected. Cities steered people to live in monocultures of single family detached houses. People in city neighborhoods like them, and they are a political force defending their neighborhoods against the "wrong" people, i.e. people who cannot afford a single family detached house. We have a problem. We aren't building inexpensive housing in the cities because it doesn't pencil out. We aren't building them in rural areas around farms because we don't think they belong there. So people hide out in tents and under plastic tarps.
Forty years is enough time to see some things play out. We made mistakes. Of course, what we don't know is how things would have turned out if we had not done what we did. It might have been worse.
We allowed the builders dictate which kind of housing they want to build.
A 4000 square foot house needs bathrooms and a kitchen just like the 1500 square foot one, but the larger one makes a lot more money for the builder, which is their big incentive!
The power of hindsight... nice post.