Portland Oregon

Portland

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Chapter 19 Policy System Cut

Portland and Oregon:

Portland: Politics and Policy System

Now to Portland. A large part of the reason Portland fell behind Seattle during the twenty years after the end of World War II was its politics and policy system. Portland did as well, arguably a bit better, during the war years when an odd alliance between the local neo-Progressive private sector, war production entrepreneurs (and the chamber) and New Deal Washington-based war production and housing agencies. That nexus was sufficient to overcome a conservative, ethnic-based political leadership and thrust them into housing and eventually a public works urban renewal based on the Moses Portland Improvement plan.

The New Deal program, however, lost considerable steam in the last years of the war—and when Congress became Republican in 1946, it was pushed back. Unlike Seattle which was able to preserve the dominant western business reformer-government partnership, Portland’s politics drifted toward fragmentation and internal division. Voter, after initially approving bonds and tax increases at the time of Portland Improvement’s 1944 launch, rejected subsequent funding, tax increases, and bond referenda in the postwar years.

I argue that the huge number of predominately young, ethnic/Appalachian wartime population emigrants resided uncomfortably with older Yankee-English-German traditional population. Rapid unionization associated with wartime shipyards and manufacturing also, I believe, polarized local political attitudes and political processes. Neighborhoods and housing were ethnically and class-segregated affecting a district-based electoral system. Suburbanization was also a factor as the total population of Multnomah and Clackamas counties surpassed that of the City by 1962. Suburban malls and middle class diffusion to the suburbs undoubtedly played out in the texture of City of Portland politics (and Portland’s downtown). Portland’s population declined slightly in the 1960 census; metropolitan population grew 16%–which was half that of Seattle during the fifties. In essence, the long-standing political culture of Portland was in considerable transition in the postwar years.[1]

With the retirement of the long-standing Mayor, Earl Riley, who had presided over the private-public partnership during the war, an aggressive, conservatively reformist Mayor, a woman, was elected in 1948. Unable to forge a working relationship with the all-male city council (1948-1952). Her attempt at charter reform to install a city manager form of government failed, and the opposition of prominent department heads (including Bowes the Robert Moses clone/public works/economic development commissioner) was a critical factor. “Asserting that the city’s rapid growth required the more efficient organization of municipal administration, she appointed a group of businessmen and civic leaders to a Committee on Municipal Reorganization in 1949. Unfortunately for reformers, the city council balked at placing the committee’s city manager charter on the ballot.”[2]

A perceived dominance by private unions over the Democratic Party which was in power through the entire period injected scandal and persistent episodes of corruption into policy-making during the administrations of subsequent Democratic mayors. Voters continued rejecting tax increases, bond issuance and support of institutions like the Zoo and the Symphony through the fifties. Organized Crime, gambling and prostitution and payoffs became a normal part of municipal politics after the mid-fifties—but had no noticeable effect on elections as Mayor Schrunk, elected in 1956 was reelected twice after, serving until 1972.[3]

Instead, the implementation of Portland Improvement was led chiefly by Commissioner Bowes, Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean and after 1956, Mayor Schrunk[4]. During the early Schrunk administration the Port Authority began its incremental modernization, a downtown coliseum was built, a modern zoning ordinance was approved and the city entered into industrial development, separating economic development from planning and public works. The focus changed during the mid-fifties (1956) when the first clearly urban renewal projects were set into motion (see below). In 1958 the Portland Development Commission, intended to be the city’s urban renewal agency, was created through referendum Amid this atmosphere, a more Progressive business elite was unable to affect consistent policy influence over economic development or anything else. Business reformers tended to focus on charter reform—and that proved to be a dead end, suffering yet a second defeat in 1966. “After nearly twenty years of effort with the same issues and the same actors, Portland still justified description as a city whose leaders hoped for steady growth and preferred placid prosperity either to machine politics or political reform”.[5]

Portland-Style Urban Renewal

Portland had an active housing program since the 1930’s and hence was sensitive to the on-going debate in Washington on the relationship of housing, slum clearance and physical redevelopment. Portland had established its housing redevelopment agency, the Portland Housing Authority (HAP) whose creation was initially defeated by referendum in 1938, was approved under pressure of massive wartime production-induced population growth in 1941. During the war HAP constructed over 18,000 units, housing more than 60,000 residents. In 1950, however, when temporary war-time housing units built by others was turned over to HAP, the agency’s board of directors became split, bitterly polarized, thus inhibiting HAP’s ability to aggressively respond to the 1949 Housing Act.

The state approved an urban renewal enabling law in 1951[6]. The legislation restricted the exercise of urban renewal to housing redevelopment authorities, and empowered those agencies only with the necessary tools. Perhaps strangely, at that time there was only one housing redevelopment authority in the entire state: the Portland Housing Authority (HAP). So, in considerable internal turmoil, HAP attempted Portland’s first mixed use (housing and commercial) urban renewal project, Vaughn Street, a forty-four block area in an industrial zone one and one-half miles from the CBD (1952). The Vaughn Street project enjoyed support from the Chamber, the Building Trades Council, the League of Women Voters, and the vault-like “City Club”.

The voters, however, did get their memo—and they turned down the project in a 1952 referendum. The issues, the same as San Diego, were resistance to federal involvement and dollars in Portland projects and fear of an increase in taxes. When HAP tried again to revive the Vaughn Street Project in the following year (1953) by rejecting federal urban renewal dollars and using its own funds Vaughn Street residents (predominately ethnic working class Croats) resisted. Their petition to stop the project was accepted by the Mayor and in the interests of harmony, Commissioner Bowes effectively stopped the project in it tracks.

HAP wanted out of the commercial urban renewal business and therefore urged the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal (MACOUR) in 1955. MACOUR wasted little time in coming up with a second urban renewal plan/project: the South Auditorium. Also, to get HAP out of the way, HAP contracted with the City’s Planning Department to implement the South Auditorium urban renewal project. The Planning Department set up an urban renewal division within the department, hired seven professionals including Santa Barbara’s planning director, John Kenward. The City had indirectly taken over responsibility for urban renewal in contravention of state law. To remedy this defect, City Planning went to the State Legislature (1957), successfully engineering an amendment to state law allowing cities, counties, and designated EDOs to conduct urban renewal projects[7]. In the following year (1958) Portland voters approved the creation of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) and entrusted to it responsibility for urban renewal. Finally, in 1960 Oregon voters approved a constitutional amendment which authorized the use of TIF to provide the local match for urban renewal projects (Oregon was the first state to follow California in approving TIF).

Amid all this action, the South Auditorium project went forward—or rather stumbled sideways in a confusing, horribly controversial series of referendums, the injection of additional public (South Portland) urban renewal project, private projects (Lloyd Center Shopping Mall which when opened in 1960 was the largest urban shopping center in the nation), and multiple freeways[8]. The apparently long-standing frustration of east of the river residents resented the west of the river urban renewal projects and through referendums forced the original west side South Auditorium project over to the west side. The South Portland (west side) project was proposed, in some measure, because the federal regional urban renewal director would not approve the South Auditorium project’s move to the east side. The path of two freeways which connected this to the CBD and elsewhere were shifted from the City’s original plan to a new configuration required by the Oregon Department of Transportation (smoother curves). As we discovered in the San Diego case study, urban renewal/redevelopment projects are far from easy. Displacement from these projects was considerable, although efforts were made by agencies to soften the ill effects they proved grossly inadequate. The black majority Albina neighborhood was obliterated, and the majority white (Italian and Jewish) district also suffered greatly.

Most of the above projects were completed by 1960 or shortly after and additional urban renewal projects followed (Portland State College, for example, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, the Mount Hood Freeway another) during the 1960’s (also a major riot). In short, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, Portland participated in a “style” of urban renewal, central city/CBD redevelopment which closely resembled that found on the Eastern and Great Lakes coasts. Like the making of sausage, it got off to a rough start, a rougher interim, and glowing press reports at the ribbon-cutting. As we discovered in the San Diego case study, however, changes in the 1960’s generated a second burst of redevelopment in the early seventies—with the arrival of Portland’s version of Pete Wilson, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt.

Goldschmidt, 32 years old and a one-term city council member, was elected to be mayor in 1972; he served until 1979 when he became Secretary for Transportation in the Carter Administration and from 1987 to 1990 was Governor. Concerned by the 1970 Census results which demonstrated that Portland had suffered from a considerable exodus of its middle class to the suburbs which were exploding. The three suburban counties, Washington, Clackamas, and Multnomah, grew from 822,000 residents in 1960 to over 1,007,000 in 1970—Portland had grown only by 2.7% to 382,619 in the same decade. Goldschmidt, once in office, developed his “population strategy” to halt the exodus and restore the primary position of the central city over its suburban hinterland.

This so-called ‘population strategy’ emphasized public transportation, neighborhood revitalization, and downtown planning. Improved public transportation would improve air quality, enhance the attractiveness of older neighborhoods, and focus activity on downtown. In turn a vital business center would protect property values in surrounding districts and increase their attractiveness for residential reinvestment. … One essential piece of city strategy was preservation of a user-friendly downtown. Business concerns about suburban competition and parking … [led to] a comprehensive downtown planning process that involved public officials, downtown retailers, property owners, neighborhood groups and professional and civic organizations [that] resulted in the [1972] Downtown Plan.[9]

Goldschmidt’s “Downtown Portland” approach brought together business leaders, professionals, and the neighborhoods in a focused strategy achieved through an open deliberative planning process. Instead of approaching CBD redevelopment in a zero-sum manner with neighborhoods, his “population strategy” presented a rationale in which both went “hand-in-glove’. This was cemented by Goldschmidt’s 1974 formation of the Office of Neighborhood Associations which incorporated into city policy-making the numerous neighborhood organizations which had developed since the middle 1960’s. Abandoning the widespread demolition characteristic of urban renewal, his more focused physical redevelopment (Transit Mall and the McCall Waterfront Park) was considerably more sensitive to the residents of affected areas. The key unifying investment was in public transit, and away from the disruptive construction of highways and freeways. Building upon the earlier creation and investment in TriMet, Goldschmidt withdrew the city’s commitment to the Mount Hood Freeway, transferring the federal funds to support a fifteen mile light-rail transit line into a suburb— constructing the Portland Transit Mall and the first leg of the “Metropolitan Area Express”[10].

If timing is everything, Goldschmidt had good timing. His administration overlapped with a larger regional initiative which in 1973 led to the creation of “what was in essence a farmland protection program [that] required local jurisdictions to prepare comprehensive plans in harmony with statewide goals. … One key element was the requirement that each municipality” create an urban growth boundary[11]. Also, in 1978 voters created the multi-functional regional government, Metro, the nation’s only directly elected regional government (at the time)[12]. Also, in 1977 the Oregon state legislature formed a committee to investigate both urban renewal and TIF. The resulting report formed the basis for a 1979 state law which substantially rewrote the state’s urban renewal legislation, injecting considerable state review of redevelopment agencies and their operation, redefined ‘blight’, expanded the permissible uses of TIF (and delinked it from its association with urban renewal local match, and included more reporting and public accountability into “urban renewal”—which, in Oregon from 1980 onward, was what the rest of the nation calls tax increment financing.

Portland (and Oregon) mirrored much of the eastern Big City urban renewal experience—with almost all of the same consequences. Ironically, having done so, Portland managed to arrive at much the same conclusion as San Diego, which did not utilize urban renewal dollars at all. Most of the conclusions presented from the San Diego case study apply, somewhat amazingly to Portland—which leads me to wonder if “urban renewal”, despite its watershed image in the perceived history of American cities, was little more than a “big tent concept” which covered several critical decades in the evolution of the American central city. As this history has tirelessly repeated, the central problem that economic development addressed in the decades leading up to 1970 was confronting decentralization-suburbanization.

That population migration, while apparently occurring in different variations and patterns in the various regions of the nation, was a nation-wide phenomenon that various economic development tools such as annexation, metropolitan planning, CBD redevelopment and central city modernization, neighborhood rehabilitation, and urban renewal was unable to successfully confront. In Portland’s case, despite Goldschmidt’s brilliant strategy, and his popular implementation of that strategy, Portland area suburbanization continued unabated for at least the next two decades. Portland CBD redevelopment continued thru the 1980’s and the opening of Pioneer Place in 1990. Still, in the post-1990 decades, downtown Portland, while not without its deficiencies and criticism, has been highly regarded and has attracted more than its fair share of office-related construction.

[1] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.

[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.

[3] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.

[4] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.

[5] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 124.

[6] In 1953 the Oregon Supreme Court, Foeller et ux. v. Housing Authority of Portland upheld the constitutionality of the 1951 urban redevelopment/renewal law.

[7] Eugene formed is urban renewal agency in 1958, Salem was next in 1961. Before 1974 termination of the federal urban renewal programs, Cascade Locks, Cottage Grove, Albany, Coos Bay, Newport, Beaverton, Toledo, Lincoln City and Tualatin formed their own agencies. Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments” a report by Tashman Johnson prepared for the Portland Development Commission on behalf of the Association of Oregon Redevelopment Agencies, 2002, p. 6.

[8] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2011), chapters six and seven; also Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments”, op. cit, p. 2ff and case studies; and Carl Abbott, The New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 147-148; and “A Brief History of Housing and Community Development in Portland, Oregon” http://stevenreedjohnson.com/stevenreedjohnson/civicpdxComDev_files/HousingandCommDevelopment.pdf.

[9] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[10] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 149.

[11] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[12] Both the urban boundary/growth management legislation and Portland Metro government will be further considered in later chapters.

End Policy Chap 19

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Policy System Cuts

Chapter 7 Policy Cut

In what has to be the longest running and most confusing city-building in history, we cite Portland Oregon. The coast (called “the Clearing”, later to be the harbor) of Portland Oregon was initially viewed (1840) by Massachusetts sea captain John Couch who immediately recognized it for its potential as a deep sea port—and then sailed off. Shortly after Couch’s observation (1843), Tennessee pioneer William Overton and his Boston-born lawyer Asa Lovejoy filed a land claim with the state for “the Clearing”. Overton lacked the funds to file the claim so Lovejoy paid the $.25 cent filing fee for half the claim. Overton, ever the shrewd businessman, quickly got bored, and sold his half of his remaining claim to Francis Pettygrove (a ship owner from Portland, Maine) in 1845. In 1846, when it was time to name the city in 1845, Pettygrove and Lovejoy flipped a coin for naming rights; Pettygrove won (now you know why Portland Oregon was named after Portland Maine). The next year Lovejoy sold his share to Benjamin Stark for half interest in a herd of cattle (worth about $346 cash). Stark, a Louisiana native, educated in Maine, was a “mate” on one of Pettygrove’s ships which brought cargo from Maine to Oregon.

In 1848, Pettygrove lost interest in Portland and took off for the California Gold Rush. Before leaving town Pettygrove sold his, and Stark’s interest (because Stark was far away on board his ship), holding back two city blocks for each, to Daniel Lownsdale, a tanner from Kentucky. Lownsdale paid the equivalent of $5,000 in hides to Pettygrove. Lownsdale then sold half his claim to Stephen Coffin for $6,000. So as not to make a long story short, Captain John Couch (remember him?) reappears to negotiate with Coffin on behalf of the aggrieved Stark. After a bizarre negotiation process (what else would the reader expect), the claim was divvied up in a manner that defies description, William Chapman (who the heck is he and how did he get into the story ?) a West Virginian, and an associate of the Oregon Territorial Governor, winds up with a sizeable portion of the divided up claim, acquiring what will become downtown Portland. Chapman, a character in his own right, will play the role of Portland’s future city-builder. Only in America!

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Policy Cut

Portland captures many themes discussed in this chapter, but none more so than the shift in policy-style that became evident in the war years.

Business leaders formed a local branch of the CED (July, 1943) by older and larger Portland business institutions, demonstrating a strong tendency to use planning in their attempt to confront existing problems and anticipate future issues. Younger private business leaders gravitated to the Chamber of Commerce when they advocated for a more aggressive industry recruitment program—in opposition to older business leaders and much of the general public[1]. A public/private group the Portland Area Development Committee[2], headed by the President of the Portland Chamber (and past- president of National Association of Real Estate Board), but dominated by Henry Kaiser[3], formed to figure out what should be done as well as bridge the gaps which existed within the business community.

Kaiser in his shipyard travels during the war had come to admire a New York planner/developer, a certain Robert Moses and thought Portland would benefit from his advice. In 1943, Kaiser pressed Portland leaders to bring Moses in to develop a plan for Portland. Moses, however, did not come cheap and $100,000 from the county, city, port authority, and school district had to be raised. So in late 1943, Moses arrived on the Portland scene and, after ignoring local officials, spent six days in Portland and shortly after issued a plan entitled “Portland Improvement” which, at root, was …

a $60 million public works program designed to ‘stimulate business and help bridge the gap between the end of the war and the full resumption of private business’. It proposed to employ up to 20,000 workers to build sewers, schools, public offices, a new airport, a freeway loop around the business core. Implementation of the plan would give the city an efficient system of arterial highways, landscape the waterfront, modernize the railroad station, and create a civic center.[4]

Portland loved Moses’s Plan in 1944. In that year the electorate approved $24 million in bonds and taxes to start implementation (mostly for freeways) which over the next decade was pretty much carried out. Worth noting, of course, is that whatever else Moses’s plan contained or did not contain, its success in Portland meant that Portland’s planners/economic developers[5] would identify themselves with urban renewal as their preferred strategy. Ironic today, in a city which one images Jane Jacobs as a patron saint, that Robert Moses-style urban renewal had positioned itself so well on the West Coast.

Interestingly, the Eastern Policy World was critical of Moses’s Portland Improvement. This might have been expected as Moses was high on their “hit” parade. But Moses added to the rancor by asserting in the course of the plan that “nothing short of a revolution in urban life [would avoid making] this report disappointing to ivory tower planners” because it relied only on public works. Dutifully, Martin Meyerson from the Harvard School of Design called Portland Improvement “ a grab bag of unrelated projects”, and Christopher Tunnard, author of prominent planning and landscape architecture publications, and a frequent writer for the prestigious Architectural Review, attacked the plan for its “narrow vision, its negative forecasts about postwar industry, and its neglect of planning for housing, health, community facilities, and other social needs”—in short because it was not a comprehensive plan.[6]

This reaction to Moses/”Plan Improvement”, to me, is suggestive of a tension within planning, which in relatively short order, will lead to the departure of Big City economic developers from planning into their own distinctive discipline-policy area. Also, the leadership of Portland’s Plan Improvement over the subsequent decade or more, fell to Public Works director, Bowes—not the Planning Department/Commission—again suggestive. That Bowes himself identified with and idolized Robert Moses also will also prove a harbinger of dysfunction in the postwar years.

The takeaway from the above discussion of Portland’s policy response to war year growth and the transformation of its economic base is that urban renewal had arrived in Portland, less because of demands from its citizenry which was largely opposed, nor from its orthodox political establishment which was wary at best—until the crisis of growth forced the political establishment to produce quick solutions to war-induced crisis, especially housing, transportation and crime. For these solutions, the Mayor turned to the private business leadership, its big-time New Deal/War Production kingpin, Henry Kaiser, embraced the national CED approach, and empowered a local largely private EDO, the Area Development Committee, to plan and implement with the City Department of Public Works a postwar urban renewal program which would remake the city over the following decade or so. In 1946, Earl Riley, still Portland’s mayor, admitted that the growth and change associated with the war years, legitimized planning because the crises of these years forced “a new era in municipal administration … [making it impossible to maintain] the “customary way of running municipal affairs” and Abbott concluded that the public-private business approach that followed achieved the local aims “of the Committee on Economic Development and Fortune (magazine) by bringing large local corporations into active cooperation with local government”[7]

[1] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p. 113.

[2] The Portland Area Development Committee borrowed staff from the Bonneville Power Authority, the National Resources Planning Board, and the Northwest Electric Company.

[3] Kaiser is a major protagonist in Miller’s Freedom’s Forge. An early west coast highway building, Kaiser was key to putting together the famous “six companies” that built the Hoover Dam and went on to build many others across the nation. Kaiser maneuvered himself into building shipyards and liberty ships during the war, founded the medical insurance firm, Kaiser-Permanente, and at war’s end returned home to Portland.

[4] Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., p.37.

[5] Portland’s economic developer of record was a Moses disciple, William Bowles who was commissioner of the city’s Public Works Department. Worthy of note is that Portland turned in 1943-44 to a governmental implemented economic development program, not an independent business-led quasi-development agency.

[6] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p. 115.

[7] Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities, op. cit., p. 118.

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Policy Cut

Portland

The huge number of predominately young, ethnic/Appalachian wartime population emigrants lived uncomfortably alongside the older Yankee-English-German population. Unionization associated with wartime shipyards and manufacturing polarized local political attitudes and political processes. Neighborhoods and housing were ethnically and class-segregated affecting a district-based electoral system. Suburbanization was also a factor as the total population of Multnomah and Clackamas counties surpassed that of the City by 1962. Suburban malls and middle class suburban exodus undoubtedly played out in the texture of City of Portland politics. Portland’s population declined slightly in the 1960 census; metropolitan population grew 16%.[1]

With the retirement of the long-standing Mayor, Earl Riley, who had presided over the private-public partnership during the war, an aggressive, conservatively reformist Mayor, a woman, was elected in 1948. Unable to forge a working relationship with the all-male city council (1948-1952). Her attempt at charter reform to install a city manager form of government failed, and the opposition of prominent department heads (including Bowes) was a critical factor. She appointed a group of businessmen and civic leaders to a Committee on Municipal Reorganization in 1949, but unfortunately for reformers, the city council balked at placing the committee’s city manager charter on the ballot.”[2]

[1] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.

[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.

[3] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.

[4] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 124.

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We Just Couldn’t Get It All Together

Portland-Style Urban Renewal

Where was business elite, CBD UR weaker//Commission form of government, strengthening the role and power of independent EDOs (205Fosler)

The state approved an urban renewal enabling law in 1951[1]. The legislation restricted the exercise of urban renewal to housing redevelopment authorities, and empowered those agencies only with the necessary tools. Perhaps strangely, at that time there was only one housing redevelopment authority in the entire state: the Portland Housing Authority (HAP). So, in considerable internal turmoil, HAP attempted Portland’s first mixed use (housing and commercial) urban renewal project, Vaughn Street, a forty-four block area in an industrial zone one and one-half miles from the CBD (1952). The Vaughn Street project enjoyed support from the Chamber, the Building Trades Council, the League of Women Voters, and the vault-like “City Club”.

The voters, however, did not “get the memo”—they turned down the project in a 1952 referendum. The issues were resistance to federal involvement and dollars in Portland projects and fear of an increase in taxes. When HAP tried again to revive the Vaughn Street Project in the following year (1953) by rejecting federal urban renewal dollars and using its own funds Vaughn Street residents (predominately ethnic working class Croats) resisted. Their petition to stop the project was accepted by the Mayor and in the interests of harmony, Commissioner Bowes effectively stopped the project in it tracks.

HAP wanted out of the commercial urban renewal business and therefore urged the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal (MACOUR) in 1955. MACOUR wasted little time in coming up with a second urban renewal plan/project: the South Auditorium. To get HAP out of the way, HAP contracted with the City’s Planning Department to implement the South Auditorium urban renewal project. The Planning Department set up an urban renewal division within the department, hired seven professionals including Santa Barbara’s planning director, John Kenward. The City had indirectly taken over responsibility for urban renewal in contravention of state law. To remedy this defect, City Planning went to the State Legislature (1957), successfully engineering an amendment to state law allowing cities, counties, and designated EDOs to conduct urban renewal projects[2]. In the following year (1958) Portland voters approved the creation of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) and entrusted to it responsibility for urban renewal. Finally, in 1960 Oregon voters approved a constitutional amendment that authorized use of TIF to provide the local match for urban renewal projects. Oregon was the first state to follow California in approving TIF.

Amid all this action, the South Auditorium project went forward—or rather stumbled sideways in a confusing, horribly controversial series of referendums, the injection of additional public (South Portland) urban renewal project, private projects (Lloyd Center Shopping Mall which when opened in 1960 was the largest urban shopping center in the nation), and multiple freeways[3]. The apparently long-standing frustration of east of the river residents resented the west of the river urban renewal projects and through referendums forced the original west side South Auditorium project over to the west side. The South Portland (west side) project was proposed, in some measure, because the federal regional urban renewal director would not approve the South Auditorium project’s move to the east side. The paths of two freeways which connected this to the CBD and elsewhere were shifted from the City’s original plan to a new configuration required by the Oregon Department of Transportation (smoother curves). Displacement from these projects was considerable, although efforts were made by agencies to soften the ill effects they proved grossly inadequate. The black majority Albina neighborhood was obliterated, and the majority white (Italian and Jewish) district also suffered greatly.

Most of the above projects were completed by 1960 or shortly after and additional urban renewal projects followed (Portland State College, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, the Mount Hood Freeway another) during the 1960’s (also a major riot). In short, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, Portland participated in a “style” of urban renewal, central city/CBD redevelopment which closely resembled that found on the Eastern and Great Lakes coasts. Like the making of sausage, it got off to a rough start, a rougher interim, and glowing press reports at the ribbon-cutting. Changes in the 1960’s generated a second burst of redevelopment in the seventies—with the arrival of Portland’s version of Mayor Neil Goldschmidt.

[1] In 1953 the Oregon Supreme Court, Foeller et ux. v. Housing Authority of Portland upheld the constitutionality of the 1951 urban redevelopment/renewal law.

[2] Eugene formed is urban renewal agency in 1958, Salem was next in 1961. Before 1974 termination of the federal urban renewal programs, Cascade Locks, Cottage Grove, Albany, Coos Bay, Newport, Beaverton, Toledo, Lincoln City and Tualatin formed their own agencies. Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments” a report by Tashman Johnson prepared for the Portland Development Commission on behalf of the Association of Oregon Redevelopment Agencies, 2002, p. 6.

[3] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2011), chapters six and seven; also Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments”, op. cit, p. 2ff and case studies; and Carl Abbott, The New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 147-148; and “A Brief History of Housing and Community Development in Portland, Oregon” http://stevenreedjohnson.com/stevenreedjohnson/civicpdxComDev_files/HousingandCommDevelopment.pdf.

Portland

If timing is everything, Goldschmidt had good timing. His administration overlapped with a larger regional initiative which in 1973 led to the creation of “what was in essence a farmland protection program [that] required local jurisdictions to prepare comprehensive plans in harmony with statewide goals. … One key element was the requirement that each municipality” create an urban growth boundary[3]. Also, in 1978 voters created the multi-functional regional government, Metro, the nation’s only directly elected regional government (at the time)[4]. Also, in 1977 the Oregon state legislature formed a committee to investigate both urban renewal and TIF. The resulting report formed the basis for a 1979 state law which substantially rewrote the state’s urban renewal legislation, injecting considerable state review of redevelopment agencies and their operation, redefined ‘blight’, expanded the permissible uses of TIF (and delinked it from its association with urban renewal local match, and included more reporting and public accountability into “urban renewal”—which, in Oregon from 1980 onward, was what the rest of the nation calls tax increment financing.

[1] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[2] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 149.

[3] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[4] Both the urban boundary/growth management legislation and Portland Metro government will be further considered in later chapters.

End of Policy system Cut

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Portland

The easiest jumping off point for discussion on postwar western suburbanization is World War II war production (which caused explosive population growth in a few short years) produced a distinctive physical pattern among western cities—a physical pattern with which postwar western central cities had to confront a t war’s end. The rapid expansion of war production capacity i.e. new factory construction had mostly occurred beyond existing central city boundaries where land was cheap and regulation/time lost was light. The same was true of army bases and airports.

Makeshift housing and related commercial/industrial businesses developed alongside the new facilities. Transportation access and required infrastructure was inherent in new facility construction. Portland’s huge Vanport and Oakland’s San Lorenzo expansions testified to the potential size of these new developments. If deterioration and blight had destroyed the downtown core of most Eastern/Midwestern cities, war production had produced a physical chaos on the borders/peripheries of western cities. “Every metropolis that had experienced a wartime boom … had its hap-hazard trailer camps, strings of tract houses along unpaved streets, and knotted traffic jams at country crossroads. The immediate response was frequently based on the assumption of primacy for the central city”.^[1]

County governments were usually rural, without capacity to government and the default to postwar suburban/periphery chaos was central city leadership. In the spirit of if one wants to get out of a hole, the best first step is to stop digging, western cities had to “impose order on suburban chaos by bringing new subdivisions under the control of the central city”—this became a central plank for business urban reformers who came to power in western cities in the postwar era^[2]. Western central cities had two tools at their immediate disposal: metropolitan planning (and the provision of infrastructure) and annexation—both contained significant elements of economic development policy and strategy. The degree of use and the effectiveness of each by the individual central cities will provide an early sense of the variation in Progressive and Privatist central city/suburban policy systems.

Portland: Portland, whatever its internal politics, turned early on toward metropolitan planning. Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean, a former chair of the Oregon State Planning Board, consistently linked the hap-hazard sprawl to increased costs for Portland taxpayers. As early as 1944 Bean, at a meeting of the League of Oregon Cities, drove home the point that “sporadic, scattered and unregulated growth of municipalities and urban fringes has caused tremendous waste in money and resources. He called for legislation to create metropolitan planning agencies to provide for “orderly growth and development”. His ally, fellow city commissioner of Public Works, Bowes supported him. Bowes chaired a special committee in 1947 that “successfully urged the [state] legislature to provide for county planning commissions”. Both Bean and Bowes worked closely with Portland’s suburban counties and by 1952 came within a hair’s breadth of establishing a city/counties single planning board with consolidated staff—a planning commission with authority over three-fourths of Portland’s metropolitan area^[3].

=====================

Portland

Portland did well during the war under an odd alliance of neo-Progressive private sector (and chamber), war production entrepreneurs and New Deal war production/housing agencies. That nexus was sufficient to overcome a conservative, ethnic-based political leadership and thrust the city into aggressive war production housing and eventually a public works urban renewal based on a Robert Moses “Portland Improvement” plan. The Improvement Plan displays the configuration of Portland’s policy system and serves as a good starting point to describe Portland’s postwar behavior.

Business leaders formed a local branch of the CED (July, 1943) to counter older, native firms and dominant Portland institutions. Younger private business leaders gravitated to the (CED-led) Chamber when it advocated for more aggressive industry recruitment—in opposition to older business leaders and much of the general public (Abbott, 1981, p. 113). Revealing a strong Portland business-led tendency to use planning to confront problems and anticipate the future, these young businessmen formed a public/ private group, the Portland Area Development Committee[i], headed by the President of the Chamber, but dominated by Henry Kaiser.

Kaiser, a native of Portland, in his wartime shipyard travels had come to admire a New York planner/developer, a certain Robert Moses and thought Portland would benefit from his advice. In 1943, Kaiser pressed Portland leaders to bring Moses in to develop a plan for Portland. Moses did not come cheap and $100,000 from the county, city, port authority, and school district had to be raised. Late 1943, Moses arrived and, after ignoring local officials, spent six days in Portland before issuing the “Portland Improvement” which, at root, was a $60 million public works program to “stimulate business and help bridge the gap between the end of the war and the full resumption of private business”.

The Plan promised to employ 20,000 workers to build a civic center, sewers, schools, public offices, a new airport, a freeway loop around the business core (Abbott, 1998, p. 37)[ii]. In 1944.the electorate approved $24 million in bonds and taxes to start implementation (mostly for freeways) which over the next decade was carried out. The informal alliance however, lost considerable steam in the last years of the war. Portland’s politics fragmented badly. Voters, after initially approving bonds/tax increases for Portland Improvement’s 1944 launch, rejected subsequent funding, tax increases, and bond referenda in the postwar years.

Kaiser, embracing the CED approach, formed a local largely private EDO, the Area Development Committee, to plan and implement with the City a postwar urban renewal program that remade the city over the next decade or so. The leadership of Plan Improvement over the subsequent decade, however, fell to Public Works director, Bowes[iii] and Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean. Under their leadership Portland turned early to metropolitan planning. Bean, a former chair of the Oregon State Planning Board, consistently linked hap-hazard sprawl to increased costs for Portland taxpayers.

As early as 1944 Bean, at a meeting of the League of Oregon Cities, drove home the point that “sporadic, scattered and unregulated growth of municipalities and urban fringes has caused tremendous waste in money and resources. Bean called for legislation to create metropolitan planning agencies to provide for “orderly growth and development”. His ally, Bowes, supported him. Bowes chaired a special committee in 1947 that “successfully urged the state legislature to provide for county planning commissions”. Both Bean and Bowes worked closely with Portland’s suburban counties and by 1952 came within a hair’s breadth of establishing a city/counties single planning board with consolidated staff—a planning commission with authority over three-fourths of Portland’s metropolitan area (Abbott, 1981, p. 172).

After 1956, a newly-elected Mayor Schrunk’s administration began a CBD urban renewal initiative; a downtown coliseum was built, a modern zoning ordinance approved and the city separated economic development from planning/public works. In 1958 the Portland Development Commission, intended to be the city’s urban renewal agency, was created through referendum.

Amid this atmosphere, the older CED business elite lost its influence over ED policy. Instead, business reformers turned to charter reform—and that proved a dead end. (Abbott, 1981, pp. 122-3). Portland’s postwar flirtation with business/government partnership had never taken root and quickly gave way to governmentally-led planning and ED—a path common to eastern Big Cities. Portland was a very early urban renewal pioneer, again following the path of Northern/Midwestern Big Cities—not the western city model.

[i] The Portland Area Development Committee borrowed staff from the Bonneville Power Authority, the National Resources Planning Board, and the Northwest Electric Company.

[ii]Interestingly, the Eastern Policy World was critical of Moses’s Portland Improvement Plan. Moses added to the rancor asserting that “nothing short of a revolution in urban life [would avoid making] this report disappointing to ivory tower planners” because it relied on public works. Dutifully, Martin Meyerson, Harvard School of Design called Portland Improvement “ a grab bag of unrelated projects”, and Christopher Tunnard, author of prominent planning and landscape architecture publications, attacked the plan for its “narrow vision, its negative forecasts about postwar industry, and its neglect of planning for housing, health, community facilities, and other social needs”—in short because it was not a comprehensive plan (Abbott, 1981, p. 115). The reaction to Moses/”Plan Improvement” suggests tension within planning, which in relatively short order, will lead Big City economic developers away from planning into their own distinctive discipline-policy area.

[iii] Portland’s de facto economic developer, William Bowles, a Moses disciple and commissioner of Public Works Department. Portland implemented economic development/urban renewal not through an independent business-led quasi-development agency, but by a government department led by Bowles.

Portland-Style Urban Renewal

The state approved an urban renewal enabling law in 1951^[4]. The legislation restricted the exercise of urban renewal to housing redevelopment authorities, and empowered those agencies only with the necessary tools. Perhaps strangely, at that time there was only one housing redevelopment authority in the entire state: the Portland Housing Authority (HAP). So, in considerable internal turmoil, HAP attempted Portland’s first mixed use (housing and commercial) urban renewal project, Vaughn Street, a forty-four block area in an industrial zone one and one-half miles from the CBD (1952). The Vaughn Street project enjoyed support from the Chamber, the Building Trades Council, the League of Women Voters, and the vault-like “City Club”.

HAP wanted out of the commercial urban renewal business and therefore urged the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal (MACOUR) in 1955. MACOUR wasted little time in coming up with a second urban renewal plan/project: the South Auditorium. Also, to get HAP out of the way, HAP contracted with the City’s Planning Department to implement the South Auditorium urban renewal project. The Planning Department set up an urban renewal division within the department, hired seven professionals including Santa Barbara’s planning director, John Kenward. The City had indirectly taken over responsibility for urban renewal in contravention of state law. To remedy this defect, City Planning went to the State Legislature (1957), successfully engineering an amendment to state law allowing cities, counties, and designated EDOs to conduct urban renewal projects^[5]. In the following year (1958) Portland voters approved the creation of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) and entrusted to it responsibility for urban renewal. Finally, in 1960 Oregon voters approved a constitutional amendment which authorized the use of TIF to provide the local match for urban renewal projects (Oregon was the first state to follow California in approving TIF).

Amid all this action, the South Auditorium project went forward—or rather stumbled sideways in a confusing, horribly controversial series of referendums, the injection of additional public (South Portland) urban renewal project, private projects (Lloyd Center Shopping Mall which when opened in 1960 was the largest urban shopping center in the nation), and multiple freeways^[6]. The apparently long-standing frustration of east of the river residents resented the west of the river urban renewal projects and through referendums forced the original west side South Auditorium project over to the west side. The South Portland (west side) project was proposed, in some measure, because the federal regional urban renewal director would not approve the South Auditorium project’s move to the east side. The path of two freeways which connected this to the CBD and elsewhere were shifted from the City’s original plan to a new configuration required by the Oregon Department of Transportation (smoother curves). As we discovered in the San Diego case study, urban renewal/redevelopment projects are far from easy. Displacement from these projects was considerable, although efforts were made by agencies to soften the ill effects they proved grossly inadequate. The black majority Albina neighborhood was obliterated, and the majority white (Italian and Jewish) district also suffered greatly.

Portland Environmental and Neighborhood Movement in 1969 ABBOTT Won the West—p.203***

SEE also WTW, p.207 for Goldschmidts”s administration

Goldschmidt’s “Downtown Portland” approach brought together business leaders, professionals, and the neighborhoods in a focused strategy achieved through an open deliberative planning process. Instead of approaching CBD redevelopment in a zero-sum manner with neighborhoods, his “population strategy” presented a rationale in which both went “hand-in-glove’. This was cemented by Goldschmidt’s 1974 formation of the Office of Neighborhood Associations which incorporated into city policy-making the numerous neighborhood organizations which had developed since the middle 1960’s. Abandoning the widespread demolition characteristic of urban renewal, his more focused physical redevelopment (Transit Mall and the McCall Waterfront Park) was considerably more sensitive to the residents of affected areas. The key unifying investment was in public transit, and away from the disruptive construction of highways and freeways. Building upon the earlier creation and investment in TriMet, Goldschmidt withdrew the city’s commitment to the Mount Hood Freeway, transferring the federal funds to support a fifteen-mile light-rail transit line into a suburb— constructing the Portland Transit Mall and the first leg of the “Metropolitan Area Express”^[8].

If timing is everything, Goldschmidt had good timing. His administration overlapped with a larger regional initiative which in 1973 led to the creation of “what was in essence a farmland protection program [that] required local jurisdictions to prepare comprehensive plans in harmony with statewide goals. … One key element was the requirement that each municipality” create an urban growth boundary^[9]. Also, in 1978 voters created the multi-functional regional government, Metro, the nation’s only directly elected regional government (at the time)^[10]. Also, in 1977 the Oregon state legislature formed a committee to investigate both urban renewal and TIF. The resulting report formed the basis for a 1979 state law which substantially rewrote the state’s urban renewal legislation, injecting considerable state review of redevelopment agencies and their operation, redefined ‘blight’, expanded the permissible uses of TIF (and delinked it from its association with urban renewal local match, and included more reporting and public accountability into “urban renewal”—which, in Oregon from 1980 onward, was what the rest of the nation calls tax increment financing.

Portland (and Oregon) mirrored much of the eastern Big City urban renewal experience—with almost all of the same consequences. Ironically, having done so, Portland managed to arrive at much the same conclusion as San Diego, which did not utilize urban renewal dollars at all. Most of the conclusions presented from the San Diego case study apply, somewhat amazingly to Portland—which leads me to wonder if “urban renewal”, despite its watershed image in the perceived history of American cities, was little more than a “big tent concept” which covered several critical decades in the evolution of the American central city. This history has tirelessly repeated, the central problem economic development addressed in the decades proceeding 1970 was confronting decentralization-suburbanization.

Portland in 1972 (and 1976) elected a young Mayor, Neil Goldschmidt. His charisma set the tone for city politics for the next decade—centering on neighborhood planning/preservation, each neighborhood possessing a citizen-governed EDO intended to keep the “neighborhood livable”. Freeways were blocked and stopped, and major UR-style redevelopment projects put on the shelves. Increases in housing and citizen participation in decision-making were institutionalized—the Portland Development Commission was reoriented to CBD historic preservation and housing. An Office of Neighborhood Associations established to liaison with organized groups of citizens seeking … neighborhood livability so they could impact zoning, planning, budgeting decisions of the city—initially (1974) it included 30 neighborhood groups in its work plans (Abbott, How Cities Won the West). By the end of the 1970’s Portland’s famous “urban growth boundary”, enforced by a regional “Metro” government was in place.

Portland and Oregon: This may be duplicate from above—taken from PreEdgar Western Chapter 19

Portland: Politics and Policy System

Instead, the implementation of Portland Improvement was led chiefly by Commissioner Bowes, Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean and after 1956, Mayor Schrunk^[14]. During the early Schrunk administration the Port Authority began its incremental modernization, a downtown coliseum was built, a modern zoning ordinance was approved and the city entered into industrial development, separating economic development from planning and public works. The focus changed during the mid-fifties (1956) when the first clearly urban renewal projects were set into motion (see below). In 1958 the Portland Development Commission, intended to be the city’s urban renewal agency, was created through referendum Amid this atmosphere, a more Progressive business elite was unable to affect consistent policy influence over economic development or anything else. Business reformers tended to focus on charter reform—and that proved to be a dead end, suffering yet a second defeat in 1966. “After nearly twenty years of effort with the same issues and the same actors, Portland still justified description as a city whose leaders hoped for steady growth and preferred placid prosperity either to machine politics or political reform”.^[15]

Portland-Style Urban Renewal

The state approved an urban renewal enabling law in 1951^[16]. The legislation restricted the exercise of urban renewal to housing redevelopment authorities, and empowered those agencies only with the necessary tools. Perhaps strangely, at that time there was only one housing redevelopment authority in the entire state: the Portland Housing Authority (HAP). So, in considerable internal turmoil, HAP attempted Portland’s first mixed use (housing and commercial) urban renewal project, Vaughn Street, a forty-four block area in an industrial zone one and one-half miles from the CBD (1952). The Vaughn Street project enjoyed support from the Chamber, the Building Trades Council, the League of Women Voters, and the vault-like “City Club”.

HAP wanted out of the commercial urban renewal business and therefore urged the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal (MACOUR) in 1955. MACOUR wasted little time in coming up with a second urban renewal plan/project: the South Auditorium. Also, to get HAP out of the way, HAP contracted with the City’s Planning Department to implement the South Auditorium urban renewal project. The Planning Department set up an urban renewal division within the department, hired seven professionals including Santa Barbara’s planning director, John Kenward. The City had indirectly taken over responsibility for urban renewal in contravention of state law. To remedy this defect, City Planning went to the State Legislature (1957), successfully engineering an amendment to state law allowing cities, counties, and designated EDOs to conduct urban renewal projects^[17]. In the following year (1958) Portland voters approved the creation of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) and entrusted to it responsibility for urban renewal. Finally, in 1960 Oregon voters approved a constitutional amendment which authorized the use of TIF to provide the local match for urban renewal projects (Oregon was the first state to follow California in approving TIF).

Amid all this action, the South Auditorium project went forward—or rather stumbled sideways in a confusing, horribly controversial series of referendums, the injection of additional public (South Portland) urban renewal project, private projects (Lloyd Center Shopping Mall which when opened in 1960 was the largest urban shopping center in the nation), and multiple freeways^[18]. The apparently long-standing frustration of east of the river residents resented the west of the river urban renewal projects and through referendums forced the original west side South Auditorium project over to the west side. The South Portland (west side) project was proposed, in some measure, because the federal regional urban renewal director would not approve the South Auditorium project’s move to the east side. The path of two freeways which connected this to the CBD and elsewhere were shifted from the City’s original plan to a new configuration required by the Oregon Department of Transportation (smoother curves). As we discovered in the San Diego case study, urban renewal/redevelopment projects are far from easy. Displacement from these projects was considerable, although efforts were made by agencies to soften the ill effects they proved grossly inadequate. The black majority Albina neighborhood was obliterated, and the majority white (Italian and Jewish) district also suffered greatly.

If timing is everything, Goldschmidt had good timing. His administration overlapped with a larger regional initiative which in 1973 led to the creation of “what was in essence a farmland protection program [that] required local jurisdictions to prepare comprehensive plans in harmony with statewide goals. … One key element was the requirement that each municipality” create an urban growth boundary^[21]. Also, in 1978 voters created the multi-functional regional government, Metro, the nation’s only directly elected regional government (at the time)^[22]. Also, in 1977 the Oregon state legislature formed a committee to investigate both urban renewal and TIF. The resulting report formed the basis for a 1979 state law which substantially rewrote the state’s urban renewal legislation, injecting considerable state review of redevelopment agencies and their operation, redefined ‘blight’, expanded the permissible uses of TIF (and delinked it from its association with urban renewal local match, and included more reporting and public accountability into “urban renewal”—which, in Oregon from 1980 onward, was what the rest of the nation calls tax increment financing.

[1] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 171.

[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 171.

[3] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 172.

[4] In 1953 the Oregon Supreme Court, Foeller et ux. v. Housing Authority of Portland upheld the constitutionality of the 1951 urban redevelopment/renewal law.

[5] Eugene formed is urban renewal agency in 1958, Salem was next in 1961. Before 1974 termination of the federal urban renewal programs, Cascade Locks, Cottage Grove, Albany, Coos Bay, Newport, Beaverton, Toledo, Lincoln City and Tualatin formed their own agencies. Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments” a report by Tashman Johnson prepared for the Portland Development Commission on behalf of the Association of Oregon Redevelopment Agencies, 2002, p. 6.

[6] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2011), chapters six and seven; also Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments”, op. cit, p. 2ff and case studies; and Carl Abbott, The New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 147-148; and “A Brief History of Housing and Community Development in Portland, Oregon” http://stevenreedjohnson.com/stevenreedjohnson/civicpdxComDev_files/HousingandCommDevelopment.pdf.

[7] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[8] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 149.

[9] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[10] Both the urban boundary/growth management legislation and Portland Metro government will be further considered in later chapters.

[11] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.

[12] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.

[13] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.

[14] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.

[15] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 124.

[16] In 1953 the Oregon Supreme Court, Foeller et ux. v. Housing Authority of Portland upheld the constitutionality of the 1951 urban redevelopment/renewal law.

[17] Eugene formed is urban renewal agency in 1958, Salem was next in 1961. Before 1974 termination of the federal urban renewal programs, Cascade Locks, Cottage Grove, Albany, Coos Bay, Newport, Beaverton, Toledo, Lincoln City and Tualatin formed their own agencies. Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments” a report by Tashman Johnson prepared for the Portland Development Commission on behalf of the Association of Oregon Redevelopment Agencies, 2002, p. 6.

[18] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2011), chapters six and seven; also Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments”, op. cit, p. 2ff and case studies; and Carl Abbott, The New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 147-148; and “A Brief History of Housing and Community Development in Portland, Oregon” http://stevenreedjohnson.com/stevenreedjohnson/civicpdxComDev_files/HousingandCommDevelopment.pdf.

[19] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[20] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 149.

[21] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[22] Both the urban boundary/growth management legislation and Portland Metro government will be further considered in later chapters.

Portland-Style Urban Renewal

The state approved an urban renewal enabling law in 1951^[1]. The legislation restricted the exercise of urban renewal to housing redevelopment authorities, and empowered those agencies only with the necessary tools. Perhaps strangely, at that time there was only one housing redevelopment authority in the entire state: the Portland Housing Authority (HAP). So, in considerable internal turmoil, HAP attempted Portland’s first mixed use (housing and commercial) urban renewal project, Vaughn Street, a forty-four block area in an industrial zone one and one-half miles from the CBD (1952). The Vaughn Street project enjoyed support from the Chamber, the Building Trades Council, the League of Women Voters, and the vault-like “City Club”.

HAP wanted out of the commercial urban renewal business and therefore urged the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal (MACOUR) in 1955. MACOUR wasted little time in coming up with a second urban renewal plan/project: the South Auditorium. Also, to get HAP out of the way, HAP contracted with the City’s Planning Department to implement the South Auditorium urban renewal project. The Planning Department set up an urban renewal division within the department, hired seven professionals including Santa Barbara’s planning director, John Kenward. The City had indirectly taken over responsibility for urban renewal in contravention of state law. To remedy this defect, City Planning went to the State Legislature (1957), successfully engineering an amendment to state law allowing cities, counties, and designated EDOs to conduct urban renewal projects^[2]. In the following year (1958) Portland voters approved the creation of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) and entrusted to it responsibility for urban renewal. Finally, in 1960 Oregon voters approved a constitutional amendment which authorized the use of TIF to provide the local match for urban renewal projects (Oregon was the first state to follow California in approving TIF).

Amid all this action, the South Auditorium project went forward—or rather stumbled sideways in a confusing, horribly controversial series of referendums, the injection of additional public (South Portland) urban renewal project, private projects (Lloyd Center Shopping Mall which when opened in 1960 was the largest urban shopping center in the nation), and multiple freeways^[3]. The apparently long-standing frustration of east of the river residents resented the west of the river urban renewal projects and through referendums forced the original west side South Auditorium project over to the west side. The South Portland (west side) project was proposed, in some measure, because the federal regional urban renewal director would not approve the South Auditorium project’s move to the east side. The path of two freeways which connected this to the CBD and elsewhere were shifted from the City’s original plan to a new configuration required by the Oregon Department of Transportation (smoother curves). As we discovered in the San Diego case study, urban renewal/redevelopment projects are far from easy. Displacement from these projects was considerable, although efforts were made by agencies to soften the ill effects they proved grossly inadequate. The black majority Albina neighborhood was obliterated, and the majority white (Italian and Jewish) district also suffered greatly.

Portland Environmental and Neighborhood Movement in 1969 ABBOTT Won the West—p.203***

SEE also WTW, p.207 for Goldschmidts”s administration

If timing is everything, Goldschmidt had good timing. His administration overlapped with a larger regional initiative which in 1973 led to the creation of “what was in essence a farmland protection program [that] required local jurisdictions to prepare comprehensive plans in harmony with statewide goals. … One key element was the requirement that each municipality” create an urban growth boundary^[6]. Also, in 1978 voters created the multi-functional regional government, Metro, the nation’s only directly elected regional government (at the time)^[7]. Also, in 1977 the Oregon state legislature formed a committee to investigate both urban renewal and TIF. The resulting report formed the basis for a 1979 state law which substantially rewrote the state’s urban renewal legislation, injecting considerable state review of redevelopment agencies and their operation, redefined ‘blight’, expanded the permissible uses of TIF (and delinked it from its association with urban renewal local match, and included more reporting and public accountability into “urban renewal”—which, in Oregon from 1980 onward, was what the rest of the nation calls tax increment financing.

As the reader may remember from past sections in this chapter, most western central cities turned primarily to annexation. Friendly state legislatures, such as in Oklahoma, produced annexation legislation which facilitated easy and generally successful employment of this tool during the late forties and fifties. Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Albuquerque are each examples of intensive use of annexation to solve the immediate postwar urban fringe crisis. The huge expansion of central city boundaries in this period have become the principal factor that 1970’s and 1980’s economists would attribute to the decline of Eastern/Midwestern cities and the rise of the Sunbelt cities. Statistically, the two dynamics may well be highly correlated, but western postwar annexation was both more complex in its policy motivations, and, despite favorable state legislation constituted a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for western central cities.

The problem was that western population growth did not stop at the end of World War II. For better or worse, a good deal of people continued to move into unincorporated areas or suburban communities. Also, western cities were not invulnerable to losing residents to suburbs. As expansive as these annexations were, they could not keep up with periphery development. “If the 1950’s were years of successful expansion for many sunbelt cities, they were also the era when the balance between city and suburb began to tilt …. By the end of the 1950’s, or the beginning of the 1960’s, it was clear that the attractions of reform [central city] governments to hold residents in older neighborhoods, that the process of annexation had failed to keep pace with peripheral growth, and that decisions on regional service distribution had been inadequate to subordinate metropolitan growth patterns to central city needs”^[9]. Say it another way, the suburbs attracted population that was increasingly resistant to attempts of central cities to annex them!

Portland

[1] In 1953 the Oregon Supreme Court, Foeller et ux. v. Housing Authority of Portland upheld the constitutionality of the 1951 urban redevelopment/renewal law.

[4] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[5] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 149.

[6] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.

[7] Both the urban boundary/growth management legislation and Portland Metro government will be further considered in later chapters.

[8] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 172.

[9] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 175-176.

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