Bolt your doors and watch your wallets, Sacramento! According to the Sacramento Bee, busybody planners from “smart growth” mecca Portland, OR are flocking to your town, with utopian dreams of replicating their statist, control-minded agenda there:
These migrants from the misty, “smart growth” mecca of Portland, Ore., seek not to ransack California’s sunny capital, but to build loft-style apartments downtown, make the region an easier place to walk and relieve its traffic woes.
Although the evidence is strictly anecdotal, people working in the urban planning and building arenas say they’ve noticed a recent influx of people who’ve made their mark in Portland and now seek to do the same thing here.”
Why should this concern Sacramento residents? Well, if the planners have their way, you can probably look forward to future light rail boondoggles, rising housing prices, higher development costs, more regional growth controls, less local land use control, and of course, more bureaucratic red tape. These Reason studies will give you a good overview of these topics:
- Urban-Growth Boundaries and Housing Affordability: Lessons from Portland (1999)
- Line in the Land: Urban-Growth Boundaries, Smart Growth, and Housing Affordability (1999)
- San Jose Demonstrates the Limits of Urban Growth Boundaries and Urban Rail (2003)
But this is only a sampling of the resources we have available. For more on Reason’s land use and urban policy work, please visit Urbanfutures.org, our website devoted to providing market-oriented analysis of land use and economic development issues.