A 50-year plan for metropolitan Portland.

• Author: Porter, Douglas R.

The regional approach to guiding urban development that Portland, Oregon, has adopted is widely viewed as sensible, sensitive, balanced, competitive, and exemplary.

Portland is a metropolitan area that works, a model for other urban regions seeking a regional solution to difficult growth issues. Its downtown and innercity neighborhoods are robustly alive. Development is controlled within an urban growth boundary, preserving farmlands, forests, and access to natural resources. The transportation system has shifted determinedly from dependence on highways to a balance of alternatives. Workable affordable housing programs are in place, and the region operates under an effective metropolitan governance system that is unusual in America.

In 1992, Metro, the directly elected government serving the region's residents (see the accompanying sidebar), embarked on the Region 2040 planning process. The schedule calls for the regional framework plan to be adopted by the Metro Council by December 31, 1997. At the halfway point in the five-year planning process, some fundamental directions have been set that propose a radical change from the traditional approaches to urban development here in the United States.

When this latest planning process began, major components of a growth management program were in place. The urban growth boundary (UBG) kept development within a 234,000-acre urban area. The boundary and functional plans for public facilities together helped reconcile local development arms with regional policies.

Highway construction was minimized in favor of transit. Bus and rail were being used for about 3 percent of trips. The regional transit agency, Tri-Met, has built one light-rail line east to Gresham, has initiated construction of a second line west to Hillsboro, and has planned a third north/south line from Clackamas to Vancouver, Washington.

An affordable housing policy worked out with the state requires half of all residential zoning to allow multifamily use and establishes minimum-density targets of six to 10 units per acre for each jurisdiction in the region.

Not resting on its laurels as a national example of how to guide urban and regional development, Portland yearned to try harder. The planners knew that the typical 20-year planning horizon fails to anticipate major long-term shifts in settlement patterns. The effects of new road and transit networks on development locations and densities, for example, extend far beyond 20 years. They knew also that rural development outside the urban growth boundary was a cause for concern. Future plans should provide better guidance for these areas. A 50-year time frame, although daunting, would allow greater room to explore the long-term consequences of metropolitan growth.

The consensus-building process in which the Portland region and its jurisdictions have been engaged for a quarter century has raised citizen awareness of planning issues to a level unrivaled in the United States. Metro began the Region 2040 planning process by surveying citizens, conducting interviews and workshops with stakeholders, holding two regional conferences, and mailing newsletters to determine the issues uppermost in citizens' minds.

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These various forums revealed that people liked their neighborhoods, open space, and natural setting and disliked traffic congestion and rapid growth. Sixty percent of respondents in a telephone survey believed that the regional quality of life would worsen if something was not done. In general, more people favored investing in transit than in roads, providing a wide choice of living environments, and focusing growth in developed areas.

Metro was projecting that roughly 1.1 million people would be added to the region by 2040, on a base of 1.4 million in the four-county region. Most people accepted the inevitability of growth, but for many acceptance of the prospect that the population would almost...