Longtime Oregon resident and Portland critic Randal O’Toole responds to the PBS show Portland: A Sense of Place

 

I didn’t watch the video; these comments are based on the accompanying text.

This is the usual “judge us based on our intentions not our results”
propaganda. The idea that planners have created a “sense of place” or
significantly changed Portlander’s travel habits is just so much
bull. Certainly, the Pearl District has a sense of place, just like
any other neighborhood in the U.S. But it is no more and no less than
any other neighborhood — just more heavily subsidized.

The story says nothing about these subsidies, instead implying that
light rail led to the Pearl District. In fact, the Pearl received
several hundred million dollars of subsidies, including a variety of
parking garages.

Thanks in part to all the parking garages, transit commuting to
downtown Portland has actually declined. According to a 100% census
of downtown employers conducted by the Portland Business Alliance,
39,900 downtown workers took transit to work in 2001, the year the
streetcar was built. In 2007, it was down to 37,000, a 7.2% decline.

The biggest change planning has had on Portland is that it has sorted
the population: families with children have been forced by high
housing prices to the urban fringe or beyond: Vancouver, Salem, and
other communities outside the urban-growth boundary. The inner city
is now dominated by singles and double-income-no-children households.
Downtown Portland now has lots of cyclists because more young singles
live close to downtown. But that does not mean that the overall
travel habits of the region as a whole are any different from any
other city.

There is a strong undercurrent of revolt against the powers that be.
You can see it in http://bojack.org — the city’s leading blogger.
Signature gathering to recall the mayor from office begins next week.
The reason for recall is that he lied about his private life during
the campaign, but the anger over public giveaways to developers is
the real source of the action.

Best,

Randal