Not that it will matter to the defenders of the status quo but here we have CATS CEO Ron Tober quite clearly explaining that Charlotte’s current light rail plan aims to turn Charlotte into Portland in 10 or 15 years.
“What I hope is that 10 to 15 years from now people will talk about Charlotte the way a lot of people talk about Portland today as being a great place to live, progressive, urban policies and so forth,” Tober declares at the end of a very revealing interview in Mass Transit magazine.
The not too small problem is that no one except urban planners, subsidized developers, and Smart Growth zealots actually talk about Portland in positive terms. Actual working stiffs and families have been fleeing Portland’s centrally planned utopia.
Randal O’Toole laid bare the myth of Portland during his recent visit to Charlotte. In an interview with the Rhino Times O’Toole explained the “Portland model”:
RT: When you were talking about Portland, I’m assuming that because they received so much government subsidy – the planners here love to hold Portland up as a glowing example of transit and urban development, by the way – what were the results of all this massive funding out there in Portland?
RO: Well, before they started building rail transit, 7.6 percent of all commuters in Portland rode transit to work. Today, it’s 9.8 percent. So rail transit has increased it from 7.6 percent to 9.8 percent. That’s their great victory. They also like to talk about how rail transit has led to economic development. It turns out that when they opened up the first light-rail line in 1986 they zoned everything along the line for high-density, mixed-use, transit-oriented development.
RT: We’ve certainly seen that same trend here.
RO: Yeah, everywhere. Ten years later in Portland, they noted not a single new development had taken place in those zones. Not a single transit-oriented development had been built, and they asked why. The developers said because there is no demand and people don’t want to live in those kinds of places. They want to live in single-family homes with yards. We have plenty of multi-family housing in Portland; we don’t have enough single-family. Let us build single-family homes with yards. So the city said we’ll let you build multi-family housing, but we’ll subsidize it to make up for the fact that you can’t make money on it.
So since 1996, the city has given about $1.5 billion in subsidies to real estate developers who are developing high-density housing along the rail line. But they never manage to mention that when they get people from Charlotte and other cities coming and looking at their rail system and all the development that’s taken place.
RT: What has it done to the cost of single-family housing outside of those TODs (transit-oriented developments)?
RO: In order to make those TODs work, they’ve had to drive up the cost of single-family housing. They drew an urban growth boundary around the city and the cost of an acre of land inside the boundary that could be suitable for development, just residential, went from $20,000 in 1989 to $300,000 or $400,000 by 2000. That, of course, has increased the cost of housing. Today the median house in Portland costs more than four times the median family income. In most North Carolina cities, it’s about two or two and a half times median family incomes.
So Portland has very unaffordable housing. But it’s part of a deliberate campaign to get people to stop living in single-family homes and get them to want to live in these high density, transit-oriented developments. The leading candidate for mayor has stated that he believes that no more housing should be allowed in Portland except for multi-family housing next to the light rail stations and on the streetcar lines. No more single-family homes, period.
And that is Ron Tober’s model for Charlotte in 10 or 15 years. Has to be because five corridors of rail in Charlotte cannot possibly work unless Charlotte is fundamentally remade into a much denser city. Portland is at least up front about it, here we lie about it and pretend it is not happening.
The Tober interview also has some other interesting insights:
— Hurricane Katrina caused the cost overruns on the South Line.
— Parsons Transportation Group is to blame for a bad design.
— The Federal Transit Administration should not have based funding on a 30 percent design level. In effect, Tober is saying he knew the process was bogus. That, and the FTA meddled too much in the South line.
And Tober confirms that the current transit plan is really just a way to get more money for local government, not help move local residents around more efficiently and effectively:
Tober explains that CATS was built from the ground up with land use and transit-oriented development in mind.
“Our big thing is land use, the city’s adopted land-use policies … the city and the surrounding towns have all adopted very transit-supportive land-use policies, zoning ordinances, as well as planning guidelines and design guidelines. And that’s a big deal. I mean that’s why we’re getting the start of a lot of the development that’s occurring along that corridor,” Tober says.
“We’ve seen — I’ve got some numbers now. [The] tax increase values that are going on there — I mean they are astronomical!”
Fabulous. The Portland model in full effect.
We need a new plan.
