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Portland shows downtowns can be sustained

Christopher Leo
Special to the Free Press – March 27, 1995

FOR MORE than a generation, urban sprawl has been taking a terrible toll on North American cities, but a realization is beginning to dawn that this is not inevitable.

The problem is serious: Downtowns that were once bustling and alive are gradually robbed of their vitality by the exodus of residents to the suburbs, and beyond into small towns and rural areas. Those who can afford to leave the inner city are drawn by the lure of modern housing, more plentiful land, and – if their destination is outside the city limits – lower taxes.

As more middle-class residents leave, and the businesses that serve them follow, the inner city is increasingly perceived as the place to live only if you cannot afford anything else. A diminishing tax base must be stretched to deal with a growing concentration of social problems, while at the same time covering the costs of maintaining downtown infrastructure that continues to be used by those who have moved out when they come downtown to work, for entertainment or for shopping.

Flight syndrome
At its worst, the flight syndrome kills cities. In Detroit and Baltimore, and in the South Bronx in New York City, substantial area have been emptied of everyone except homeless people. In block after block, there is nothing but boarded-up buildings, or the ruins of buildings that have been reduced to rubble by fire. In countless small towns, suburban development has transformed once-lively main streets into empty lots.

Winnipeg has not reached that point yet, but the symptoms are there for anyone to see: Empty storefronts on Portage Avenue, a decaying Main Street strip, deteriorating residential neighborhoods throughout the inner city, some of them all but ruled by by gangs, pimps or drug dealers. Bad as that is, if the recent history of North American cities is any guide, it can get a lot worse.

All of this has been well-known for a long time, but it has not received the attention it deserved, partly, perhaps, because of a despairing sense that the process is inevitable. Everywhere in the world, there is an exodus from inner cities, and a burgeoning of suburbs, satellite cities, small towns and rural areas. Much of the writing on this subject in the 1980s emphasized the similarity of these trends, and implied that the outcome was inevitable.

More recently, however, researchers and practitioners have begun to recognize that the outcome is not preordained. European cities have been spreading out for a generation, but there are no Detroits or Baltimores in Europe. Even in Canada, despite many similarities to the United States, the problem is by degrees less serious. Decay is common in Canada, but ruin and abandonment of whole neighborhoods is not.

The conclusion is that, although urban spread is inevitable, inner city decay is not. It is a question of culture and politics. Our cities will die if we let them, if we cannot muster the political will to prevent their mindless destruction through abandonment. But if we make up our minds to preserve them, we can do it.

It is done in Europe as a matter of course, but it can be argued that Europe is different – business people and citizens there are accustomed to a greater degree to state direction, and are more willing to accept it than Canadians and Americans.

More persuasive, then, is that it is also being done in Oregon, that initiatives are under way in Ontario, that serious attempts have been made to tackle the problem in Minnesota and that lately even the City of Calgary, that Canadian bastion of rip-snorting individualism, is considering a draft plan in which citizens are asked to accept more compact development patterns, and to accustom themselves to more use of public transit in the interest of preserving the urban environment.

HOW CAN inner cities be saved? There is no once correct answer. Each community must develop its own answers to suit the conditions prevailing there. Perhaps the best way to get started thinking about possible answers is to look at an example of a community that appears to be succeeding in the effort.

Take the case of Portland, Ore., which has gained a reputation as an American city with a downtown core that works, a distinction that has acquired rarity value over the last two or three decades. Part of the secret of their success is the establishment of so-called growth boundaries. Portland and its adjacent municipalities are organized into an upper-tier scheme called the Metropolitan Service District, or Metro for short.

In the 1970s, the Oregon government required urban areas to establish growth boundaries to prevent productive farm and forest land from being swallowed up by suburban development. Metro drew a boundary in 1980, placing Portland at the centre of a regional area of 938 square kilometres. Inside that area, development is encouraged. Outside it, municipal and state governments discourage development through a variety of measures, such as refusal to allow various kinds of road improvements and sewer installations.

THE RESULT has been more compact development within the boundary. The average size of a single-family lot, according to recent statistics, is 808 square metres, compared with 1,226 before the boundary was drawn. All the municipalities in the Portland are have enacted plans to allow half of new housing to be medium- or high-density. Under the new rules, the region can accommodate twice as many new housing units as would have been possible under the old zoning.

The City of Portland has combined these measures with a variety of initiatives to maintain and improve the attractiveness and livability of downtown neighborhoods, and to improve transit service.

Area residents are able to choose among a wide variety of housing alternatives, and their choice does not come at the cost of destroying the city their parents and grandparents built. It can be done if the political will is there to do it.

Christopher Leo teaches political science at the University of Winnipeg.