Transportation/Sprawl11 Mar 2007 08:03 pm
Oregon Rethinks Easing Land-Use Limits
by Angry White LiberalTrying to Untie Property Owners’ Hands, Voters Also Ended Some Checks on Sprawl
A voter initiative in 2004, however, undermined the state’s land-use law. With the overwhelming approval of Measure 37, which has been upheld in the courts and is shredding the anti-sprawl status quo, Oregonians unwittingly replaced land-use quirkiness with land-use chaos.
Many here are now suffering from voter’s remorse and want the law fixed, according to opinion polls, newspaper pundits and a number of powerful state politicians.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/10/AR2007031001184.html?nav=hcmodule
2 Responses to “Oregon Rethinks Easing Land-Use Limits”
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March 11th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Voters weren’t given much of a choice, so they chose to take the backlash route. Now, we need to tweak the laws until they are both fair and eco-logical. And, that we will do, but there may be a little pain and suffering along the way, and maybe even some irreversible damage.
If there hadn’t been so much pain and suffering and irreversible damage done to the people of Oregon by a decades-long approach to land use that had become callous and quite heartless there would never have been an angry voter backlash.
There are probably many lessons to be learned in all of this, but I think the obvious one concerns the abuse of power. I am certainly no advocate of ecological carelessness and poor stewardship, but I care for the people, too. A bit more care needs to be taken to enact sensible laws that do not trample on so many individuals in pursuit of our many noble causes.
Love the land, but don’t forget to love your neighbor. Love your great-great-great grandkids and work to leave them something of value, but don’t neglect loving the landowner that lives clear across the country from you, and his children and grandchildren that he planned to whom he intended to leave something of value.
Heavy-handed land preservation programs won’t work any better than heavy-handed abuse of the environment in the long run. They both hurt people, even they only hurt the people whose viewpoints you don’t respect or care for personally.
If we can’t carefully compromise, we are doomed to watching the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other, and laws passed in the heat of passion that cannot be altered along the way to be more humane will go down eventually to defeat and be replaced by laws that reflect the passions of those that they hurt.
Angry white (or any color) liberals and conservatives could probably both take a lesson from all of this.
March 13th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Yahad–
It seems to me that the only way that your concerns can be addressed in any meaningful way and still limit suburban sprawl is to make all new development pay for all — and I do mean all — of the infrastructure from schools to libraries to meaningful mass transit that provides service every five minutes.
– Angry White Liberal