Framing Question: To what extent does planning infill development reinforce inequity?
I. Scalar Issues of Equity in “Smart Growth” Planning
A. Reconfiguration of Urban Governance
- Since the 1980s, many have argued that there has been a significant shift in the role of municipalities in urban policy from government to governance, as part of the neoliberal revolution. State agents are seen as increasingly playing a facilitative role in the planning process, bringing together private business and civil society stakeholders in consensus-driven, participatory approaches to create policy. (McCann 2003)
- As part of this shift, the role of neighborhood involvement has been discursively emphasized. Neighborhood planning, however, has the potential to fall into the local trap—the tendency to assume that the local scale is preferable. (Purcell 2006)
B. Smart Growth Planning
- “Smart Growth” began to emerge as a planning theory in the 1970s and has become a major cornerstone of urban planning since. It proposes densification through infill development. Smart growth literature emphasizes both equity and community involvement.
Focus Question: How was the Residential Infill Project in Portland shaped by various stakeholders?
II. Portland Planning in Context
A. Centers and Corridors
- Portland’s 1980 Comprehensive Plan made the notion of directing growth into designated mixed-use centers and corridors policy. This was intended to facilitate City desires to accommodate densification in transit-supportive configurations and resident desires to minimize physical change within neighborhoods.
B. History of Neighborhood Involvement
- Portland is renowned for its neighborhood-involvement in the planning process (Putnam et al. 2003). Neverthless, this characterization elides the many conflicts embedded in neighborhood-involvement in Portland over its history (Witt 2003; Leistner 2013).
C. Housing Affordability Crisis
- Since the 1990s, Portland has seen dramatic housing price increases, particularly in inner neighborhoods, culminating in the declaration of a housing crisis. These price pressures have resulted in an ongoing spate of demolitions of older single family homes (as rising land prices have made many structures effectively worthless) and their replacement with newer homes built out closer to the zoning limits.
- These developments have challenged the underlying precepts of centers and corridors, as development spills out from where it is planned.
III. Producing the Residential Infill Project
A. Rationale and Scope of the Project
- RIP was intended as a “grand bargain” to address the spate of demolitions, the scale of their replacements, and the affordability of new homes.
- RIP included three project areas—shrinking the scale of new houses and remodels, creating new guidelines for narrow lot development, and adding alternative housing options.
B. Composition of the Stakeholder Advisory Commission
- BPS created a Stakeholder Advisory Commission to guide the planning process and promote outreach. It was intended to include a diversity of people directly concerned with infill development, including for-profit and nonprofit developers, architects, representatives of all of the District Coalitions of neighborhood associations, and representatives of other community-based organizations.
C. Guidance of the Project
- The project bounds were delimited by city planning staff, who additionally guided thought through the presentation of policy options and specific scenarios within those options.
- The guiding principles of the project were exceedingly vague, leaving significant room for interpretation.
- A coalition of pro-middle housing stakeholders, comprising a solid majority of the RIP SAC, influenced the project in key ways, pushing for a vision of addressing housing affordability through wide-scale development of small, multiple-unit structures throughout single family zones. They characterized single family zoning as fundamentally inequitable.
D. Public Feedback
- The process has nominally included large amounts of public feedback. This feedback, like RIP SAC itself, was highly polarized; opponents and proponents of middle housing coalesced into ideological sides, rendering consensus impossible and negating pressures to alter the plan before presentation to the City Council.
IV. Social Network Analysis
- Creation of a social network of planning in Portland, using both various plans over the past decade and the stakeholders involved in those plans as nodes, with edges drawn between these nodes on the basis of serving on a committee of a plan or the board. Shows the extensive overlap between nonprofits and developers/business interests and the comparative isolation of most neighborhood associations (besides those few which have taken a generally pro-development stance).
V. Implications
A. Incorporation of Nonprofits into the Municipal Development Matrix
- Over the course of RIP, nonprofit and for-profit developers came into significant alignment on both the issues (significant expansion of middle housing in single-family zones) and the framing of these issues (creating equity by addressing affordability). Though the coalition supporting this policy included members of neighborhood associations and district coalitions, the vast majority of neighborhood associations opposed the widespread addition of middle housing to single family neighborhoods.
- This coalition presents denser, real estate-led redevelopment of single family zones as a solution for gentrification and creator of equity. Neighborhood opposition to development was cast a regressive NIMBYism, ignorable because of its unrepresentative nature.
- This emergent politics of housing that aligns real estate-led development with solving gentrification echoes Stabrowski’s (2015) examination of inclusionary zoning in Brooklyn.
B. The Coevolution and Tensions of Smart Growth and Neighborhood Planning
- Smart growth and neighborhood planning are presented mutually-supportive by smart growth proponents and guiding visions, but attention must be paid to the ways in which these two are in fundamental contradiction. In particular, the notions of process equity and outcome equity may not be aligned.
C. The Power of the Facilitative Role
- This examination reveals how devolved municipal governance leaves significant informal power in the facilitative hands of planners.