A number of cities besides Portland, OR have enacted urban growth boundaries or some analogous form of growth management. As part of my group project assessing the connection between UGBs and gentrification, I’ve done some longitudinal studies of how UGBs have functioned in other contexts. I’ve decided to specifically examine Seattle, Lexington, KY, and London. I used Seattle as essentially a “control” city for examining the issues raised by Portland’s UGB, as the two cities are quite similar in many respects. Both are major Pacific Northwest cities in the U.S. with comparable city and metro area populations in terms of quantity, race, and socioeconomic status. They share a substantially similar urban history (established in the 1850s, booming in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with this growth creating extensive streetcar suburbs, experiencing a modest core decline and substantial suburban expansion in the 1960s and 70s, and rapid growth, housing appreciation, and gentrification since 1990).
Lexington and Toronto provide somewhat more contrasting case studies, and were selected for this purpose and the amount of information readily available. Lexington was one of the first cities in the U.S. to establish an urban service area, 1958, while Toronto recently established a large greenbelt in 1994. Lexington presents a case of UGB dynamics in a small city, while Toronto provides a case of a large, ethnically diverse global city.
All three cities I studied for this post have seen some degree of core revitalization and rapid growth since 1990. Analysis of the language justifying their growth boundaries reveals a temporal shift in emphasis. Lexington’s boundary emphasized protection of rural areas and farmland, with little mention of influencing urban form. The Seattle and Toronto plans, while still including some language pertaining to protection of rural areas, emphasized smart growth discourse. Both Seattle and Toronto coupled their growth boundaries with comprehensive plans, which explicitly highlight densification and revitalization of existing urban centers as the a priori goals of growth management.
Seattle Skyline at Dusk
Washington state passed the Growth Management Act in 1988 and was effectively implemented in the Seattle area in 1990, a bit over a decade after Portland. This act was closely modeled on Oregon’s law. Like Oregon, Washington requires cities to establish urban growth boundaries, with some key stated purposes being to:
(1) Urban growth. Encourage development in urban areas where adequate public facilities and services exist or can be provided in an efficient manner.(2) Reduce sprawl. Reduce the inappropriate conversion of undeveloped land into sprawling, low-density development.(3) Transportation. Encourage efficient multimodal transportation systems that are based on regional priorities and coordinated with county and city comprehensive plans.
Lexington’s 1958 Comprehensive Plan contains little in the way of lofty language or philosophical concern with how new developments are built. The Urban Service Area created was 55 squares miles, at a time when the developed land was about 17 square miles—it seems to have been created largely for the purposes of directing where further suburban expansion would go, for the sake of economizing on sewage infrastructure. Even fifty years later, Lexington lacks the emphasis on smart growth and densification present in Seattle’s Comp Plan. It sees the USA instead as balancing “the need for an adequate supply of developable land to accommodate anticipated long-term growth with the need to preserve and protect existing neighborhoods, the built environment, and the Rural Service Area.” (2007 Lexington-Fayette County Comprehensive Plan, 19, emphasis added)
Ambrose and Gonas did a comprehensive study of the Lexington USA, finding some weak empirical evidence in line with economic theory about UGBs. In particular, they found a weak negative relationship between expansions of the UGB and vacant lot prices, indicated that there are possibly some minor supply constraints created by Lexington’s growth management. Connected to this, they found that housing prices rose sharply before USA expansion and declined slightly in the quarter following expansion. They also found evidence for spillover effects of Lexington’s growth boundary in terms of neighboring counties’ population growth. They found that Lexington’s population growth in the 1990s lagged behind a set of chosen peer cities.
I was unable to find any literature even discussing Lexington as a site of gentrification, though a perusal of Google Maps Streetview reveals some recent developments near the center of the city which would be quite at home in the Pearl District. Housing prices in Lexington are significantly cheaper than the national average, at about $153,000, up by $13,000 since 2006. There are some localized condo or loft developments in Lexington, which play on the rhetoric of green urban living and walkability to sell central real estate. Overall, however, the case of Lexington provides evidence that UGBs have only minimal gentrifying effects when decoupled from the context of a highly desirable metro area and the other smart growth policies which they are commonly associated with.
Toronto is an expensive, large, global city, comparable in size and urban form to Chicago, with an exceptionally diverse population (45% of its population is foreign born, with no singular ethnicity dominating). Toronto’s Greenbelt was enacted in 2005, as part of a broader “Places to Grow” framework which guides growth to 2040. In the introduction, Places to Grow lays out that it intends to:- direct growth to built-up areas where the capacity exists to best accommodate the expected population and employment growth, while providing strict criteria for settlement area boundary expansions
- promote transit-supportive densities and a healthy mix of residential and employment land uses
- preserve employment areas for future economic opportunities
- identify and support a transportation network that links urban growth centres through an extensive multi-modal system anchored by efficient public transit, together with highway systems for moving people and goods
- plan for community infrastructure to support growth
- ensure sustainable water and wastewater services are available to support future growth
- identify natural systems and prime agricultural areas, and enhance the conservation of these valuable resources
- support the protection and conservation of water, energy, air and cultural heritage, as well as integrated approaches to waste management.
The paper “Priced Out: Understanding the factors affecting home prices in the GTA,” published by a nonpartisan think tank and the Royal Bank of Canada, found little connection between the greenbelt and housing prices. It noted that housing prices had risen about as quickly throughout the 2000s in Toronto as in other Canadian metros without greenbelts. It attributed this rise in housing prices to the national relaxation of lending standards and historically low interest rates. It also notes the sheer amount of build-able vacant land within the Toronto greenbelt—approximately 200 square miles (or about half the total land within Portland’s UGB). In their analysis, there is plenty of land contained within the greenbelt—there is just little supply of the most desirable, central land.
Such analysis misses the mark, somewhat, however, in its assumption that demand for inner city living is a given or individually-generated demand. It is important to keep in mind the ability of governments to reshape landscapes. And while the gentrification of inner Toronto began well before the 2005 formalization of UGBs and smart growth, this urban strategy likely plays a role in shaping ongoing gentrification. The current sites of gentrification in Toronto are in the inner suburbs, which certainly fall under the purview of the existing urban spaces smart growth seeks to “revitalize.”