Ponder this for a moment:

As an August heat wave pushed Portland temperatures to a record 108 degrees last week, Tina Kotek’s Housing Advisory Council urged the governor to consider putting an ax to your local tree codes and canopy.

When Kotek was asked about this revolting development, she could have said, “You’re right. That’s unreal. A lack of trees and shade can be fatal in poor neighborhoods when it’s this hot.”

Instead, her spokeswoman, Elisabeth Shepard, said the panel’s idea was merely a preliminary draft, a response to Kotek’s demand for “bold” ideas to meet her goal of 36,000 new housing units annually for the next decade.

And Anca Matica, another spokeswoman, followed up Friday by insisting council members need space for “expansive conversations that explore every aspect impacting housing production. If we are going to make progress, we can’t start by taking things off the table or limiting dialogue.”

The governor clearly can, however, never invite environmentalists to the table. The panel is stacked with builders and developers, and Mary Kyle McCurdy, deputy director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, says that makes a certain sense: “We need more housing. But some of these proposals are compromising other values we have that we don’t have to compromise to build the housing we need.”

Like the pitch to clear-cut local tree codes. Or another proposal to pave over wetlands that aren’t connected to navigable waterways.

“That’s a good recipe for making Oregon’s cities unlovable and unlivable, as well as unaffordable,” says Robert Liberty, the former Metro councilor and former executive director of 1000 Friends.

The edge of the wild

That the housing crisis has us considering such nonsense may have you fretting Oregon’s environmental legacy.

Don’t. It was Julia Olson’s Eugene-based non-profit law firm, Our Children’s Trust, that helped 16 youths convince a judge last week that Montana must consider climate change when approving or renewing any fossil-fuel project in the state.

As a similar case unfolds in Oregon, Matica tells me the governor “is thankful for all the youth activists who are fighting for climate change. Oregon’s environmental priorities require continued and urgent action, especially in the face of a worsening climate crisis.”

In the meantime, though, Kotek has boldly promised to roll the environmentalists who stand between her and legislators who, in the quest for housing, want to expand Oregon’s urban growth boundary.

What should we make of that? You could contend that part of the governor’s exclusive focus on growth and housing is cagey political outreach to Republicans who make their living in the trades.

Or you could argue, as Mike Houck does, that “Tina clearly can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

“Those kids just won this amazing case in Montana,” says Houck, founder of the Urban Greenspaces Institute. “I bet if you asked those kids if there wasn’t a way you could protect the environment and create housing, they’d say, ‘Absolutely,’ and call what Tina is doing small-minded and retrograde.”

When the state’s supply of affordable housing is desperately low, the urban growth boundary is a tempting target. I should know. I argued last November that it might be time to “rethink, revamp or flat-out eradicate” the UGB.

Several thoughtful, and smarter, folks talked me down off that ledge.

“The issue isn’t land; it’s land readiness,” McCurdy says. “We have tens of thousands of acres inside urban growth boundaries, zoned for residential development, that are not being developed because they don’t have infrastructure.”

She points to the city of Bend. Since 2016, the city’s UGB has expanded by 2,676 acres to make room for a minimum of 8,100 housing units. As of November 2022, however, the city reported only 509 had been built, thanks in large part to a $101 million funding gap for transportation infrastructure alone.

If Bend, quite the destination these days, can’t afford such financing, how in the world could Grants Pass or Medford?

As Robert Liberty says, “Even a Texas developer would blush if he claimed that creating windfalls for land speculators at the edge of the suburbs would result in affordable housing.”

Does anyone really believe the builders and developers on Kotek’s housing council would crank out $200,000 homes in a world where $500,000 properties generate cash offers?

“Expanding urban growth boundaries won’t do anything to make housing affordable. Because it hasn’t. And it never will,” Liberty says. “The idea that reducing costs – for land, lumber or labor – translates into reduced price? That’s not how the market works. Home prices are determined by demand, not the cost to build them. Even if you give away the land for free, developers will charge whatever the market will bear for a house. It’s called market capitalism.”

Once upon a time, notes Ethan Seltzer, emeritus professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, federal programs subsidized infrastructure and paid local contractors to build it. That ended, Seltzer says, in Reagan’s America.

“The governor wants to turn the market loose on the Oregon countryside with none of the supporting investments that guarantees we get what we need,” Seltzer says. “In 99% of the metropolitan areas in this country, there is no urban growth boundary, and we don’t have affordability or sustainability.

“What the governor is advocating for is following the lemmings over the cliff.”

Kotek should also pause to reconsider these things, perhaps in the telling shade of a glorious tree.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com