Portland Planners Threaten Local Resiliency, Local Food and Local Economy

Vince
The Daily Attack
vince@thedailyattack.com

In an attempt to increase “gardening opportunities to support Portlanders’ access to healthy, locally grown food” and encourage “small entrepreneurial food ventures and urban farmers that contribute to the city’s economy,” the City of Portland, Oregon, is considering regulatory and zoning code changes that will accomplish precisely the opposite. Under consideration are measures such as:

• Limiting the size of urban market gardens.
• Limiting the sale of produce on-site at market gardens; presumably to limit the sale of produce in residential neighborhoods.
• Limiting the areas in which the following may operate: market gardens/bees and backyard chickens, community gardens, CSA drop off/pick up sites, and food buyer’s club drop off/pick up. Presumably this means regulating or outright banning some of these activities from residential areas.

It is strange that the City of Portland claims to be supporting such activities, while considering taking measures to limit or outright ban them in the majority of the city. Among the reasons for this are ensuring that such activities are well-integrated and beneficial to the surrounding neighborhood and mitigating the noise and traffic they create. There are a number of problems and issues with this:

The regulation of these activities should reside exclusively at the local level. There is no reason for one governing body to make a sweeping decision on neighborhood, street and block level matters in a city with 580,000 people. We should be empowering districts, neighborhoods, streets, and even single blocks to make these sorts of decisions on their own. The personal tastes, lifestyle choices, and cultures of our districts vary; just like any other American city. What works in inner Southeast Portland is likely unwelcome in the West Hills. Northeast Portland may have an entirely different set of priorities than Northwest Portland. Even within these districts we might find a diversity of uses if neighborhoods and blocks were allowed to make such decisions on their own.

A number of neighborhoods might choose to keep their neighborhoods as nice, suburban enclaves, free from the traffic and strangers that economic activity such as markets and food production bring. Others might welcome it, opting for a vibrant, urban atmosphere of market activity and industriousness. Let us decide for ourselves. You might be surprised with what we come up with.

This is an outright assault on our food safety, local resiliency and freedom of choice. Our economy is in shambles. We are faced with high unemployment. Increasingly, our food choices are made by large agricultural conglomerates. Increasingly, our right to produce our own food, our right to support local food growers, and our right to food choice is being encroached upon by regulations and subsidies that favor large agribusiness over local producers. This is precisely the time when we need our city to step up and allow us to produce our own food and trade with our neighbors. Our economy and our food security depend on it. The measures under consideration are a move in the opposite direction.

City economies rely of a diversity of activity and use. Economic activity, diversity of human enterprises, and living near other humans are all essential building blocks of civilization and the entire point for the existence of cities in the first place. Humans, in these activities, create noise and traffic and these activities attract strangers to our neighborhoods. While we should all be kind to our neighbors and understand that not everyone wants all this hustle and bustle, our neighbors must also accept that Portland is not the country. It is a vibrant city. If the City of Portland wishes to make the city of Portland an unvibrant, economically dead wasteland, then by all means “plan” away until we are the Town of Portland. Or, better yet, let neighborhoods take it upon themselves to limit these activities on their own streets. Why should a handful of neighborhood busy bodies have the power of the city government behind them to restrict these activities on a city wide level?

The problems of traffic and noise are created by zoning and planning in the first place. The real problem we are dealing with here is traffic and noise, not farmers markets and CSA’s. Almost all human activity in our city requires the use of a personal automobile. This is a function of our city’s design, it is a product of zoning and planning in the first place. Zoning puts distance in between the places we live and the places we work, dine and shop. The purported reason for this is to reduce the exposure of residential neighborhoods to traffic. But the further we segregate the uses of our neighborhoods, the further dependent we are on automobiles to get us to and from home, work and shopping. With this car dependence comes a need to further segregate our homes from the obnoxious traffic we have created, and thus we demand wider streets, more parking lots, deeper setbacks and even stricter zoning regulations. But all of these measures make the problem worse by “thinning” our city further and stretching it out to the point where a car is absolutely, near 100% required to get around. Hence, nearly any activity or event in the city, such as a farmers market, is bound to attract almost as many cars to it as people. It’s a self created, artificial problem.

Not only does this suburbanization of our city deepen traffic and noise problems, it also narrows our grocery choices to large, warehouse style stores and chain restaurants, which are the only kind of establishments that seem to flourish in the suburbs. It destroys our neighborhoods, and destroys low overhead small businesses and small entrepreneurship, all in an effort to curb the very traffic we have created by design.

The alternative to eroding our city away into a suburb is to create a diversity of uses in our neighborhoods. This would mean allowing us to live, work, dine, shop and even grow our own food in the economic dead zones that residential areas have become. In other words, this would mean acting like we actually live in an honest to goodness city. If we stop restricting, regulating and segregating these activities, then we will end up with vibrant neighborhoods with strong economies without creating all the traffic and noise that personal automobiles create. But then we wouldn’t need planners or zoning regulators anymore, would we?

And finally, zoning and planning departments don’t have a clue, anyway. City planning and zoning departments have in mind exactly the sorts of things that ought to happen in exactly which places. They claim to be able to handle and mitigate the messy intricacies of highly complex cities and their inner workings. They seem to know precisely how many shopping centers we need, where they should be located, and how we should get there (exclusively by car.) They take measures to boldly separate people from where they work, dine and play so as to create economic dead zones (residential areas) across great swathes of our cities. The truth of the matter is that no one is able to accomplish the feat of city planning. Cities are a complex accumulation of unplanned human action, interaction and activity. To regulate that is to regulate human nature and civilization itself. At the city level, the best we can hope for is that some shot-gun style regulation doesn’t hit us in the rear end as planners try to make sweeping regulations that effect the lives of half a million people.

I welcome backyard chickens, market gardens, farmers markets and CSA drop sites in my neighborhood. I welcome a diversity of use. I welcome economic activity. I welcome the Do-It-Yourself ethos of back yard farmers and even garage workshop engineers and mechanics. I welcome food security. I welcome running into people from my neighborhood on the street, as they are on their way too and from the store, work, dining out, going to a show, and, yes, while they are tending their flock of chickens. Let’s build strong neighborhoods and a strong city. Let’s save families money. Let’s create lively, active streets and blocks. Let’s not restrict our community’s ability to create a resilient, vibrant, neighborhood level economy.

UPDATE 8/14/11 —The online survey is back up and the deadline has been reset to August 29th. Tell the City of Portland what you think: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FoodCodeConcept The City of Portland is accepting public commentary until 5PM PST on Monday, August 15. They have an online survey by survey monkey, however it has been down since at least the evening of 8/13. Multiple people are reporting a 404 error at some point during the survey process. Still watch for when it’s back up:

UPDATE 8/15/11 — More info on nation wide trends in regulating, restricting or outright banning urban agriculture, CSA drop points, etc here.