Articles
Pushing the Limits
In Oregon, radical antisprawl laws aim to save the state's bucolic paradises. But with land-hungry suburbs on the prowl, can these goats be...
01.07.10
In Oregon, radical antisprawl laws aim to save the state's bucolic paradises. But with land-hungry suburbs on the prowl, can these goats be saved?
On a Wednesday morning in harvest season, Lyn Jacobs chases a rebellious goat through the barn. The beast has escaped its pen on Jacob's two-acre farm outside Portland, Oregon, in pursuit of forbidden cabbage. On Wednesdays, about 80 local families drive out to Jacobs's farm, La Finquita del Buho, to pick up their weekly vegetable subscriptions-vegetables piled, at this moment, in mighty heaps in the barn, in immediate peril of unauthorized caprine consumption. But Jacobs is a woman who can defend her cabbage. She drives the renegade goat into a dusty corner, next to the rabbit cages, far from the vegetables, and at her triumphant cry of "Out! Out! Out!" the animal vaults over the threshold.La Finquita, it seems, is just the kind of place where such scenes unfold: a wacky pocket of rustic cuteness, where jumbled gardens, orchards, beyond-free-range chickens, rambunctious dogs, and aloof cats recall kids' storybooks rather than modern agribusiness. As Jacobs steps outside the barn, she plucks a fat apple off a tree and hands it to a visitor. At that moment, Juvencio, her soft-spoken Honduran husband, ambles up the drive, past the Prius slapped with liberal bumper stickers, carrying two big Mason jars full of frothy milk from a neighbor's cows.If La Finquita seems idyllic, it matches its surroundings. Helvetia, Oregon is not so much a town as a hazy-bordered swath of bucolic paradise that looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, a Wendell Berry essay on sustainable agriculture or, at least, a TV commercial for a high-performance sedan. Two-lane country roads twist through lush hills, past browsing cattle and cozy farmsteads. Wheat farms dating back to the Swiss and German pioneers who settled the area in the 1850s stand next to boutique operations like La Finquita that supply heirloom tomatoes and organic kohlrabi to Portland's rapidly expanding ranks of the food-obsessed. The whole place begs to be romanticized.
Until, that is, you walk to the end of the driveway and swivel your gaze 90 degrees. Just beyond the green fields loom boxy strip malls, thickets of town houses, industrial warehouses, and acres of parking. The town of Hillsboro, a Portland suburb, sprawls out just beyond Highway 26, a 10-minute drive from Helvetia. The contrast between the two towns is startling, abrupt, and entirely by design. Nearly 40 years ago, Oregon, facing an onslaught of urban sprawl, adopted the nation's toughest land-use laws. In 1979, greater Portland became the first metropolis in the country to impose an urban-growth boundary, a hard-and-fast line beyond which suburban development is essentially banned.Along with creating dense neighborhoods, encouraging mass-transit use, and irritating free-market zealots, the growth boundary saves farmland close to the city. The resulting proximity between country and town defines life here. Portland is a small-to-medium city with a frequently dismal economy, a single major sports team that hasn't won a championship in 30 years-and world-class access to premium local produce. Ambitious small restaurants crowd the city, bedazzling visiting food critics from New York; some Portlanders follow the local pinot noir harvest the way people in Greenwich, Connecticut, track hedge funds. None of this could exist without the boundary, and neither could farms like La Finquita."We are stunningly aware that we are only a half mile from the line," Jacobs says. "We're able to model what it means to eat locally and eat seasonally for hundreds of people. We couldn't do what we do if we were an hour outside of town."Right now, however, this invisible line also hides a threat to La Finquita's future. Hillsboro, a high-tech manufacturing hub that has more than tripled in size in the last 30 years, imagines a future brightened by hot next-generation enterprises and corporate investment. In pursuit of that dream, Hillsboro would like to absorb Helvetia-pretty much all of it-in the expectation that prosperity will follow.
Hillsboro, a high-tech manufacturing hub that has more than tripled in size in the last 30 years, would like to absorb Helvetia-pretty much all of it-in the expectation that prosperity will follow.
"They say, Well, we need another huge swath of land so we can create another industrial cluster," says Brian Beinlich, another Helvetia farm owner. "But for what industry? No one can tell you that with any specificity at all. It's all just based on someone's fantasy of what might happen in the future."You could call the goal of Oregon's land-use laws "slow sprawl." Growth is allowed, here and there, every once in a while, but at a pace that would seem geological in subdivision nirvanas like Arizona or Florida. That goal is enforced by a bureaucracy so complicated, it's almost heroic: multiple tiers of government; phalanxes of professional urban planners; reams of population projections and transit-corridor-ridership estimates. The results can be measured in any number of ways: The average Portlander drives 20 percent fewer miles than the average American city dweller, for example. Places like Helvetia, however, make the most vivid illustrations of the laws' power.Oregon's slow-sprawl vision evolved from a bygone political convergence that now seems impossible: An iconoclastic liberal Republican governor, Tom McCall, worked with a legislature dominated by working-class Democrats to pass the necessary reforms. Among many requirements, the Portland area's various governments must negotiate every five years on where (and whether) to expand the boundary. The process almost always gets ugly-so fraught with lawsuits, countersuits, political maneuvering, and gatherings of angry townsfolk that by the time one five-year cycle wraps up, it's time to start the next one. So in 2007, Oregon's legislature devised a more far-reaching scheme. Cities, towns, and counties would collaborate to select "urban reserves" and "rural reserves"-designations intended to shape Portland's growth not for five years but for half a century. Urban reserves would be the first land taken into future boundary expansions. Rural reserves would-theoretically, at least-remain farms, wetlands, and forests until at least 2060.
"In the end, we are going to piss off just about everyone. And I have to say that, if that's the result, I think we'll have done more or less the right thing." -Jeff Cogen, county commissioner
The final decision is due in early 2010. While consensus is shaping up on most of the reserves, Helvetia's status remains undetermined. Hillsboro's desire to spread out faces opposition from other parts of the city that would like Helvetia to remain as it is. "Hillsboro does need to expand, but where?" says Jeff Cogen, a county commissioner who represents a liberal Portland district. "We've heard from a lot of people who say, I live inside the boundary, but I get food from a CSA in Helvetia. Or I ride my bike in Helvetia. It's an asset for everyone in the region."Cogen and a few other area officials believe that at least some of Helvetia will remain rural. And he expects that, despite earnest efforts to give everyone a turn with the talking stick, no one will be completely satisfied. "In the end, we are going to piss off just about everyone," he says. "Homebuilders will say we didn't designate enough land for development. Farmers will say we designated too much. Environmentalists will say we designated the wrong land both ways. And I have to say that, if that's the result, I think we'll have done more or less the right thing."