Are you interested in helping to creating a more livable Bend? How about encouraging public transit? Walkable neighborhoods? Affordable Housing? Sustainability? Smart Growth? If any of these topics concern you, then it's time you take an interest in Bend's Urban Growth Boundary expansion.

Why? Because this process is about far more than determining how many acres to bring in, or which acres to bring in, it's about setting growth policy. It's about determining what new growth will look like and how our community will take shape as it grows. How aggressively will Bend pursue the development of vacant or underutilized land within the City? What sort of housing mix will the city shoot for? What density will Bend grow at? What role does the Bend 2030 Vision play in all this? And for the goals and priorities the City does set, how does it propose to achieve them? All of this and more will be determined as part of the UGB expansion process.

If you find that surprising, you're probably not alone. Most of the discussion has focused on how many acres to bring in, whether to go east or west, what to do about Juniper Ridge, and so on. And anyway, this is all just "land use" right? What does "land use" really have to do with everyday life? The simple answer is: far more than you might think.

If you'd like to learn what we think about all this, about how we'd like to see Bend grow to better serve the needs of the entire community – and why we'd like to see you get involved alongside us – keep reading.

The Point Of It All

The State of Oregon requires cities to plan for twenty years worth of buildable land within their UGB. But it can't just be any land. Each city has to follow certain priorities for determining which land is in and which land is out, for avoiding the unnecessary conversion of irrigated agriculture, forest land, and sensitive environmental areas, and for growing in ways that will alleviate problems within existing city limits and be most cost effective over time.

As we've learned with this process, the rules are not hard and fast, but there is a definite aim involved. It's not about constraining growth, or "social engineering" as many have claimed, it's about guiding and shaping growth according to principles designed to ensure that as the community grows, it will be able to better serve the needs of its citizens and help create a community that people enjoy living in, while avoiding the unnecessary conversion of lands that are most valuable in their less-developed states. Oregon's approach to Urban Growth Boundaries may not be perfect, but if interpreted reasonably, and in consideration of the individual needs of each city, it can provide a solid blueprint for 20 years of quality growth.

Is Bigger Better?

As you may have heard, the Bend City Council – or the vocal majority of it – has decided that bigger is better and that it wants to bring in as many acres as possible. Why? For one thing, a large supply of land is supposed to bring land prices down. (More on that later) For another thing, it will provide flexibility, the councilors say, although admittedly I'm not really sure is meant by that other than that more land will be available to develop.

Does it really matter how big the UGB expansion is? That all depends. Ideally, UGBs in Oregon are designed to be long-term growth shaping tools, guiding growth away from some lands, and towards others over a 20-year timeframe. It's the job of more specific growth-shaping policies like annexation or infrastructure concurrency policies to encourage smart growth on a month-by-month or year-by-year basis. So if the city has a means of ensuring efficient land use within existing city limits – without upsetting existing neighborhoods, mind you – and of encouraging orderly, equitable, and well-principled growth on its urban periphery, then the importance of the UGB boundary as a short-term growth-shaping mechanism (and a poor one at that) is diminished.

But if the city lacks those sorts of policies, a large UGB presents a number of serious problems.

To understand why, we need travel no further back in time than 1998, when under then-City Manager Larry Patterson, the City decided to annex ALL the land within its existing UGB to make room for growth. The boom was coming, and people could see that, so an annexation at that point was entirely appropriate, but an annexation of such a large size, without any rhyme or reason for how all that land would be developed, created some serious problem – problems that can most easily be summarized by terms like unplanned growth or leap-frog residential sprawl. This in large part has led to the now more than $100 million deficit in funding for existing infrastructure and created the sea of single-family homes that is now East Bend.

True, part of the problem was in the way the City had set (or failed to set) Systems Development Charges, which could have helped pay for servicing much of that growth, but at the base of it is the fact that it is far more costly to provide infrastructure for unplanned growth than smart growth. Sprawl is expensive, it's as simple as that, and one way or another, the cost is born by the city's residents.

So if Bend opens up a massive UGB expansion without taking care to manage that growth then we're going to get more of the same.

Where would all the money come from to service such sprawl? That's a really good question. Most likely from astronomically high SDCs, which the building industry will no doubt fight tooth and nail, or from additional infrastructure bonds paid off the back of all the city residents. Not only shouldn't the existing residents of the city be asked to pay for this poorly planned growth, they probably won't agree to pay for it. This town is notoriously stingy on funding school bonds, gas tax increases, and other such "taxes" that go into the public good.

So with a powerful building lobby and a stingy tax-base, it seems unlikely that our infrastructure funding issues will go away any time soon, and in fact they may get quite a bit worse, making the financial prospects of continued sprawl particularly troubling.

What Should The City Do?

Simple. Well, kind of. If Bend is unwilling to adopt principles to guide land use efficiently – and so far this topic has yet to really be addressed – the best answer to our problems is a conservatively-sized UGB, a concept which seems to send builders, realtors, and their hired consultants into frenzies. Their primary concern, it seems, is that if we don't bring enough land in now, we may face a shortfall in the future – as we do at present, they say – and land prices will go through the roof. A larger expansion will cause prices to drop more than a smaller expansion, they say, and so as a result a smaller expansion makes it harder to provide affordable housing options.

But that's just not how it works. And there's several reasons for that. First of all – although the City does lack sufficient economic land at present, there is still a ton of vacant/underutilized residential land within the current UGB. In fact, according to the City's Buildable Lands Inventory, as of last year there was enough land to accommodate 13,000+ homes on existing residentially zoned land at a fairly low density without having to expand the UGB an inch. That's well over half our projected growth over the next twenty years. And while some think the amount of land actually available is less than that, even a conservative estimate suggests that Bend has enough housing for at least ten years. Does that sound like a supply problem to you?

The second reason why the "land shortage/price escalation" argument is not all that pertinent is that the City is planning on pursuing what's called "Urban Reserve" planning following the adoption of this UGB. What that means is that outside of its 20-year UGB, the City (in agreement with the County) will designate another 30 years worth of land for future growth, and stamp a 10-acre minimum zoning restriction on it. This is smart for a number of reasons, but what's most significant in this context is that once land around the UGB is zoned UR, it dramatically simplifies the UGB expansion process, and allows the city to proceed in a simple and sensible way that's difficult to challenge legally. The point is that with a UR in place (and Redmond's recent expansion is a great example of this) UGB expansions don't have to be huge and messy, they can be neat, and more importantly easily pursued on a more frequent basis. And what that means is that every five or so years, the City can easily re-evaluate its land needs, and if growth projections turn out to be low, it can easily add more land to accommodate before any sort of supply shortage is ever reached.

Lastly, in regards to a constrained land supply driving land and housing prices up, there is a tremendous amount of literature and common sense experience that suggests that a 20-year UGB does not present a constraint on growth, which is to say that it does not drive land prices appreciably higher. So it really doesn't matter whether we adopt a conservative expansion or a more generous one in this regard.

Now, if the City were left with a rapidly dwindling two or three year supply of land, we would most definitely be facing a supply constraint that would drive costs strongly upwards. But we're not even close to that yet, and Oregon's land use system is designed to avoid that problem. The bottom line is that in Oregon, prices are driven by demand, not by supply – the most immediate evidence of that being the fact although we're supposedly facing a supply shortage, housing prices are coming down almost as fast as they went up since the bubble burst. It's about demand.

All that being said, merely establishing a conservative UGB and letting the chips fall where they may isn't what we want. And in fairness, the City is looking at opportunities for increased density in its Central Area Plan, around neighborhood centers, on transit corridors, and also planning on implementing a strong annexation policy to discourage/avoid leap-frog development and help master-plan growth as it heads outwards.

But, at this point in time, and THIS IS THE KEY, the City is actively encouraging a large UGB and has put startlingly little thought into the policies that would implement smart growth both in the urban core and on the urban periphery. So what we're left with at present is a large UGB and little assurance that growth will be much different than it has been in the past.

In summary, it's the growth-management polices, affordable housing policies, and transit-oriented types of policies that we want to see, because these are the policies that determine how livable our city will be in twenty years. With the right policies in place, the size of the UGB matters far less than without.

In our next post we'll discuss which direction growth should go and why. Be sure to stay tuned.