Interview with Ethan Seltzer: The idea of Oregon

To Ethan Seltzer, urban studies means looking closely at a city's economics, planning, architecture, ecology, transportation systems, politics and social relations. It means comparing Portland's metropolitan climate to rural areas in Oregon. It means constantly exploring ways in which the urban landscape can sustain all city and state residents, whether they are lifetime natives or the many outsiders staking claims to little pieces of the Pacific Northwest.

Seltzer's been an Oregon resident since 1980, when he moved to the state to work on statewide drinking water issues with the Oregon Environmental Council. He is the founding director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, and for the last two years, he has been director of the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University.

DJC: Generally, what does urban studies mean?

Ethan Seltzer: What we're interested in are the ways in which people have created cities and the things that occur within cities. We're interested in that from an economic point of view, a political point of view, and we're also interested in it from the standpoint of what it means for different groups of people in the city.

Why do some people do well, and why do some people not do well? And from the standpoint of society, what are the consequences for society because of the ways in which we've built our cities and the ways in which certain groups have thrived or not in the city? That's what we're interested in.

DJC: That brings up an interesting question, because Portland is a place that a lot of young creatives want to come to. At the same time, there are high-rise condos going up downtown that really aren't anything that young people can afford. So, we're drawing in a lot of great people, but where do they go? How do we keep them here?

Seltzer: Well, where are they going now? Where do you live?

DJC: I live on the East Side.

Seltzer: There you go. Think about that. Where do you think a lot of these people are living? On the East Side.

DJC: Now there's the Portland Development Commission's Burnside Bridgehead project on the East Side.

Seltzer: We're doing something on the Burnside Bridgehead, but we don't know what, exactly.

DJC: But it's that idea of jumping the river, and some on the East Side are wondering what's going to happen. Is it going to be another Pearl District on the East Side?

Seltzer: Should there be another Pearl on the East Side of the river? I live on the East Side, too.

DJC: Do you think another Pearl would work? Do you think that's what people want there?

Seltzer: No. To me, there are some really amazing things happening on the Central East Side, apart from the bridgehead. My hope is that we can let those things develop, try and understand them better than we do now, before we try and decide whether they need to be fixed. It's a real challenge.

Actually, for people who are interested in this issue, it's a really good time to be dialing into what the Portland Development Commission is doing with the potential extension of the Central East Side urban renewal area.

But the other part of that is that new housing is often the most expensive housing, and the idea that a city is building new housing is actually good. Fundamentally it's a great thing.

When I look at the Pearl, even though I don't live there, my feeling is that it's a great sign for Portland, because you want cities to have a continuing stream of investment. You don't want cities to become places of disinvestment or no investment.

For example, when I was working for (the neighborhood advocacy group) Southeast Uplift, we were really concerned about the Pioneer Place development. We thought, why should the city be so interested in Pioneer Place? Why would the city put tax increment dollars into building Pioneer Place?

Well, the net result of Pioneer Place, among other things, is that Saks Fifth Avenue located, at that time, their only Pacific Northwest store at Pioneer Place. Though a lot of the people that I worked with may not ever shop at Saks Fifth Avenue, what Saks Fifth Avenue has done is maintained the interest of households that can shop there, in the center of the city. Fundamentally, that's a really good thing, because you don't want cities to become places that people either choose to ignore or ignore because they're irrelevant.

You want cities to be vital. That's what those kinds of investments have enabled Portland to become. So, I look at the Pearl District, and I say to myself, not everyone's going to live there, I don't know that I could afford to live there. But on the other hand, the fact that the Pearl is happening is a sign of health for the city of Portland overall.

I wouldn't expect that you would find new housing built necessarily for 25- to 34-year-olds. That's why they're on the East Side. And the East Side is a great place to be.

DJC: A lot of young professionals would never consider living in the suburbs. Is the age of the suburbs over?

Seltzer: The real challenge is to offer people choices. The fact is that not everybody wants to live the same way.

One of the really interesting, distinguishing characteristics of Portland and this region is that the grain here is relatively fine, meaning that you have a lot of diversity within a relatively small area. If you take a look at older neighborhoods in Portland, the housing is all mixed up, you've got big houses next to little houses next to duplexes next to four-plexes.

Some people want to live in the suburbs and feel real strongly that their quality of life, their American dream, is a house and a yard and a fence and RV parking. And a lot of other people feel strongly that their notion of what they want is a vital city where they're a regular at the coffee shop down the street.

It's not that one is better than the other, but it is a fact that within this region, you can choose either, and that's what we're trying to achieve - not that everyone chooses the same, but that people can find what they want.

DJC: Beaverton and Gresham are annexing a lot of land. What is the significance of that from an urban planning perspective?

Seltzer: In Oregon, for some time, we had a passive assumption that cities would be the ultimate providers of urban services, meaning that when you get right down to it, in the end, the combination of where your services come from and how your community is governed would be worked out at the city level, not the county level, not the state level.

Multnomah County and Washington County have passed major policy directives that have asked the cities to determine where the boundaries would be between them and to gradually take responsibility in providing governance and services within those territories.

In Multnomah County it was Resolution A, which was passed in about 1980, and in Washington County it was County 2000. That was passed in about 1989 or 1990.

In both cases, the objective was that, over time, the county would get out of the urban services business. The county commission would not be the town council for large populations living within what are essentially regarded as unincorporated communities within the boundaries.

So, both Gresham and Beaverton, including Hillsboro and Portland and the rest of the cities in Washington and Multnomah County, had responsibilities assigned to them by those legislative acts.

Portland and Gresham decided on a line at about 174th Street, and since that time Portland has gradually annexed its way to 174th, and Gresham has gradually annexed itself to 174th coming from the other direction.

In Washington County, Beaverton and Hillsboro came to an agreement about where they would essentially identify their long- term city boundaries, somewhere in the midst of what was an unincorporated area known as Aloha.

What Beaverton has been doing is essentially making good on the promise it made when Washington County passed County 2000, which is to begin to gradually assume responsibility for governance and urban services in this large unincorporated territory.

From that standpoint, Beaverton and Gresham are behaving very predictably. Does it mean that there's a date certain by which all of those areas are within one city or another? Well, not necessarily. Is it controversial? Yes, certainly. But, fundamentally, they're moving forward on a series of agreements that were reached a long time ago.

DJC: In Mayor Tom Potter's Community Vision Plan, he's asking for a lot of citizen input. How does one take the input from the citizens and turn it around to those who can effect change?

Seltzer: There are several good reasons to seek broad public involvement in trying to understand and determine where the city is going to go.

Number one, an awful lot of private value is due to public investment and public policy. The people who make public investment and policy are the city council, and they ultimately sit on those seats because they get elected. So, if you want public support for the actions that enable both public and private goals to be achieved, you have to involve people.

Number two, citizens know a lot about what's going on in their city. In fact, it's highly likely that there is information that you can only get by talking to people because it's not written down, it's not cataloged, it's not on some Web site somewhere.

The third part is that you really want to talk to people because no one really knows the future very well. It's kind of an unpredictable item. What that means is that developing the most resilient approaches to moving forward takes the views of a lot of different people. Where we are and where we're going is best described from many points of view, because no one point of view actually is very encompassing.

The other part of all this is that Portland and Oregon have done very well involving the public in the past. The downtown plan is a product of public involvement, and it has created a downtown which has drawn international acclaim. Forest Park is a consequence of public involvement. The 40-mile Loop and Waterfront Park came out of a little organization called Waterfront for People, largely comprised of architects here in town that recognized that Portland was losing something by not having a better connection with its river.

You can look at almost everything for which this city is best known, and there's a lot of intentional civic involvement around it, and you put those two things together, why you ought to have civic involvement with the track record that we've had here, and you've got to conclude that it's served us very well.

DJC: Would you call Portland a benchmark city for urban planning?

Seltzer: I would call Portland a benchmark city for Portland.

There is an interesting tendency on the part of outside observers to suggest that Portland has done what it has done as a means of making its mark on the world scene. But when you look at most of the urban initiatives and innovations that have occurred here since about 1970, these things were done in response to what were perceived as local or statewide needs.

We did these things because they made the most sense for Oregon. We didn't do statewide land-use planning to basically convince Missouri to do statewide land-use planning, or something. We did statewide land-use planning because Oregon had a set of conditions and its own set of problems that it felt it needed to respond to. And the means that we chose were statewide land-use planning, which at the time turned out to be fairly unusual.

But the important point to make is that Oregon and Portland have done best when we have had a clear sense of what we want to achieve and what the challenges are before us in achieving it. What we've come up with are responses that have been remarkably effective for us, and at the same time actually remarkably innovative by the standards of the nation and in some cases the world.

The flip side of that is we're known not for creating new things but for preserving things that we value.

The statewide land-use system was about preserving the working landscape that was the core for the economy of Oregon at the time. The neighborhood association system in Portland was an effort to sustain a sense of scale and a sense of empowerment at the local level. In a lot of cases, we've done things to ensure that the best aspects of this place didn't get lost as growth and change occurred.

DJC: I want to touch on Measure 37 and that idea of empowerment. We've heard a lot from the individuals involved with particular cases, and now that it has been deemed unconstitutional, do you think individuals are losing their sense of empowerment?

Seltzer: Any time you have a vote and it turns out (to be) invalidated, that's a shocking thing to most people, who essentially expect that majority rules.

But on the other hand, we've got a constitution for a reason, and if Measure 37 is unconstitutional, then it seems to me that I don't care how many people voted for it, it doesn't necessarily mean that we should sustain it.

There's a legal constitutional issue that the courts will have to work out. But is it shocking for those who strongly supported Measure 37? It's got to be. Absolutely.

DJC: Do you sense that it might come back up on the ballot?

Seltzer: Yes. If you take a look at the history of planning in America, this is an age-old issue, this issue of property rights, the interest of the individual versus the interests of the community. When do individual desires get tempered by public community needs?

This is the heart of the debate over the American ideal that has been part of this country from its inception. It's never going to be completely settled, so as a consequence, I would expect that we'll continue to see this issue come to the ballot in a variety of forms for a good, long time.

DJC: Do you have an opinion on Measure 37 one way or another?

Seltzer: Yes. I think Measure 37 is remarkably short-sighted in a lot of ways. There are issues of fairness that we ought to address. If the real purpose of Measure 37 was to end land-use planning in Oregon, they should have put that on the ballot.

But fundamentally, communities need to have a way to pursue objectives. It's still a representative system out there, and measures that essentially make it impossible to move forward on collective ends are fundamentally not going to help us.

DJC: What would you say are Portland's most pressing issues going forward?

Seltzer: Land use and our expectations for the relationship between city and country, urban and rural, built and wild, is something that we need to continue to think about.

Those issues are being worked over all the time, but one of the really interesting advantages of Portland is that you can take a day trip to the wilderness, you can live in the most densely populated part of the state and have access to the least populated parts of the state.

Politically, within the state, one of the huge issues we have is the relationship between the Portland metro region and the rest of Oregon and the degree to which the economy of the state now depends so heavily on the Portland regional economy, which is another way of saying that communities throughout Oregon depend on the strength of the Portland economy now more than they ever have before. Politically, I don't think we've quite worked out the details in what that relationship looks like.

Finally, the last issue I would point to is the growing gap between the rich and poor that we're in, where there are generations being left behind. We need to think about what our social contract is all about, what our commitment is to meeting the basic needs of Oregonians right now and in the future.

It's not just a funding issue. Funding certainly is a symptom of that, but it's also an issue of recognizing the role that all people of all incomes play in this community and society, and I don't think we've made a lot of progress.

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