Shuffleboard, anyone?
August 23rd, 2007 by Jim JustNo matter how hard I try to distance myself from the whole Measure 37/49 debacle, I keep getting drawn back in. Yesterday, I heard from a friend who had been at a meeting. The hot item on the agenda was whether or not the organization would endorse Measure 49. He referred to my previous arguments that we might actually be better off under Measure 37 – which apparently were received with a resounding thud. Now that the campaign is underway, he asked, do I still feel the same way?
Which brings us to the question of what I think about the campaign, and why. The answer is a bit long and convoluted, and requires that we start with a look at the work we at Goal One do and the global context within which that work is carried out.
As Donella Meadows pointed out, each of us is a complex system nested within a myriad of complex systems – a living organism, a city, an economy, an ecosystem. We are confronted with major global problems—poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, inequality and economic insecurity. Complex systems have leverage points where a small input can produce big changes. We at Goal One work every day to find those leverage points, to move the system and make the biggest difference we can.
Mostly we work at what Meadows identified as the least effective level – “numbers.” Since we work in the land use arena, we most often find ourselves trying to save fragments of land and environments from development. We work on specific proposals that affect jobs, neighborhoods, local economies. The levers we use aren’t really very powerful, and they get only at symptoms. The disease itself is caused by the paradigm of growth that rules our social and economic system and that is driving our ecosystem to the brink of disaster.
So we also try to work more powerful levers, to change the rules of the game, the goals of the system, the underlying paradigm itself. Meadows pointed out that growth – both population and economic – is the leverage point for getting at and solving the world’s interrelated problems. And she’s right. The day-to-day problems that we work on would simply disappear, or would at least radically diminish, without the unrelenting pressure of growth. We wouldn’t be seeing the endless march of residential development into farmland and forested hillsides. We wouldn’t be seeing an urban growth boundary expansion in Springfield , a West Eugene Parkway or Newberg-Dundee bypass, new bridges over the Columbia and Willamette, another Wal-Mart Supercenter in Lebanon-Central Point-Medford-Cornelius, a new shopping center at a freeway interchange in South Salem. Globally, we wouldn’t be seeing wetlands, fisheries, rainforests being decimated.
Measure 37 changed the rules of the game in Oregon, dramatically. That’s a very powerful lever. Measure 49 monkeys with the numbers – that’s the least powerful lever. And in doing so, Measure 49 pointedly refuses to touch more powerful levers, while locking Measure 37’s lever in place. I think that’s a big mistake. We now hear the argument – from those like Phil Barnhart, who should know – that a defeat of Measure 49 would lock Measure 37 in place, as no legislator would touch it again for years. Unfortunately, that too may be true. We need to fire the leadership whose lack of strategic vision got us into this position.
But back to the numbers for a minute. Oregon has averaged in the neighborhood of 25,000 housing starts over the last several years. As near as I can figure from DLCD’s farm/forest reports, at most about 1,000 of those are outside of UGBs. While the land use planning program is credited with keeping people from building on their land, it works mostly at the margins. We ourselves are successful in stopping only a few dwellings a year. What’s this mean? Getting rid of the land use laws completely isn’t likely to result in a flood of new rural development. It’s much more likely that the 1000 houses a year that we’re seeing pretty much reflects market demand. Measure 49 would pretty much guarantee that 21,000 new houses could be build in rural areas. That’s a 21-year supply of rural housing, under current conditions.
And we know that current conditions won’t last. We’re right now seeing the sub-prime mortgage meltdown morph into a crisis of the international banking and monetary systems. The real estate bubble has burst in many places around the U.S. and the world, and Oregon isn’t likely to escape the meltdown. And this is just the short-term outlook.
The population growth that we’ve seen over the last century and especially over the last several decades was made possible by cheap and abundant energy, particularly oil. Global oil production will soon peak, if it hasn’t already. A peak in oil will be followed by a peak in population. We don’t yet know exactly how this will come about – whether birth rates will fall precipitously as people stop having babies, or whether the death rate will rise dramatically as a result of starvation, war, disease, and disaster – or, most likely, a combination.
We know that the growth of suburbs was fueled by cheap and abundant oil. With the oil gone, suburbs will – as Kunstler says repeatedly – prove to have been the greatest misallocation of resources in history. The demand for commuter houses will collapse. What this means for rural communities remains to be seen. We may actually see a repopulation of the countryside, as the demise of industrial farming forces people return to the land for their very survival.
And climate change is the wild card. We may see mass migrations on an unprecedented scale as rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and drought render heavily populated areas uninhabitable. We need to be thinking about what climate change will mean for Oregon’s cities, farms, forests, and water supply, about how we are going to support our population and perhaps serve as a refuge for those fleeing less favored places.
So now maybe you can begin to see why and where I’m at on Measure 49. It was incredibly short-sighted and incompetent leadership that has brought us to this dilemma. Arguing about whether we’re better off under Measure 49 or Measure 37 seems as silly and as much of a waste of energy as arguing over a shuffleboard game on the decks of the Titanic. We ought to be focusing on the icebergs ahead, and on getting the lifeboats ready.
August 25th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Readers of Shuffleboard:
I have long admired Jim Just’s commitment to good land use planning, not to mention his ongoing attention to energy/climate issues. But his position on Measure 49 continues to baffle me, and I fear that he has convinced himself of his own logic without faithfully considering the depth of the ramifications of leaving M37 as it is. I have already spent some time responding to Jim on this with little movement on either of us to the wisdom of the other side. But as Jim continues to use his web blog as a platform to undermine the possible course correction for the worst of Measure 37, I feel compelled again to inject some alternative views into the discussion. In the interest of brevity and coherent connection with Jim’s own comments, I will comment within his article “Shuffleboard, anyone?” below.
– Tom Bowerman
OK, good, yes.
Yah, OK.
No, I think not. Even if growth were to suddenly cease – I won’t discuss the odds right now – I believe we’re still in for a severe crunch. We can simply not sustain our currently level of consumption, much less increased consumption; so it’s flawed to say all we need to do is to stop economic and population GROWTH. A coherent, livable, future requires we significantly diminish consumption of resources with the attendant external impacts. I believe deconsumption is even more essential than the population bomb, but this is a far more complex issue than can be engaged in while retaining attention on Measure 49.
Again, my point is that we’ve already seen our wetlands, fisheries, forests, watersheds decimated, I mean, we have about 10% of our historic salmon runs and 20% of our wetlands remaining, so on. We must not aim for a stasis situation but an entirely new cultural interaction with our environment, one that springs from respect and nourishment, rather than disrespect and exploitation. Of course, there is little to instill optimism here.
True.
No, not really so. Measure 49 changes the rules, and just as M37 changed the rules, it resulted in the numbers being changed. Measure 49 eliminates all commercial and industrial claims. That’s a significant “RULE†change, not just a number change. Quarries, strip malls, shopping centers, mini-storage units, manufacturing facilities, car dealerships, and so on will be off the table. OFF THE TABLE, not just less. It’s not just playing with numbers, it’s changing the rules! Why doesn’t Jim Just get this?
NO, M 37 isn’t locked in place, it’s replaced, or significantly amended.
Uh, yah, right! That’s the attitude which brought us term limits a decade or so ago. Even I was foolish enough to think term limits would breath new life into our policy bodies, but what we ended up with were some totally unprepared neophytes who had a serious predisposition to undo the regulatory structure to protect resources and guide sound decisonmaking. It’s just so damn easy to say throw the bastards out, but what will replace them? And that’s if you agree with Jim’s essential proposition for “just†cause, that M49 is worse than 37, which I submit is just wrong.
Say What? This logic just escapes me completely. On one hand, Jim says that the market demand can’t absorb more than the supposed 1000 houses a year, and then on the other implies that we’d see 21,000 new houses. How can we have a tapped market for a thousand and then worry that there would be 21,000 new houses? Now, careful reading of Jim’s text reveals a lot of ambiguity of interpretation, but I’m only going on the implied sense of the statement. More significant, if we get to the real issues, are such things as: a) the number of houses with 37 and the number of houses with 49; b) the impact of those competing scenarios on rural infrastructure, farm economy and natural systems; c) the relative impact of a M49 claim on any individual neighbor who would be looking at hundreds of half acre subdivision lots (or gravel quarry, strip mall…) next door or looking at 2-10 houses with minimum lot sizes in a cluster pattern. And some people are focused on the 10 house size without considering the demonstration of “lost value†that will be required to move above the “up to three†M49 track. There has been substantial consideration of valuation by several economists who argue that valuation is going to be a difficult matter to substantiate. I don’t know if they are right, but if they are, we won’t be seeing the “21,000†figure that Jim puts in his arguments. What if it were more like a few thousand? The main thing here, is that with 37 intact, there really isn’t any limit other than whether a person owned land before the “regulation†was adopted. M 47 alters the entire rules on 37, and gives a finite upper limit of “houses†which is easily far less than Measure 37, not even counting the entire deletion of the commercial / industrial components of M37.
Yup, I said this back in emerging recessions of 1974, 1982, and with less conviction in 1992. While I agree that current conditions cannot last, I’m not convinced that the long expected implosion is imminent. I am much more circumspect today than I was when I was making the broad sweeping predictions of collapse, and I continue to be amazed by the resilience of the industrial paradigm. In fact, I’ve been more recently teetering between thinking that I won’t see it in my lifetime and otherwise thinking that the only way to see any meaningful shift short of disaster for culture is to be far more strategic in inducing a positive cultural response to deconsumption. I could tell you a few stories about land use appeals forgone because of the belief that the collapse was upon us. So, I’d advise Jim to not get his hopes up as “meltdown†as being the alternative recourse to deal with Measure 37.
When is “soon� And even if “soon†is to be experienced incrementally over the next 20 years, there seems to be a lot of powerful “levers†which say we’ll turn to other more filthy sources of energy to keep the paradigm in action.
And, so is Jim saying that maybe Measure 37 is good because it “repopulates the rural areas†– puts people out in the country where they belong, tilling the soil in a more historic pattern? Hmmm, how quickly do you think this is going to manifest, Jim? Is M37 the appropriate response? No, I really think not. But I’m not dismissing the importance of this part of the discussion. I think it’s appalling that we’re not having this very discussion within circles dedicated to a fresh vision of our future. 1000 Friends should have a study group or research leg on this. Goal 1 should dedicate some of it’s brainpower to a constructive and positive vision of survival in a post cheap-fossil-fuel era.
Absolutely. And while I fully agree, this doesn’t detract from the more immediate choice we face with 49 or leave 37.
Nope, sorry, I really don’t see it.
A dilemma for Jim, but not for me.
To pick up Jim’s analogy, I’d equate 49 to throttling down the ship to half speed as we gain some evaluation perspective. I say half speed because many of us agree that Measure 49 is not a likeable solution, we’d prefer full-stop. But given the dynamic we find ourselves in, it’s a choice between a big evil or a small evil. You say we shouldn’t vote in a small evil? Well, OK you purists, no more driving your cars. Cut your electricity use by 90%. No more airplane rides. But until you do this, then it really isn’t fair to be so self righteous on this stuff without – more importantly — a coherent, implementable strategy to get us where we need to go. Sorry, just saying we’re going to “meltdown†tomorrow really doesn’t get us there.
Jim gives us a false choice, or more accurately, non-choice. If the meltdown comes tomorrow, then it won’t make any difference whether it’s 37 or 49, either way all bets are off. But if the economy continues on trajectory for a few decades or longer, there really isn’t any logic in retaining 37, unless there was the convoluted logic that when the egregious build-out happens we’d wake up and overturn the law. Hmm, that makes 37 seen a lot more like the Titanic than 49 – kind of like putting on the brakes AFTER the wreck.
One thing which troubles me a lot about Jim’s characterization of the dirth of leadership in dealing with M37 is that I know he understands the awkward political dynamic which gave birth to M49. M49 was a very hard fought measure, the best that would be wrenched from a very mixed and divided legislature. I’d be the first to agree that there are a lot of legislators I’d like to replace, but not the ones who tried to bring us a more comprehensive and likeable solution, but settled for the best they could get out of conservative democrats and impossible republicans who were looking at the margin of the M37 outcome.
Considering the disaster of M37, coherent thinking seems to suggest that short of outright repeal, significant mitigation is preferred over nothing. I would encourage all citizens who value Oregon’s future to vote YES on M 49, and then to keep their shoulders to the wagon to move Oregon’s awareness on the importance many of the things that Jim advocates. That is the choice Jim should be giving us.
August 27th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Tom,
As always, I find your comments thought-provoking and valuable. But there are a couple of things in your response that I find troublesome.
The first is the notion that any dissent from the party line enables the opposition. We’ve heard this all too often, from Viet Nam to Iraq: you either support the war, or you’re for communism, terrorism, or whatever the bogeyman of the day.
The second is the notion that I would welcome a “meltdown” as a solution to the environmental crisis that is unfolding. To the contrary, all of my efforts are directed to changing course to avoid catastrophe. Admittedly, I think the odds of achieving that goal diminish every day.
Which brings me to the last point. We have to understand our predicament, and take responsibility for doing something about it. We can’t let others set our agenda for us, even when they’re so wrongheaded and dangerous it makes us blind.
Just as we know who was responsible for getting us into Iraq, we know who’s responsible for Oregon’s property rights fiasco. So “our” response is to fight a better war, to run a better occupation, to “fix” Measure 37. What we really need is leadership which will dismantle the American imperial machine, replace the American growth paradigm with something sane and sustainable. But what do we get? Barack Obama in Foreign Affairs, calling for an increase in military manpower. A “fix” that reiterates the nefarious notion that the community that creates and protects property rights “owes” somebody the moment a bit of personal sacrifice for the common good is called for.
“Settling for the best they could get” just doesn’t cut it with me, any longer.
September 4th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Jim,
You say you’re troubled by several things in my critique of Shuffleboard.
First you say you’re troubled that I criticize you for “dissent from the party line”. Huh? Where did I say this? I’ve re-read this exchange, and I’m really not seeing this. No, actually, I agree with the need to have some hard and candid discussions about the state of our land use planning program and what is and what is not working. What I am saying is that your position on Measure 49 is just wrong, irrespective you your efforts to try to convince me. I’m not criticizing your dissent, I’m criticizing the substance of your position. I just don’t think your criticisms of M 49 is representative of the type of discussion likely to make our planning and growth management better. Rather, I think it confuses the issues when you mislead about what Measure 49 actually does. My point in the exchange is that M49 both changes the numbers and it changes the rules; and most importantly, it does so in a way which addresses the intent of what many citizens have said they intended but did not receive with Measure 37. Measure 49 does not do the things you see necessary to address climate change – on this I do not disagree. But Measure 49 does restore some of what was destroyed with Measure 37, but we have more to address which was not possible within the 2007 legislative process.
Second, you say you’re are troubled by my saying you’d “welcome a meltdown”. Nope, I didn’t say this either. What I did say was that IF a meltdown were to occur, it wouldn’t make an iota of difference whether we had M37 or 49.
Your concluding remark is that “settling for the best they could get doesn’t cut it with me, any longer”. Boy, this is pretty naive isn’t it? I mean, just what is it that you’d be happy with from the Legislature, give the political circumstances? If Measure 49 wasn’t a significant improvement over Measure 37, then I’d probably be right there with you. As I said, Measure 49 isn’t JUST “monkeying” with the numbers. Aren’t your really saying that since a fully revolutionary makeover of Oregon’s energy policy wasn’t possible, that the legislature shouldn’t have done anything at all?
What comes up again and again in your critiques of M49 is the sense that you see all this as a static product and process. It isn’t. We have at our collective disposal the opportunity to continue to achieve the ends we desire. But we live in a very divided culture and we have lost much of the common purposes which once characterized the Oregon dream. Measure 49 was a process at one point in time, within a political dynamic and structure which produced an improvement on a bad situation. Am I happy with M49? Hell no, I’m not happy with it. But it is a damn sight better than M37. It’s an ongoing process, and if we can’t settle for what we can get at any particular point in time, we’re very likely to keep losing ground because the other side is relentless in ground we naively cede.
Tom Bowerman
October 5th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Measures 37 and 49, laws, property rights, etc.
In any discussion of land use laws it can be helpful to examine the origin of the concept of property rights.
As I indicated in an earlier comment on banking and the Federal Reserve System, the concept of property rights goes back in time to pre-history, a time when all lands were open and free, a time when people could hunt or graze their animals anywhere.
Then other humans, probably riding horses and carrying weapons, claimed the once-open lands as their territory, telling the herders that the land where they were grazing their animals belonged to them and that from that time on, they’d have to pay rent to the armed rider to use the land under his “protection.”.
Those early land grabbers gradually evolved into the rulers of city-states and then nation-states, what we now call kings and emperors. But the concept was the same as in earlier times. Their self-assumed rights to land and land ownership were based on deeds of war, hence, “deed” is still the term used to describe a land ownership document. And to give their land claims the aura of divine authority, warlord-kings’ deeds of war were often blessed by a priest.
But is this ancient, protection-racket concept of property rights really valid? Consider the huge land grab on this continent once known as the Louisiana Territory.
When the Louisiana Territory was claimed for France in 1682, explorer Lord Robert LaSalle merely stood by a cross erected at the mouth of the Mississippi River. As puzzled Native Americans looked on, LaSalle claimed 830,000 square miles in the name of “the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by Grace of God king of France and Navarre, 14th of that name.” The French king did not pay natives, trappers or anyone else a cent for the vast lands, yet in 1803 the U.S. had to pay Napoleon $15 million to gain “title” to the Territory.
Why? Did the Louisiana Territory really belong to the French? As Chief Seattle said, “The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky, the land?”
Even in 21st Century America, living in modest subdivision home or grandiose estate, the concept of land ownership often seems alien. First of all, families today are extremely mobile and change homes often. I’m probably atypical, yet I’ve “owned” four different homes over 40 years. But did I really own those homes and the land on which they stood?
For most of the 40 years in those four homes there was a mortgage on the properties. Didn’t my monthly payments to a bank or finance company make me a renter — not an owner — of those properties?
Then there’s the issue of eminent domain, a concept based on the old idea that property rights are derived from the warlord-king, or in today’s world, the government. By allowing the local, state or federal government to condemn someone’s property to build a new highway, library or maybe even a new shopping center, what does eminent domain say about the rigidity of property rights?
And finally, there’s war. Again, consider the property rights of Native Americans. They were not only erased by claims from far-away monarchs. They were systematically destroyed by deeds of war carried out by the military of the fledgling United States. Also, what happened to the property rights of Jews in Europe during World War II, as well as Japanese-Americans here in the US?
My point here is that no one’s individual property rights are worth anything without the protection of a government’s police and armed forces. And just as a government’s armies can defend one party’s property rights, they can dissolve someone else’s. A good example is the invasion of Iraq, a plan largely designed to shift ownership of Iraqi oil from the Iraqis to multinational oil companies.
Yet individuals and corporations act as if their rights of “private property” are absolute, that the government, whether local, state or national, is there only to provide services and to protect that property but not restrict its use in any way. That’s an underlying issue in the Measure 37/Measure 49 debate, as well as almost all other land-use controversies.
But given that the entire concept of property rights is based on the historic-but-invalid concept of divine right, perhaps we should be questioning the concept of land ownership itself. For example, how can you own something that is there long after (perhaps a billion years after) you’re dead — “How can you buy or sell the sky, the land?”
Buckminster Fuller used geometry to debunk the property rights concept, primarily because it is based on invalid flat-earth thinking. We now know, for example, that a two-dimensional plane exists only in concept, not in reality. So, when you say that you own a plot of land, where does that ownership end — at the center of the earth? Does it also extend out into space to infinity? If so, should air traffic and satellites pay a fee each time they enter your property? It sounds ridiculous. And it is.
Still, the concept of private property rights is so thoroughly entrenched in our legal and political system, it isn’t likely to disappear any time soon. But a deep understanding and recognition that private property can’t possibly exist without public protection, transportation and other services can be very effective in all property rights arguments.
Zoning attorneys and property owners are quick to make the “takings” argument whenever regulations affect their property. But they seldom acknowledge the “givings” of government that ultimately make their property rights possible.