Now if they could only do the same for the Hate Amendment
Judge razes Measure 37 land law is what the headline in the Oregonian and the world's worst newpaper website says. Good. And not for the traditional reason that zoning is a good idea, but because measure 37 is a particularly creepy way of enriching rentiers while telling those of us who had the fortune to not come in before Tom McCall (An, ahem, Republican, from back in the days when the Evil Party still had some beliefs other than Bowb your Buddy!) got land use laws passed that we're screwed.
If the citizens of the state of Oregon, which is a magnificently pretty state with plenty of rich agricultural land, wish to write all of this off and become some sort of sick cross between Southern California and northern New Jersey, I'm certainly not going to spend much effort in fighting it; when gasoline gets up to US$6.00/gallon, those people who live in their little ranchettes located conveniently 60 miles (US$72 roundtrip in your spiffy new H2! *kiss kiss*) away from the nearest grocery store will find that the New! Improved! No Zoning for You! cesspool that is Oregon has become a somewhat less appealing place to live. But if you're going to legislate zoning away, it's discrimination to not allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to rent a power shovel and wreck the property values for everyone else in their neighborhood.
Now, I know that the people who run Oregonians in Action won't be really happy unless they can get droit de seignor written into the Oregon constitution, but perhaps it's time they go back to Grover Norquist and get him to write a no more icky zoning! law that applies to hoi polloi instead of just the members of the ancien regime.
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I didn't live in Southern California very long before I moved to Portland (approximately three years) but one thing that struck me was looking at the way the countryside looked 75 (and even 50) years ago compared to today. There's a lot of good agricultural land that's buried under subdivisions in between the San Gabriel mountains and the Mexican border; that's the curse of Los Angeles (and it's not just Los Angeles; my best friend moved to Chicago at the start of the 1980s, and I moved there in the late 1980s, and the difference in the way the suburbs looked in 1984 (my first visit) and 1993 (when I decamped for NYC) was pretty scary in the amount of good agricultural land that was converted into the most horrible sort of development (big houses on little lots, complete with scary flash floods because the runoff no longer had anywhere to do.) But, once you get out of the midwest, mentioning Chicago as an example of suburban sprawl gets a blank-eyed "wha???" reply, because not very many people realize there's anything other than optically flat prairie between Ohio and the Rocky Mountains.
Northern New Jersey, on the other hand, has some of the most horrific traffic I've seen anywhere (and that includes the perpetual traffic jams on I-5 in Orange County.
But they're proof of development!, which, to a particular sort of dimwitted capitalist, is the only worthy thing there is; they believe that if they can subdivide a lot, public services will magically appear and money will pour into their pockets like water. To them, the only thing wrong with the Los Angeles basin and Northern New Jersey is that there is still some undeveloped land locked up in parks and floodplains, and if the Evil State could be forced to allow development, it would usher in a golden age for all.
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I grew up in So Calif, lived in LA for a buncha years, and now I live in northern NJ. here I've got the light rail two blocks from home and about 40 feet from the office.
I guess it depends where in So Cal/NoJ you mean :) sure there's horrid car-choked strip-malled big-box'd burbs. I bet you even have those in Oregon. I've driven my car once this month, because I can. but too many people still refuse public transit in all areas so gridlock is inevitable. I love going "ha! ha!" to stuck drivers on route 440 as I woosh by em on the train.