Talk:Land use in Oregon

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Pulled a few urban planning books off the shelf. Adding here as possible fodder for the main page.

• "since the 1970s, arguably no other U.S. city has organized its metropolitan environment with as much care as Portland." Bart King, p2, An Architectural Guidebook To Portland, 2nd Ed. Lots more about Portland, of course. "Portland has the smallest blocks of any large American city", King, p4; "About one-third of Seattle's downtown is open to the sky. Compare that to downtown Portland's 53 percent.", King, p4. Some great pages about the Harbor Drive expressway, cast-iron buildings, Robert Moses' plans for Portland, then the 1972 Downtown Plan, 1978 Metro creation, etc.
• There's a lot in Timothy Beatley's Native to Nowhere about "establishing place"- things like the People's Food Co-Op, the Metro's greenspace plan (pg 120).
• The Metropolitan Frontier, Carl Abbott. "Oregon's adoption of a statewide land planning system in 1973 to fend off what Governor Tom McCall termed "the unfettered despoiling of the land" through "sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia in the Willamette Valley.", pg 146. The quotes are footnoted to Tom McCall and Steve Neal, Tom McCall: Maverick, 1977, p196. Abbott also makes some strong claims to why the West is actually not vast tracts of lands with cities interspersed, but is actually based around the regional centers- in other words, places like Condon, Oregon are "embedded in the dense system of laws and regulations that pervade the United States in the late twentieth century." Later, "urban growth over the last half-century has not only reshaped cities and suburban zones but also set the terms of life for virtually all of the nonmetropolitan West." (both quotes p151) It also references a map, basically showing all of Oregon and SW Washington being based around Portland based on migration patterns 1955-1960, from John Bochert's America's Northern Heartland, pg110.

Okay, that's it for now. I had to skim six books to find the three with any good meat in them. It's all fairly tangential, and city-centric, but Abbott certainly makes some good arguments for the importance of Portland to the state as a whole. tedder (talk) 06:59, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Very good stuff! Looks like this material could really help establish (part of) a narrative for this article, and also inform some others like Harbor Drive and Tom McCall. I'll try to grab some more overarching sources too. -Pete (talk) 19:09, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• "Oregon land survey". The Oregon Encyclopedia.

Hey Pete! That link doesn't work. This seems to be intended. —EncMstr (talk) 18:02, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Aieee! I've been abusing the {{Oregon Encyclopedia}} template all over the place this morning :( Thanks for pointing it out! Fixed now here, now I have to go retrace my steps. -Pete (talk) 18:22, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hey all you land-use fans, I've been checking the entries in the book The Oregon Companion against what we got to see if there's anything interesting or important that's been left out. One entry is for the Oregon and California Revested Lands. Obviously this is related to the Chamberlain-Ferris Act and the Stanfield Act, and the "O&C counties", and the recently dried-up revenue stream to them, school funding, etc. So my question is, is this a good topic for a separate article or should it go somewhere else? Where?

Ah, back to my favorite on-again-until-my-brain-explodes-off-again subject. Those are good finds. In particular, this gives a really good summary of the whole issue. Some other good sources are here and here (text of the O&C Land Act of 1937). I agree we need a new article. My vote would be for

O&C Lands Act of 1937 which brought back the money from the timber (needs separate article, law fans), then the subsequent revisions of those laws in the 1990s and beyond that keep the timber "safety net" payments coming. It is a crazy complex topic that includes railroads, timber, land law, scandal, government takeover, welfare, and obscure legislation. --Esprqii (talk) 18:18, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply

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