Oregon's Land Use Policies Haven't Kept Up with Public-Interest Goals for Food, Water, Housing & Energy Security or Pandemic & Wildfire Resilience.
For decades, Oregon's LCDC has preserved green spaces and limited sprawl, but now it presents some obstacles to new sustainable re-development ideas needed for adapting to climate change.
Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC)1, enacted into law in May 1973, was a bold innovation and it has served well to “Keep Oregon Green”, protecting natural areas from encroaching development. Although it has succeeded and evolved significantly since its inception, it has also contributed to artificial scarcity and housing insecurity of late. As a result, many Oregonians have a lower quality of life as housing becomes unaffordable for all but the wealthiest families who can afford a home with enough land for gardening and play spaces for children.
Many things have changed during the life of LCDC, especially since the COVID pandemic. Thanks to the internet (and rural datafication), more people are able to work from home so that living in a rural area no longer necessitates the added carbon footprint of a daily commute to an office in the city. Electric cars have finally come into mass production, making it possible for some to still live in the country and work in the city without an increased carbon footprint (as long as their electricity is generated from renewable sources such as hydropower). A growing proportion of shopping is now done online instead of with automobile trips. The COVID pandemic has taught us, rather brutally, that there can be a big downside to having most people live in densely populated areas.
Global warming has proceeded apace, despite our attempts to reverse the trends. It is no longer true, as it seemed in the 1970’s, that nature will thrive if left completely alone. We humans have already knocked over the first dominoes in a long chain of environmental consequences and we’re going to have to take action to stop environmental damages we’ve already set in motion. The decades ahead could require us to make significant environmental interventions. For example, hydrological projects may be needed to help hold water on the land long enough for it to soak into the soil (instead of running off down muddy canyons carved out by flash floods)2. We may have to log firebreak corridors to help protect forests from runaway wildfires. We will probably need to change our forests from the current Douglas Fir monoculture to more resilient tree species in the longer term. It appears that, for nature to thrive, we humans have a lot of work to do not only to change our patterns of consumption worldwide, but also to step-up with labor-intensive stewardship practices required to keep natural lands healthy.
Whereas, in the 1970’s, the vision of environmental progress focused on minimizing our average carbon footprint by reducing the length and frequency of automobile trips, we are now faced with the necessity of transitioning to a post-carbon economy. Reinventing agriculture will be difficult, but it could also be far healthier for most people than our current systems.
There are many compelling reasons to want to include environmentally friendly rural residential clusters (RRCs) of higher density housing to allow more people to live on farms that will need more labor in the post-petroleum economy and more people to live closer to forests that will need more careful stewardship if we are to weather the climate changes ahead. Such clusters might look like solitary apartment buildings in the country, or co-housing eco-villages or clusters of tiny homes similar to Square One’s recent projects. The common design traits are that instead of having many individual large, single-story houses with long driveways and big lawns around them (defensible fire spaces), there would be just one driveway and one defensible fire space for ten to fifty housing units. Thus, there would be many hands to tend the farms and forests, easy access to nature for everyone living there and plenty of room for children to play.
Some of that may all sound like “work, work, work”, but there’s plenty of good news too. As it turns out, RRCs provide a number of synergistic positive feedback loops that could enhance peoples’ quality of life and simultaneously address a number of difficult problems we’re now facing related to climate change, energy and health.
The paradigm shift is from conservation to stewardship. The political challenge will be to keep conventional development in check by tightly formulating RRCs as integral, not just to the footprint of the buildings, but to include a large land buffer around every cluster— the land that the occupants will look after in harmony with nature whether the zoned purpose of the land is agricultural, forest or recreational. Legal structures for ownership first developed for condominiums and later adapted to co-housing can be further extended to include stewardship covenants and restrictions with provisions for land-use auditors to ensure C&R’s are followed.
Let’s look at some of the advantages of RRCs.
Housing Security
This year (2022) in Eugene, the median home sale price has reached $486,800 (up 16.4% over last year)3 The median household income is $52,6894. Home economists have long recommended paying no more than 2-3 times household income for a home, so half of Eugene households can’t afford a $158,067 home (if one existed), while half of the homes are, in theory, being sold to households earning more than $162,000 per year. I say “in theory” because many homes in the area are being bought by people (or investment companies) with cash or large down payments. But, if we were talking about first-time home buyers, they’d need to have a household income of $162k. The 95th percentile for Eugene household income is $175,0005, so only about 5 or 6% of Eugene households can now afford a median-priced home based on annual income.
Rental prices have similarly gone crazy with one bedroom apartments averaging $1800/month6 and rising at rates of 30% or more annually. The extent of the problem is partially hidden due to the fact that two and three bedroom apartments are now often quoted at a per-bedroom price and even websites like rent.com don’t seem to have been able to adjust for that yet.
It is difficult to overstate the human suffering behind these numbers. The dream of raising a family in a home not shared with other renters and a yard where children can play is all but dead. Many rent rooms in houses shared with near strangers. Elderly renters on fixed incomes are being priced out of the market and often have nowhere to go. One senior citizen I know has resigned himself to an itinerant lifestyle living in an RV and working on farms until officials eventually force him to move on from each situation because year-round occupation of RVs in one place is not acceptable under current land use regulations.
Although there are many factors contributing to skyrocketing housing prices, the artificial scarcity of buildable land must be counted among the primary, driving causes. Available buildable land within Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs) has become scarce. Land outside of the UGBs generally cannot be subdivided and additional dwelling units can only rarely be added. In fact, because every residential parcel of land outside UGBs is zoned for a single residential units, it is impossible to build new RRCs in Oregon today and people who wish to live in the country have to buy homes with land that are even more expensive than homes within the UGBs.
Within the UGBs, under current land use policies, instead of creating human-scale housing with open space for gardens and parks, we are seeing more and more five and six-story behemoth apartment buildings on thoroughfares like Eugene’s Franklin Avenue where people typically don’t even have a balcony of outdoor space they can call their own.
Adding rural residential clusters following cohousing development models and permaculture ethics would provide not only higher quality of life options, but would also serve as a pressure-relief valve for today’s pressure cooker of housing prices within existing UGBs.
Food Security
Post-petroleum agriculture is more labor intensive than conventional industrial farming that relies on gas or diesel-powered heavy equipment and petroleum-derived fertilizers. The sizes of farms for various kinds of crops, as codified by county-level land-use plans, assumes labor is leveraged with massive inputs of petroleum. To re-invent agriculture without petroleum requires a larger labor force and it would be more efficient if this labor force didn’t have to reverse-commute from overly-dense cities to work on farms in the country.
Thus, RRCs will help to maintain a flow of food from farms to cities in the post-petroleum economy (especially if RRCs are developed along existing rail lines that can be repurposed as light rail for both passengers and farm products).
Health
When lower income people are forced to live in cities, the lower rent areas tend to be food deserts because fresh produce in the city costs more per meal than other less healthy options. Typical apartments provide no access to land for gardening and where community gardens are available they’re often located far from the people growing the gardens so that a daily commute is required, defeating the potential energy savings of gardening.
In addition to better access to better food and physical health (summarized by Michael Pollan as “Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much.”) there is also mental health to be considered because many people living in RRCs will thrive in a quieter, more peaceful rural location where it is easy to walk in nature than it is in urban areas.
Water Security and Topsoil Preservation
Although loss of topsoil still hasn’t really registered as one of our civilization’s existential threats in the popular consciousness, it was always a key part of the WorldWatch Institute’s “State of the World” reports that annually documented humanity’s diminishing prospects in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
The key threats to topsoil have long been high-till agriculture and the effects of wind and rain on such fields, especially during extreme weather flooding and dustbowls and when farmers failed to leave healthy wild edges (aka “hedgerows”) around their fields and along riparian areas.
In post-petroleum agriculture, there is greater reliance on perennial crops and low-till or no-till practices which are made possible with extremely well-composted garden beds.
Permaculture is a kind of agriculture that is both pre-petroleum and post-petroleum, combining a mix both aboriginal sustainable practices and western “re-discovered” sustainable practices. In other words, the petroleum age is destined to become a fad, if you will, a brief departure from sustainability that, we hope, leads, more or less, back to human beings having a more direct connection with the Earth and the amazing gifts of plants and other living things as well as a deeper felt relationship to the environment that, while never absent, typically seems to have been forgotten in modern western life.
One of the core principles of permaculture is to do “earth work” to create ponds on the landscape and to cut “key line” channels on gentle slopes to help hold and absorb water uphill in bio-swales where plants can help retain water as groundwater and, by avoiding sharp downhill drops in water flow, help to reduce the amount of topsoil that gets washed away even during the heaviest of rainfalls.
In addition, because RRCs won’t be connected to any municipal wastewater “grid”, they will rely on septic fields and Wastewater Stabilization Ponds (WSPs) for processing blackwater. Thus, instead of flushing human-created fertilizer downstream to the oceans, the fertilizer biomass is retained on the land and eventually becomes new topsoil after being suitably bio-processed. Food scraps that would have been dropped into “garbage” disposals and then into the municipal wastewater stream can more easily be composted in an RRC development because of the space available and the ongoing need for more compost for food growing.
Energy Security
One of the more absurd aspects of conventional forestry is slash burning, complemented by the lumber industry’s scrap burning. While there are some innovative lumber mills with innovative co-generation plants integrated into their energy management plans, more typically slash and scraps are simply burned, releasing all the carbon accumulated over many decades back into the atmosphere and the energy released is typically wasted.
RRCs, especially when located near forestland where “fuel reduction” is needed, could harness the energy for water and space heating— displacing other more commonly used sources such as natural gas and electricity and providing an overall net reduction in the carbon footprint. Wouldn’t it be great if we replaced the current wildfire management concept of “fuel reduction” with the more upbeat perspective of the phrase “fuel harvesting”?
Of course, with RRCs located outside of UGBs, many solutions that tend to get stopped by the politics of NIMBY (“Not in MY Backyard”) become possible. Windmills and methane production are two obvious possibilities, but there are also possibilities for energy storage with mechanical (gravitational and kinetic) “batteries” that don’t require the rare earth metals commonly used in rechargeable batteries. Another great technology for storing energy is hydrogen production, which, still suffering from the stigma of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, would be hard to site anywhere within an UGB.
Pandemic Resilience
RRCs can help prevent the spread of respiratory viruses simply by making it less necessary to share air with strangers during one’s daily routine. People living in RRCs would spend most of their time in less densely-populated areas, they’re more likely to work at home instead of in crowded offices and they’d live in buildings that typically don’t have enclosed shared hallways.
It is unfortunate that consideration of pandemics was apparently absent from Oregon’s original land-use formulation. COVID-19 was not unprecedented. Though the plagues of Europe and even the Spanish flu of 1918 are gone from living memory now, people have long relied on the strategy of rural living as a way to avoid contagions that thrive in cities7
Wildfire Resilience
FEMA recommends that a defensible fire space around a structure include cleared spaces about 200 feet from every house or other structure8. Such a large perimeter means that about three acres of cleared land is required around every building, so fifty rural homes would require about 150 acres of cleared land. Obviously, this guideline isn't commonly adhered to in legacy areas where houses have been built into wooded areas.
The aesthetic of a home in the woods has a powerful appeal, but it may be that now, with climate change lengthening and intensifying fire seasons almost everywhere, that the home-in-the-woods ideal needs to be revisited (including where I live, by the way). We can think of many tragic wildfires in recent years-- Paradise, CA, Blue River OR, etc. It's quite possible that many of the tragic losses of homes could have been avoided by following defensible space guidelines. Please pardon my hindsight if you or someone you know lost a home some of these places.
With RRCs, however, it’s possible to have one larger defensible space surrounding a cluster of homes or even a multi-unit building so that only a small fraction of the defensible space is needed compared to the same number of homes built separately at a distance from each other. And, whereas three acres for a garden is far larger than what a single family would want to tend or use, a similar-sized defensible space committed entirely to gardening and a recreational lawn for fifty homes would be roughly the right proportion so none of the cleared space would be wasted and all the homes would be much safer than homes in the current development patterns.
These benefits are, of course, in addition to the advantages offered by resident families doing “fuel harvesting” on the nearby woodlands — meeting their energy needs while simultaneously reducing fire danger in the surrounding forests.
Plain old Security
Plain old security against trespassing, theft and potential violence is also a problem that is far better addressed by RRC’s than by single-family rural dwellings. Whereas rural single-family home dwellers struggle to maintain keypad gates and video surveillance systems, with a RRC there is rarely a time when the property is left completely unattended by occupants and because the occupants work together on the land, they know each other better than typical neighbors and help to keep an eye on eachothers’ property. Help is not a half-hour of more away with a patrolling sheriff, but, most often, within shouting distance, if needed.
The advantages of RRC’s would also be incomplete if we didn’t consider medical emergency situations where nearby neighbors can provide first aid, call 9-1-1 if someone is found unconscious or drive an injured but semi-mobile person to the Emergency Room.
Of course, natural disasters including storms, power outages, and extreme weather can also underscore the advantages of mutual reliance in RRC’s for woodstoves and fireplaces (heat), backup generators (power), telecommunications and other resources that not everyone needs to own independently.
How to Make RRCs a Reality
There are only a few extant RRCs in Oregon, but none that I’m aware of were built after LCDC guidelines went into effect in the 1970’s. The few examples we can point to were “grandfathered in” as “exceptional use” parcels where there’d been a history of multiple dwelling units on the same parcel of land prior to LCDC’s creation. These few RRCs often don’t reflect the level of design we would expect to see in new contemporary RRCs.
If there are other extant RRCs that I’m unaware of that make good showcase examples, creating a list of these places and documenting their strengths is step one. Seeing is believing.
Step two will be to talk with people in local planning offices, the legislature and LCDC itself to find allies. I’d like to think that most people would be supporting of the idea of RRCs once they’ve given some thought to the advantages. Having allies within state and local planning agencies will be crucial.
After building a network of advocates both inside and outside of planning agencies step three would be to begin formulating new and/or revised statutes that would allow RRCs and decide if a ballot initiative, a referendum or direct action by the legislature would be the best strategy.
I am recommending that allies within the real estate development community be vetted very carefully or kept out until very late in the process— the reasons for the original LCDC’s creation are still with us today— the tendency of the profit motive to overwhelm environmental considerations was the engine behind urban sprawl and it could easily buy out any movement aimed at creating RRCs and use it as a green-washed sock-puppet to help get sprawling rural second home destinations with shopping centers and boutique main streets off the drawing boards again. This dynamic is possibly the most difficult challenge the RRC movement might face.
But, if we can build an RRC movement and keep it laser-focused on stewardship with well-defined covenants and restrictions (C&R’s) that protect the local environment of each project and commit resources to caring for post-petroleum farming and forestry, RRCs might provide one of the strongest housing models for sustainability yet invented and become a model for sustainable rural development in other states.
Related Link(s):
Restoring Forests With Fire - A Permaculture Approach PINA’s video includes strategies for increasing forests’ fire-resistance and fire-resilience including hydrological strategies.
Eugene Housing Market: Stats & Trends | Orchard , accessed 16 August 2022.
https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/OR/Eugene-Demographics.html, accessed 16 August 2022
The Demographic Statistical Atlas of the United States - Statistical Atlas, accessed 16 August 2022
Rental Market Trends & Average Rent in Eugene, OR | Rent., accessed 17 August 2022
The Truth About Isaac Newton’s Productive Plague, accessed 20 August 2022