These are wild and radical
times in parts of the “conservative” West. It’s not big news
that property rights are a powerful issue, or that plenty of
Westerners would like to expand them. But the current discourse
leaves you wondering if there’s room left for any balancing
values.
That’s especially true in my state after
Oregon voters approved a “takings” measure last November that will,
depending on who you talk to, limit or decimate the state’s
trail-blazing 30-year-old land-use planning system. Measure 37 says
that if any governmental action has reduced the market value of
your property since any family member — parent, grandparent,
spouse, cousin, aunt, uncle, brother, sister, in-law or others
— purchased it, you are entitled to a permit to do anything
with the property that was possible before the action, or
compensation from government for the reduced value.
With
Oregon’s public treasuries bare, compensation isn’t a
real option. But commercial development is of vast tracts of
previously protected Oregon forest and farmland. Three months after
the election, we’re still arguing over how significantly this
will change the face of Oregon.
I could give you my take
on all the damage and all the regrets that lie ahead for this
state. I could lay out the unsurprising details of how a handful of
Oregon’s biggest corporate landowners and developers financed
a Yes-on-37 advertising blitz. The blitz featured frail and forlorn
seniors whose simple life-long dreams were crushed by heartless
bureaucrats.
None of that would change the fact that for
every two voters seeing it my way, there were three who
didn’t.
Does this new law bring us to a truly
radical moment in Oregon history? I wasn’t sure until I heard
the conversation surrounding the Legislature’s post-election
task of sorting through and implementing the measure’s
details. Recently, one legislator, who falls somewhere in the
ideological middle of the Republican majority in the House of
Representatives, said, “This arrogant attitude by the state that we
will dictate what you shall do with your property has to cease.”
There’s a word for the arrogant attitude he’s
talking about: zoning. It doesn’t work flawlessly —
there are isolated cases in which it’s been unfair —
but it’s been the basis for what we thought was a settled
agreement on how we’re going to live together in the growing
cities and counties of the West. Now, in a spasm of political
rhetoric and reaction, all bets seem to be off.
Let’s take a deep breath and think about this. A cornerstone
of modern civilization has been the balancing of the
individual’s rights to use his or her property as the owner
sees fit, and the community’s rights to protect quality of
life for the rest of us. It’s part of the Social Contract.
The West came to this contract a little late because we started out
with so much open space.
Chest-thumping by ambitious
politicians aside, very few of us challenge the notion that both
the property owner and those who live around him or her are
entitled to some rights. The real-world question is where to set
the balance.
The loudest political voices in most of our
states are saying that the balance has to be pulled harder towards
personal property rights, and they’re going to continue to
ask voters to agree with them. They’ll find more attractive
everyday-looking people to stare into television cameras and sadly
share their government-imposed hardships.
It’s time
to apply to these claims the skepticism that most of us have
developed toward government. Let’s ask who’s paying to
broadcast these television messages and who the big winners are
when we further weaken land-use regulations. There’s a
defining question to ask: Which seems a greater threat to the
quality of life you want for yourselves and your children in years
to come? Is it the oppressive restrictions of government
bureaucrats, or the traffic, noise, air quality, health and public
safety impacts of developments that are sited on the basis of
maximizing profits rather than blending into communities?
In the midst of complex public-policy battles, it’s natural
to wonder who and what to trust. In this case, all of us who are
coping with the impacts of growing communities have as much
expertise as the professionals who produce the political TV spots.
Maybe we should start trusting ourselves.
Jeff
Golden is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is the author of
the new book, As If We Were Grownups, and lives
in Ashland, Oregon.
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