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Drawing the Line: Oregon's Urban Growth Boundary
How Senate Bill 100 Reshaped American Land Use

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About this book:

Drawing the Line: Oregon's Urban Growth Boundary When you fly into Portland on a clear day, you see something that exists nowhere else in America: a city that stops. Suburban streets end abruptly at hazelnut orchards and timbered hillsides. An invisible line separates urban density from open farmland. That line is the Urban Growth Boundary—the living legacy of Senate Bill 100, the most radical land-use law in U.S. history.

*Drawing the Line* tells the fifty-year saga of how a Republican governor, a dairy-farmer senator, and an unlikely coalition of conservationists and farmers rewrote the rules of the American West. It's a story of legislative knife fights and backroom deals, of citizen watchdogs and property-rights insurgents, of a state that dared to say "enough" to sprawl while the rest of the country paved its paradise. But this is no simple conservation fairy tale. The boundary saved Oregon's farmland and birthed a global model for livable cities—yet it also fueled a housing crisis, sparked battles over equity and displacement, and faces new assaults in the age of climate change.

From the Missoula Floods that created the Willamette Valley's miraculous soil to the Measure 37 earthquake that nearly dismantled the law, this is the definitive history of America's boldest planning experiment. As cities everywhere grapple with unaffordability, sprawl, and climate collapse, Oregon's half-century ledger offers an urgent question: Can a free society plan its own geography, or will the market decide how we live? The answer lies in the line they drew.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Eden of the West: Postwar Growth and the Threat to the Willamette Valley
  • Chapter 2 Tom McCall’s Vision: "Sagebrush Saboteurs" and the Battle for Oregon’s Soul
  • Chapter 3 The Farmer and the Senator: Hector Macpherson’s Revolutionary Idea
  • Chapter 4 Drafting the Blueprint: The Making of Senate Bill 100
  • Chapter 5 The 1973 Legislative Siege: Compromise, Backrooms, and Passage
  • Chapter 6 Inventing LCDC: Building the Architecture of Statewide Planning
  • Chapter 7 Goal 14: Defining the Urban Growth Boundary
  • Chapter 8 Drawing the Line Around Portland: The Birth of Metro
  • Chapter 9 Farmland, Forests, and Open Spaces: Protecting the Natural Resource Base
  • Chapter 10 The Backlash Begins: Ballot Measures and the Property Rights Rebellion
  • Chapter 11 The Watchdogs: How 1000 Friends of Oregon Defended the Law
  • Chapter 12 Growing Up, Not Out: Density, Infill, and the New Urban Form
  • Chapter 13 The Housing Question: Affordable Living vs. Urban Containment
  • Chapter 14 The High-Tech Influx: Silicon Forest Inside the Boundary
  • Chapter 15 Measure 37: The Great Property Rights Earthquake
  • Chapter 16 The Grand Compromise: Measure 49 and the Restoration of the Boundary
  • Chapter 17 Beyond Portland: How Rural Counties and Small Towns Adapted
  • Chapter 18 Infrastructure and Transit: MAX Light Rail and Urban Density
  • Chapter 19 The Economic Ledger: Development Costs, Real Estate, and Agriculture
  • Chapter 20 Exporting the Oregon Model: Growth Management Across America
  • Chapter 21 The Boundary and the Climate Crisis: Carbon Footprints and Conservation
  • Chapter 22 Gentrification and Equity: Who Was Left Out of the Green Enclave?
  • Chapter 23 The Modern Battleground: Expanding the Line in a Housing Shortage
  • Chapter 24 Fifty Years of SB 100: Assessing the Country’s Boldest Planning Experiment
  • Chapter 25 The Future of the Line: Land Use for the Next Century
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Author:

Jeremy Q. Ellis

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Date Published:

September 3, 2026

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