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

About this book:

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.