Almost three years ago, Metro's John Fregonese predicted that Portland's urban growth boundary would need to be expanded by about 4,500 acres in order to accommodate regional growth pressures. Last month, after countless public hearings and meetings, the Metro Council voted to expand the boundary by 4,500 acres. No wonder Fregonese was dubbed the "guru of growth." The director of growth management services at Metro, the regional governing body, Fregonese probably did more than any one person to steer the region through its elaborate, nationally renowned planning for the future--and he did it with a humor, panache and warmth not often found in urban planners. Fregonese announced last week that he'll leave Metro in January to open a Portland office for Peter Calthorpe, a nationally known planning consultant. Fregonese is quick to quash the idea that there's any controversy surrounding his departure. Instead, the 46-year-old attributes his move to "a middle-aged man's desire to try something new." Always voluble, Fregonese has thought-provoking opinions on subjects ranging from obsessive lawn care to the latent popularity of row houses. He also tells a pretty good joke. Below are excerpts from an interview with Fregonese last week. WW: You often say that we need to offer people more alternatives to the big house on the big lot. Yet I don't hear people clamoring for row houses. Fregonese: Well, when you build them, they buy them right away. How much more clamor do you want? I think that what's happened is that planning tends to express the cultural values of a society. You look at the Aztecs, the Romans, the early Mexican colonial town, you find the plaza and the church. It tells you a lot of the role of the church in that society. You look at an American city, and you see what's important. The churches are not the most prominent buildings. The corporation is real important, that's clear--look at the banks and insurance companies. And the single-family detached home has been real important. You talk about that in the past tense. Society is different now, a lot of those things are over. We have a lot more diversity. I think that what's happening is that our urban development is starting to reflect our true culture, not the culture of the '60s and '70s. We've got to learn to let people make choices of house styles without making it a big deal of cultural values. You hear people talk about how "there's not even a place for kids in the backyard to have a swing!" Well, two-thirds of the people in this region don't have kids that would want a swing. We have this symbolic agriculture we carry on. Everyone in the region is involved in growing this crop, which you harvest with your miniature combines and immediately throw away. It's the lawn! We need to lighten up a little bit on requiring everyone to march down this Leave It to Beaver Highway. Is the suburban dream really what people wanted or what the market was offering them? Growing up in an American city seems marvelous: the community, the closeness, the smells that we shared. How did that ever get to be a bad thing? I think it's that too much became a bad thing; things became too crowded, too ghettoized, and there were some bad parts of that that you forget in the nostalgia. In this case, our cities--the parts designed in the '50s and '60s--were really designed around the car, where the car was a good thing, and it was good to move out in the suburbs, it was good to drive everywhere. It was a tremendous freedom. We were drunk with freedom when the car became cheap and gas became cheap; and when you get drunk, you get a hangover. We're in the hangover stage, where we have too much of it. We talk about managing growth properly, but look at what's happening in Southwest Portland. When it's time for increased density, people are up in arms. Are we hypocrites? Southwest Portland is an unfortunate example of where things have gone to an extreme. Neighbors should be concerned about anything that happens on their street, because sometimes the designs are not all that great. But I also know that there are classic examples of high-density building where the neighbors are involved, and those are what you don't hear about. Look at Lloyd Towers. It's 120 units per acre, and the neighborhoods got together, addressed their concerns, got what they wanted and everyone seems happy. You need to work out the rules of engagement and get everyone involved in the process because it is a shared space and you must be careful. What message do you have for no-growthers? I think their target is wrong because I don't think it's the population growth that's the problem. Places that have no population growth have tremendous sprawl. Chicago expanded its area by 50 percent with 5 percent increase in population. I'm not convinced that if not one more person came to Oregon, it would fix the problems of sprawl. I think we tend to overplay what advantage you get from no growth. It appeals to people who have a fear of strangers. Getting rid of them is an appealing solution that reveals a weak side of human nature. I remember a joke you told about planners. How does it go? There's a woman who had been married to three men. She's talking to her girlfriend at a bar, and her friend says, "What were your husbands like?" The woman replies, "Well my first husband, he was very wealthy and very old. When it came time to go to bed, he couldn't do anything. We could never consummate the marriage, so we had to get divorced. The second husband, he was young and like a rabbit: bang-bang. It was way too fast. We were totally incompatible. The third man I married was a planner. He was the worst of all. All he ever did was sit at the edge of the bed and tell me how good it was going to be some day." |
