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I'm a Real Estate Broker in socialist portland, and what we have here is called the "Urban growth Boundary". No, or a limited spliting outside of certain areas. It's so stupid that while we build common-wall homes on 2500 sq. ft. lots inside the boundary in the city, they wouldn't allow my parents to split their 100 acre farm into two fifty acre lots for their two sons. "It would ruin the green space. Talk about curtailing property rights. Sheer idiocy.

Nam Vet

I used to live in Portland. The inner city if full of beautiful tree-lined neighborhoods with lovely single family houses on mostly 5,000 square foot lots. I lived in one of these.

It is NOT as you portray a choice between being crammed in or living on a 50 acre lot. There are many many choices in between for single family living in wonderful well planned neighborhoods. Portland is trying to draw on it's history of well planned traditional neighborhoods, with parks and schools and shops nearby. You misrepresent what is going on there.

In many places you would not be allowed by 1960's type zoning to build the traditional single family neighborhoods on grid streets with schools, shops, parks and churches embedded in the neighborhood. What Smart Growth is about is a return to older zoning (1920's and 30's) which allowed these grand old neighborhoods (now highly prized to live in) to develop in the first place.

Under recent(since 1960's) zoning and land use patterns which encouraged spawal and isolation, if I had 400 acres to develop, I would not be able to develop a traditional neighborhood. I would have to build a typical spaghetti street sprawl type subdivision, houses on larger lots, with curvy unconnected streets, with no other shops and services in the neighborhood. The OLD zoning is what is restrictive to land owners/developers, and what anti-sprawlers want removed from zoning codes.

The zoning enacted in the 1960's is what caused bad planning and sprawl and leapfrog development.