Effects of Growth
Environmental
Air Quality
- Technology has improved air quality, and our view of Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, and other Cascade peaks. But technology has its limits. Planners estimate that air quality will peak between 2001-2010 as population overwhelms the technological gains.
- Despite reductions in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions in Portland, population growth has erased those gains.
Water Quality
- Population growth is propelling plans to drink from the Willamette watershed where over 70% of the state's residents live and excrete. 93% of all Willamette River fish have dioxin in their tissue.
- 45% of Oregon's freshwater fish species have declined and are at some risk of extinction. 5 species of salmon and trout are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
Open Space
During the 1990's, growth overran approximately 8 acres of farmland and open space each day!
The Oregon State of Environment Report 2000 found that Oregon's environment suffers from:
- Inadequate water supplies
- Poor water quality, especially in urban and agricultural areas
- Loss of wetlands
- Degraded riparian areas
- Depleted fish stocks
- Invasions of exotics
- Diminished biodiversity
- Waste and toxic releases
Growth in population and consumption are only making these problems worse.
To see how a Forest Heights neighborhood development has affected the Cedar Mills Creek Drainage, click here.
Social
Oregon Progress Board Report
A 1999 report for the Oregon Progress Board stated, "Like the national pattern, we concluded that Oregon's social health has stagnated and that strong economic growth no longer guarantees improvements in our collective well-being.
Housing Costs
In the Portland-Metro region, it is projected that the median price of a Portland-area home will jump to $350,000 by 2025, up from $161,000 in 1999 and $61,500 in 1985.
Work
Prosperity in Perspective: The State of Working Oregon 2000 found that:
- Despite gains in the late 1990's, the wages and incomes of Oregon workers show no improvement over ten and twenty years ago.
- The poverty rate among working families with children increased substantially over the 1990s, despite increases in Oregon's minimum wage.
- Growing income inequality has channeled the benefits of economic growth into the hands of fewer and fewer Oregonians.
Financial
Oregonians are paying to foul our own nest. Despite the promises of developers and their chorus - chambers of commerce, most government officials, much of the media, etc. - the significant and rapid population increase of the last two decades has not lowered taxes. In fact, it has raised them as the cost of providing services to new industry and residents far exceeds any taxes they might pay.
- Governor Kitzhaber's Task Force on Growth concluded that growth exacerbates government revenue spending, it does not relieve them. (Download a pdf of the report)
- Eben Fodor, in his report, The Cost of Growth in Oregon, found that each new house costs the taxpayers at least $33,000 in infrastructure costs.
- The Assessment of Statewide Growth Subsidies Report found that Oregonians pay over $1 billion a year to subsidize growth in the state.
- A recent Brookings Institution report, Paying for Prosperity: Impact Fees and Job Growth, is perhaps the strongest supporting document to date that underscores AGO's position regarding systems development charges, or impact fees. The data derived from this report directly refute many of the opposing arguments often heard from the development industry.
