Reconciling Oregon's Smart Growth Goals with Local Policy Choice: An Empirical Study of Growth Management, Urban Form, and Development Outcomes in Eugene, Keizer, Salem, and Springfield

• Main Author: Witzig, Monica
• Other Authors: Yang, Yizhao
• Language: en_US
• Published: University of Oregon 2014
• Subjects: Growth management; Infill development; Local policy; Oregon; Performance measurement; Smart growth
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1794/17921

Oregon's Statewide Planning Goals embody Smart Growth in their effort to revitalize urban areas, finance environmentally responsible transportation systems, provide housing options, and protect natural resources; yet the State defers to its municipalities to implement this planning framework. This research focuses on Goal 14 (Urbanization), linking most directly to Smart Growth Principle 7 (Strengthen and Direct Development toward Existing Communities). It assesses Eugene's, Keizer's, Salem's, and Springfield's growth management policies that specifically target infill development of single family homes against this Goal and Principle. Though these municipalities must demonstrate consistency with the same Goals (see Supplemental File 1 for this context), this research questions whether sufficiently different policy approaches to curtailing sprawl yield significantly different results. The primary analytical method is a logistic regression that uses parcel-level data to understand how administration affects development by isolating these policies' direct effects on observed outcomes (see Supplemental File 2 for this theory).