Please people, Oregon IS NOT a role model

Planners betting on light-rail boom
The light-rail line along Interstate 25 is spurring a development frenzy around the rail stations that will open next year, marking what could be a back-to-the-future change in the way the metro area grows.

Greenwood Village is creating a 45-acre downtown around the Arapahoe station, which it calls Village Center. The plan, which is now being finalized, calls for a high-rise district on both sides of I-25 that would allow residents to do without their vehicles.

Our state trasportation and growth management department is lauding this story as wonderful news. I'm guess that the folks in Denver didn't attend this conference:

Main subject:
What Conditions led to the Failure of the Round in Beaverton?

I feel sorry for the "planners" who look to Oregon's "livability" as an example. Scratch that, I don't feel sorry for planners at all. They get what they deserve. Unfortunately that means that the citizenry get screwed first.

And is anyone else tired of hearing about Portlands "famed livability?" The only people who talk like that are the liberal elites who are blind to the crime, agressive panhandling, trash, violence, and lack of families.

The problem is that the media has been allowed to define "livable" as "anything that makes car use difficult" and "high density housing, preferably a taxpayer subsidized project."

The rest of us realize that livable neighborhoods are ones where you don't need to lock up your car at night. Where neighborhood kids can throw a football in the street in front of their house or ride bikes back and forth. Houses that have a nice backyard where you can bar-b-que.

Where you can drive to the store without seeing a homeless person peeing on the sidewalk. Stores in a "livable" neighborhood don't need bars on the doors and windows and neither do the houses. Storefronts don't sit empty and become canvasses for graffiti.

Sherwood, my home, is livable. I would never subject my kids to life in Portland.