Urban sprawl has been an issue for America over the past several years as cities around the nation have continued to grow in size and population. The building of strip malls and subdivisions replaces forests and in some occassions, farms. The progressively-minded folks in Oregon have implemented a law to control urban sprawl. The following post is from the winter 2010 issue of (#018), and discusses when slowing urban sprawl is important:

Helvetia, Oregon is not so much as a hazy-bordered swath of bucolic paradise that looks like something out of a Normal Rockwell painting, a Wendell Berry essay on sustainable agriculture or, at least, a TV commercial for a high-performance sedan. Two-lane country roads twist through lush hills, past browsing cattle and cozy farmsteads. Wheat farms dating back to the Swiss and German pioneers who settled the area in the 1850s […] The whole place begs to be romanticized.

Until, that is, you walk to the end of the driveway and swivel your gaze 90 degrees. Just beyond the green fields loom boxy strip malls, thickets of town houses, industrial warehouses, and acres of parking. The town of Hillsboro, a Portland suburb, sprawls out just beyond Highway 26, a 10-minute drive from Helvetia. The contrast between the two towns is startling, abrupt, and entirely by design. Nearly 40 years ago, Oregon, facing an onslaught of urban sprawl, adopted the nation’s toughest land-use laws. In 1979, greater Portland became the first metropolis in the country to impose an urban-growth boundary, a hard-and-fast line beyond which suburban development is essentially banned.

Along with creating dense neighborhoods, encouraging mass-transit use, and irritating free-market zealots, the growth boundary saves farmland close to the city. The resulting proximity between country and town defines life here. Portland is a small-to-medium city with a frequently dismal economy, a single major sports team that hasn’t won a championship in 30 years – and world-class access to premium local produce. Ambitious small restaurants crowd the city, bedazzling visiting food critics from New York; some Portlanders follow the local pinot noir harvest the way people in Greenwich, Connecticut, track hedge funds. None of this could exist without the boundary.

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At its base, the argument for preserving Helvetia as farmland rests on factors difficult to quantify, and calls for a complex judgment on both what kind of land we need right now and what we’ll need in uncertain future decades. Oregon’s system constitutes the nation’s most muscular effort to rein in sprawl – to balance two conflicting but mutually dependent forms of modern civilization. Portland’s hinterlands do, indeed, include Chili’s and Burger Kings, soccer-mom cul-de-sac and McMansions. At very definite places, however, that all ends. Helvetia is one of those places – and a prime example of the kind of habitat that human beings have sought for millennia. – Zach Dundas