Daniel Brook’s article on Measure 37 in the current Legal Affairs attributes the measure’s passage (and the cracking of the long-standing consensus in favor of planning) as a failure of imagination. Unlike Tom McCall, who spoke poetically on behalf of how the state’s beauty — both rural and urban — were in serious decline, opponents failed to demonstrate how the state’s planning regime was at risk, and how that planning regime has helped the state make monumental strides in everyday individuals’ collective and personal quality of life.

Yet rather than trying to draw the connection by showing voters what Oregon might look like without smart growth, the measure’s opponents let its backers define the terms of debate. The tagline of one anti-37 ad I saw wasn’t much of a rallying cry: “No on 37: Arbitrary, Unfair, Costly.” […]

OIA’S campaign didn’t succesed because of an appeal to self-interest alone, however. It was aided by complacency. OIA polling found that 54 percent of Oregonians who had had a run-in with the state’s planning system rated the experience poor or worse. Yet the same poll estimated that less than half of the state’s residents had ever had a run-in with planners at all, whether positive or negative. OIA’s campaign relied on the outrage and self-interest of those who felt they’d been burned by the system, but it also relied on those who had used a superior transit system, breathed cleaner air, or picnicked in a park without crediting the system that protected those benefits of living in Oregon.

The real genius of OIA’s campaign was in its having convinced voters who might otherwise have been disinclined to dismantle their state’s planning system that a vote for 37 was a vote to safeguard rights, not curtail them.

The rights being curtailed, of course, are the public’s right to livable, beautiful spaces. Yes, in fact, that is social engineering of sort, but sprawl is just as socially engineered as any other alternative growth mechanism. The foolish cry of “it’s my land, I can do what I want with it” is absolutely maddening in this context.

It was the fear of a paradise paved that mobilized Oregonians to undertake their experiment in smart growth in the first place. As Metro Council President Bragdon told me, in the 1970s “people saw a reason to act. Population was growing, the air was getting dirtier, downtown Portland was dying, there was disinvestment. And all of that sort of activated people in a way they ordinarily would not be activated around something as arcane and abstract as land use planning. At least for that brief period, people saw the relevance of it and the importance of it.” [emphasis added]