The Future of a City: his development program too, one must assume — was rejected in his bid for a second term this May. One theory attributes his defeat to voter perception of his shift in allegiance from the little people to powerful developers and financiers. However, as City Commissioner Mike Lindberg points out, “Frank Ivancie has done quite well at carrying out his agenda”: the traditional, industrial strategy based on providing the city resources necessary to get large manufacturers to locate or expand in our area. Dare we depend on traditional approaches to economic development to save us? We have moved dangerously far from the self-confident Ecotopia of the 1970s, even to the brink of becoming a Western Appalachia. Remember, Appalachia is a region where economic colonialism is practiced with a vengeance, and the loss of local control and resulting human misery are the costs of short-term job creation and industrial growth. Our region’s prime natural resources — fish and timber — have been plundered in a similar manner by distant corporations. Consider the diminishing quality of our public education, continued high unemployment, plant closures, towers of unrented offices, human service cuts, and the paralysis of our state government. Portland is now in transition, with Mayor-elect Bud Clark and his different but as-yet-undefined agenda for development. City Commissioner Margaret Strachan feels, “There’s a whole new sense of goodwill in the city, a rebirth of the spirit that took hold of our community over ten years ago.” Can a more progressive vision of Portland's future now become a reality? To answer that question, let’s first look at the problems the city has faced over the past four years; then examine how our representatives have handled them, and compare that to one alternative being developed in St. Paul, Minnesota — their “Homegrown Economy Project.” Instead of devoting their municipal resources to courting outside developers, they are nurturing small, local businesses and providing a variety of services designed to open up new public-private partnerships within the community. In search of a model for development better suited to Ecotopia than Appalachia, we may discover how to get Portland not just “in business,” but into the business of promoting a better life for its citizens. “Portland Is Open For [BIG] Business” Ecotopia orAppalachia? Economic Development in Portland By Lynn Darroch Drawing by Stephen Leflar ■■cotopia ... Do you remember? The idea first gained national attention in 1976, when Ernest Callenbach used it as the title for his novel describing the secession of Oregon, Washington and Northern California from the United States. Callenbach’s imaginative portrait of this new nation sold hundreds of thousands of copies and helped to spread the notion — given wide currency by then-Governor Tom McCall’s famous “Come visit but don’t stay” speech — that the Pacific Northwest was a maverick, progressive region where industrial development was subordinate to a resource that was then in great demand: quality of life. Those were heady times. Portland and Seattle became national leaders in energy conservation with their home weatherization programs, and the state of Oregon was heralded for its bottle bill and nuclear waste initiative. New immigrants were flocking to the Portland area — the 1970s produced the greatest population increase in recent history — in pursuit of a better way of life. As the smaller of the two regional centers of Ecotopia and free of the military that surrounds Seattle, Portland was seen as a forward-looking place where culture, progressive politics and the magnificent natural world all favored an alternative to the corporate skyscrapers and streetlevel decay of many other cities. As late as 1980, in fact, on the eve of the election of Ronald Reagan and the most severe recession since the 1930s, Joel Garreau, in his book The Nine Nations of North America, described the Pacific Northwest as operating “politically, socially and economically ... on some fundamentally different assumptions from its neighbors’.” The key to that difference? Our approach to development. “While the other eight nations speculate about how, in times of scarcity, they will further their current ways of life,” he wrote, “Ecotopia asks a profound question: Were we heading in the right direction in the first place?” We took a long look and questioned some basic assumptions; and briefly we inclined toward a future different from the materialistic vision of improving life by economic expansion. But what has happened since? Jobs have been lost, city and state revenues have declined, services have been cut, and some of those talented immigrants who had appeared eager to trade a reduction in their monetary standards for an improvement in the quality of their lives, began to leave. The progressive visions that seemed to characterize our area during the Neil Goldschmidt-Tom McCall years have been in retreat, their proponents timid or powerless, while our environmental legislation and land-use goals are blamed for a faltering economy. In Portland, the shift in agendas from the Goldschmidt administration of the mid-1970s, through the caretaker years of Connie McCready, to the tenure of Mayor Frank Ivancie from 1980 to the present, has paralleled these social and economic changes. During the past few years, many people in business and government agreed with Frank Ivancie that the city needed to take significant action to stimulate the local economy, and attempted to accomplish that by luring multi-national manufacturers and land developers to the area. Ivancie — and Portland was seen as a forward-looking place where culture, progressive politics and the magnificent natural world all favored an alternative to the corporate skyscrapers and street-level decay of many other cities. Tom Higgins, publisher of The Business Journal and a former Iowa State Legislator as well as Carter administration official, is one of those recent immigrants to Ecotopia who chose Portland — when he could have found employment anywhere — because, he says, “this was the place where I wanted to live my life." Higgins, who considered running for mayor himself last winter, notes that economic development “is a regional problem” that the City of Portland cannot address alone. “Our economic destiny doesn’t stop at the borders of the city or the borders of any of the counties or at the river," he says. “This area is either going to Clinton St. Quarterly 5
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