Metro helps nature, cities coexist

Preserving green spaces in urban areas not always popular

By Anthony Roberts

Pamplin Media Group, Feb 12, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

COURTESY OF METRO

Metro acquired property at Cooper Mountain near Beaverton using funds from the Natural Areas bond measure passed in 2006. Metro is putting the finishing touches on a park there and expects to be finished this spring.

In the shadow of Mount Hood and nestled among Clackamas County farms, the 500-acre, Metro-owned Clear Creek Natural Area looks the way it did centuries ago. After a decade of careful land management, the area’s open prairie fields are lined with purple-flowering camas, and salmon run through Clear Creek.

Similar ecological success stories form an emerald ring around Portland’s urban landscape thanks to Metro’s Natural Areas Program, which taps voter-approved bonds to buy valuable parkland and natural areas from willing sellers.

It seems surprising now, but the notion of protecting urban green spaces in the Portland area hasn’t always enjoyed widespread support.

In 1980, Mike Houck joined the Portland Audubon Society staff and started taking stock of the area’s parks and natural resources. Only a handful of people were concerned with the concept, Houck remembers.

The Portland area’s urban growth boundary, originating in the early 1970s, protected rural farm and forest lands while focusing development inside the urbanized area. Houck says that worked against protecting urban green spaces.

“The UGB became such an icon,” says Houck, now executive director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute in Portland. “For quite a while there was an attitude among planners that we couldn’t afford to protect too much green space inside the UGB or we’d lose our developable land.”

That began to change in the mid-1980s when increased growth led to housing developments encroaching into open space. “People realized they really wanted access to nature near where they lived,” Houck says.

At the same time, parks and environmental advocates posed the idea of having a regional government – Metro – acquire and manage some area parks and open spaces.

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