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Do you have a vendetta against Portland, Ore.? Twice in one month your editorial page has spilled ink to malign the city's popular urban growth boundary. Both Joel Kotkin's "War Against Suburbia" (Jan. 14) and Kimberley Strassel's "This Land Was Your Land" (Dec. 15) used the threat of more urban growth boundaries to scare American citizens into demanding property-rights protection to allow the building of more strip malls and chain restaurants.

Joel Kotkin's fine essay spells out many of the factors the elites use to "combat urban sprawl" and try to drive people into more dense, multistory cities on the model of Chicago or New York. However, he does not mention what I regard as one of the major, and most pernicious, factors behind this effort: Homeowners are just too damn independent and "uncontrollable" for the elites. Is it a coincidence that the areas that are full of renters are largely Democratic strongholds and centers for statist policies? Where people own their homes and feel in greater control of their own lives, they are less apt to cede control to others. Elites, planners and environmentalists can't abide this independence.

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Do you have a vendetta against Portland, Ore.? Twice in one month your editorial page has spilled ink to malign the city's popular urban growth boundary. Both Joel Kotkin's "War Against Suburbia" (Jan. 14) and Kimberley Strassel's "This Land Was Your Land" (Dec. 15) used the threat of more urban growth boundaries to scare American citizens into demanding property-rights protection to allow the building of more strip malls and chain restaurants.

Both authors fail to concede that even though home prices in Portland are "high" (they are lower than every other major West Coast city), the great majority of its residents want and demand the anti- sprawl boundary. Please use another example to scare Americans, because the Portland urban growth boundary argument is as illogical as saying residents of Amsterdam are being denied their rights to ocean- front views.

If Portlanders desire sprawl and big backyards, they can move to Houston.

Robert Mardock

(Portland native)

Houston

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Given your free-market advocacy over the years, it was shocking to read Joel Kotkin's commentary "The War Against Suburbia" that claimed American suburbs reflect a market preference when the fact remains that anything other than low-density suburban development is forbidden by a complicated maze of regulatory red-tape -- 99% of existing zoning codes and traffic engineering manuals in the U.S. forbid anything but suburban development. Financing criteria reinforce this market imbalance.

Mr. Kotkin's misguided analysis is analogous to claiming that people prefer apples over oranges even if the market does not permit anyone to grow orange trees. Until consumers are actually offered a real choice of new places in which to buy, making generalizations about market preferences is misleading.

Nathan R. Norris

Director of Implementation Advisory

PlaceMakers, L.L.C.

Miami Beach

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Although Mr. Kotkin makes a number of interesting points, I believe he has oversold his case with respect to Los Angeles. As the immediate past president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, I am familiar with the planning "vision" of this city. Far from seeking to destroy the single-family neighborhoods that are both characteristic of and vital to Los Angeles, we are incentivizing denser mixed-use development along transportation corridors to protect low-rise communities in places like the San Fernando Valley (where my family lives). This will not replace suburban neighborhoods, but it will allow some Angelinos to live closer to work, use public transportation, and enjoy a more pedestrian-oriented urbanized lifestyle -- while reducing the drive-through commuter traffic that has become endemic to all of our neighborhoods as the metropolitan fringe expands ever outward.

It also will help alleviate our severe housing shortage and the horrendous jobs-to-housing imbalance in places like the Westside. One need not be an "elite planning bureaucratic" to find two-hour commutes or three families crammed into small apartments unacceptable. Indeed, Mayor Villaraigosa should be congratulated, not criticized, for forthrightly addressing these difficult challenges.

David L. Burg

Studio City, Calif.

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Joel Kotkin's fine essay spells out many of the factors the elites use to "combat urban sprawl" and try to drive people into more dense, multistory cities on the model of Chicago or New York. However, he does not mention what I regard as one of the major, and most pernicious, factors behind this effort: Homeowners are just too damn independent and "uncontrollable" for the elites. Is it a coincidence that the areas that are full of renters are largely Democratic strongholds and centers for statist policies? Where people own their homes and feel in greater control of their own lives, they are less apt to cede control to others. Elites, planners and environmentalists can't abide this independence.

Hugh T. Sharp

Williamsburg, Va.