The column, "'Yes in my backyard' in North Albany," in the Saturday, July 6 edition makes cogent points that are 180 degrees from my housing priorities. I also live in North Albany on a 10,000-square-foot lot that I downscaled to five years ago from a half-acre lot with a house almost twice the size of the current one. The larger house is also in North Albany, although outside city boundaries.
I purchased my present home anticipating the move to be my last. I'm 78 years old, married for 37 years and do NOT want to move again. When the Oregon Legislature repealed single-family zoning, combined with removal of many code compliance requirements like onsite parking for additional residents, I was aghast.
I consider that change taking property value by enabling intensified noxious external influences on my home. Dozens more cars parked on my street are far from an acceptable change and will impair fire truck access, for only one detriment. My working career was in Tucson as a real estate appraiser and broker from 1977 until I retired in 2009 and moved here.
My father, Otto Small, was a housing developer there. He built Desert Palms Park on Tucson's east side in the early 1960s. Oregon's growth boundaries are a remarkably better system than Arizona's wild west building rules that allow developers to buy cheap remote land, build hundreds of houses and let the beauty of the Sonoran desert be damned.
However, expanding our growth boundaries in Oregon is a preferable solution to the ho.