Houses, a chip factory, anything really in place of Portland’s Hillsboro Airport

Oregon governor Tina Kotek has good ideas for things to build, but she is having trouble finding a place to put them.

The state’s system of urban growth boundaries steers development inside the footprint of existing cities, making it painful and time-consuming to expand city limits. Partially because of limited available land, Kotek’s attempt to expand Oregon’s high-tech manufacturing industry has met with its share of headaches and obstacles, and some chip factories have decided to set up shop in Arizona and Ohio, where there are fewer land use barriers. The Oregon legislature has given the governor some controversial and temporary powers to move urban growth boundaries for semiconductor manufacturing, but actually using these powers would attract significant political opposition.

Similarly, the governor’s goal of adding 36,000 housing units per year over the course of a decade to address a significant housing shortfall is complicated by a land use regime that makes housing development slower and more expensive than the greenfield sprawl of other states. A new set of laws now enables eligible cities to take a one-time shortcut for expanding their urban growth boundaries.

I have a simpler solution: Governor Kotek should bulldoze the Hillsboro airport.

The Hillsboro airport takes up approximately 900 acres inside the Portland metro’s urban growth boundary. Another semiconductor plant the size of one of Intel’s existing Hillsboro campuses would require just over half of this land, and developing the rest with low-rise apartments could provide as many as 10,000 housing units, enough to accommodate about a decade of Hillsboro’s projected growth. Bulldozing the airport would not make it harder for ordinary people to travel in and out of Portland, as it offers mainly private charter flights. It served a total of only forty-six passengers in 2023.

That is not to say the Hillsboro airport is totally without value. Several flight schools operate there, keeping its runways busy, along with corporate shuttle and air ambulance services. An annual air show attracts tens of thousands and benefits local charity. But there is no particular shortage of general aviation airports in Oregon that could accommodate these needs. The McMinnville airport less than an hour away has already hosted the air show a few times in the past. What is in short supply are large, flat, mostly empty parcels of land inside desirable city limits that are well-served by roads, sewers, and transit.

Every choice of where to build something will displace something else. Even the most valuable possible construction will replace farmland that will be lost forever, or trees that will take decades to regrow, or people whose relationships will never recover. Displaced aircraft can just fly away.