Land Use Planning Project
Gray Family Fund of The Oregon Community Foundation

Vision and Values

The fund advisors of the Gray Family Fund seek to fulfill John and Betty Gray’s faith in the human spirit. The family acknowledges their responsibility to give back to the systems that nurture all of us: our culture, our natural environments, and our communities.

Land Use Planning Project

The Gray Family Fund, through OCF, has funded several projects that seek to contribute to the public debate about land use planning in Oregon. Please consider the following points of information:

1. Oregon’s Statewide Planning Goals and Guidelines: “Since 1973, Oregon has maintained a strong statewide program for land use planning. The foundation of that program is a set of 19 Statewide Planning Goals. The goals express the state’s policies on land use and on related topics, such as citizen involvement, housing, and natural resources.”

2. The Institute of Metropolitan Studies at Portland State University has created an online database of all Measure 37 claims filed in Oregon.  The Institute is also working to map the claims.  See the database and maps

3. The Oregon State University Libraries, managed in partnership with the Oregon University System Institute for Natural Resources (INR) and Portland State University, developed The Land Use Explorer portal as a part of their digital natural resources library Oregon Explorer. The Land Use portal can be found at: http://www.oregonexplorer.info/landuse/.

As described on the portal’s home page, “Specific goals of the Land Use Explorer portal are to:

1. Allow visitors to quickly and easily determine current and historic land use activities using maps, charts, and tables for their locale anywhere within Oregon.

2. Provide a single point of access to all relevant land use information for the State and each of the counties.

3. Offer a place to organize and archive important land use content in a digital form.”

4. The Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute (GELPI) and Oregon State University are conducting an economic assessment of the fairness of Oregon’s land use laws.  The researchers will produce a thorough literature review, original data collection and analysis, and final report about land values in Oregon.  The original data collection and analysis will examine trends in real estate values in different parts of the state over time. 

5. The American Land Institute, which researches land use policy issues and disseminates that research to the public, has completed a landmark study of Oregon’s investment in farm and forest land through the state’s tax deferral program.

OCF supports research and publications that promote constructive dialogue with the goal of finding common ground on issues that affect our communities.  OCF’s support of these projects is not an endorsement of positions taken in the publications.