One thing that "planners" love to do is to create more population density, whether it be through pushing stack-and-pack lab-rat cages or going with four skinny "houses" on a lot previously occupied by a single-family dwelling. Especially in the inner Northeast and Southeast parts of Portland, these large older homes are frequently transformed over a period of years into multiple one-bedroom apartments with low rents. But from the outside, they retain the feel of the neighborhood.
And then a developer buys the place, evicts the renters, tears down the building, and stuffs as many "houses" as he can into the available square footage. Over time, this process of gentrification reduces established neighborhoods with a mix of people into an homogeneous strata of well-off, mostly younger white folks who clot the neighborhood streets with their BMWs and Priuses.
Despite their constant mantra of "diversity" and "transit", city "planners" actually accomplish the exact opposite: the former residents, a mixture of ages and ethnicities generally ranging between low and middle income - the very people most likely to depend upon public transit - are pushed to the outer margins of the city, where public transit is less available and pedestrian access to stores and services are limited. For the most part, thanks to Portland's "planners" so-called affordable housing which formerly existed in the inner neighborhoods has become even less affordable than "Affordable Health Care".
Not only are they destroying the character of neighborhoods; they're creating results which directly contradict their stated goals of enhancing public transit use and building diverse, "liveable, walkable" neighborhoods. What we see here is yet another argument in favor of limited government.