Portland, Oregon: beyond the myth

Twenty-five years of regional planning has left Portland with a renewed downtown, a spirited and informed public debate, and lots of sprawl that still needs fixing. Portland has a long-standing reputation as a model for regional-scale progressive land use planning. City officials from across the country travel to Oregon’s capital for ideas on how to guide growth and preserve prime rural land, and the city has enjoyed much favorable coverage in the national press. The notoriety has also made the city a favorite target for individuals and groups, in the city and beyond, who oppose central planning and like to paint Portland as a hotbed of extreme government control. These black and white images disguise the fact that most growth in Portland has occurred in forms not very different from most other places. The city is no stranger to sprawl. Portland has been a leader in regional planning, but on the local level the city has gone through a tough decade of testing what works and what doesn’t. The city’s population is growing at double the national average: in the last 10 years the Portland region has added 204,000 new inhabitants, and they arrive at the rate of 75 a day, according to Mike Burton, executive officer of Portland’s regional government. Growth plans have been refined and adopted, but only recently have the all the good intentions begun to filter down into the region’s many jurisdictions. “The local government level is where the fight to build better neighborhoods is being fought,” says Rick Holt, developer of Fairview Village, a new urbanist community in Portland, and a member of the Portland Planning Commission. The growth boundary goes only so far Portland’s reputation rests on the twin pillars of the urban growth boundary (UGB) and the MAX light rail system operated by the transit authority Tri-Met. The UGB is not unique to Portland, however. All metropolitan areas in Oregon are required to have one. Covering an area of 364 square miles, the UGB around Portland has preserved prime farm and forest land outside the boundary, and it also gets partial credit for encouraging downtown’s remarkable resurgence over the last 25 years. However, when the UGB was officially adopted in 1979, it was drawn far enough out to accommodate growth 20 years into the future and has not curbed sprawl within its borders. “The UGB is made up of 27 different jurisdictions and not all those have had adequate codes to prevent sprawl,” says Bill Lennertz, a Portland architect whose firm Lennertz Coyle & Associates has designed several new urbanist projects in the Northwest. “It’s one thing to prevent the sprawl and another to promote the building of complete neighborhoods. The good, the bad and the ugly; we have all of it here,” he says. When planners began considering an expansion of the boundary in 1992, they estimated that they would need to add 120,000 acres, but decided to add only 5,300 acres. That decision was appealed, however, and in January 2000, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the appeal. Expansion is now up in the air. New urbanist architect and planner Andres Duany has written that most of the postwar urbanism in Portland is “junk” and argues that the UGB and light rail alone are not sufficient to maintain a sustainable pattern of growth. Shelley Poticha, Executive Director of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and a former resident of Portland, agrees that the city’s sprawl is the same as anywhere else, but maintains that planners and elected officials recognized this 10 years ago and have been hard at work to find ways to fix it. A framework for growth inside the boundary The most prominent fix is the 2040 Framework Plan, a comprehensive effort to rewrite the rules of development which began in 1992 and was officially adopted in 1997 by Metro, Portland's elected metropolitan government. Metro serves approximately 1.3 million people in 24 cities and suburban areas around Portland and carries the primary responsibility for regional land use and transportation planning and for managing the UGB. The final 2040 plan was partly inspired by Calthorpe Associates’ LUTRAQ (land use, transportation, air quality) plan sponsored by 1,000 Friends of Oregon, a local citizens’ group. According to Poticha, LUTRAQ was the first document to make the connection between land use and transportation planning. In a nutshell, 2040 recommends that growth should be concentrated in the central city, in regional and town centers, along main corridors, and in light rail station communities. The framework plan, however, contains general language, has no specific mandates, and gives local jurisdictions flexibility in how they interpret the call for denser development. “[Portland planners] are now in the phase where they have adopted this plan that is revolutionary in its basis, and they are trying to implement that on the ground,” Poticha says. To this end Metro created Urban Growth Management Functional Plans which target local jurisdictions and include more details on housing densities and other planning requirements. While the functional plans get specific about parking ratios and minimum lot sizes, they fail to actively promote a strong neighborhood structure, says Bill Lennertz. “What is happening now in the region more than anything else is that when infill development doesn’t happen right, which is most of the time, the neighbors rise up against it,” Lennertz says. “The local jurisdictions don’t have the codes to demand that the developers do the necessary things to contribute to the quality of the community, making walkable, safe streets with amenities that are within walking distance. It’s no easier here than any place else to get the codes, to get the design review, to get the right things coded.” Efforts to change zoning ordinances to encourage denser growth are also adamantly opposed by the local homebuilders association, Holt says. “They’re fighting it as a political organization because they want to bring more land into the UGB,” he says. “They really like developing farmland.” Is Portland too expensive? While new urbanists might decry the UGB’s failure to stop sprawl, property rights advocates complain that property owners whose land happens to lie just outside the boundary suffer big losses because land values are considerably higher within the boundary. Holt argues that wealthy land speculators are in fact buying up land outside the boundary and lobbying for its inclusion. Others complain that land and housing prices are soaring as land becomes scarcer inside the boundary. The Portland Oregonian reported in 1998 that home values doubled and rents rose by more than a third between 1990 and 1996, while household incomes grew by less than 25 percent. But little hard evidence supports the claim that the UGB is directly responsible for this increase. Holt says Portland used to be much more affordable, but he attributes that to 20 years of negative growth before 1993. “As soon as we get positive population and economic growth [and prices go up] people say ‘well, it’s our UGB,’” Holt says. “But we had the UGB before.” The affordability controversy has been intensified by the National Association of Home Builders’ (NAHB) annual Housing Opportunity Index, in which Portland currently ranks as the seventh least affordable city among 184 metro areas. This ranking makes Portland’s housing costs look higher than they are. Although the average price of a single home in Portland is $160,000, the index reveals that housing prices are equal or higher in 31 US metropolitan areas. NAHB also takes into account median income in its Housing Opportunity Index. NAHB's methodology has been called into question by 1,000 Friends of Oregon, which argues that the index fails to take other living expenses into account and uses income data based on outdated 1990 census figures. NAHB may not claim that the Portland’s planning policies are responsible for the low rating, but to proponents of Portland’s planning policies the index is important because it has become a popular missile in local homebuilders’ attacks on the city’s land use planning. “It makes good rhetoric, and they beat you over the head with it,” Holt says. The challenge for light rail Light rail was introduced in 1986 with the Eastside MAX between downtown and Gresham. The Westside MAX line to Hillsboro opened in 1998 and serves thousands of suburban jobs in the high-tech sector; all 11,500 Intel employees receive an annual pass. The system now covers 33 miles, and a 5.5-mile extension to the airport is under construction and scheduled to open in the fall of 2001. Tri-Met is also seeking funding for the 5.6 mile Interstate MAX northbound connection. According to the transit agency, light rail ridership reached record levels in September 1999, with 64,500 average boardings on weekdays and 76,800 average rides on weekends. “Light rail has exceeded expectations in terms of ridership, but the real value of light rail in the Portland metropolitan area is its connection to the broader strategy of growth management,” says G.B. Arrington, a former director of strategic and long-range planning at Tri-Met. “Some people would argue that land use comes first, but the region needed a template to start with and started the 2040 growth concept by looking at where light rail was going to be and developed the land use strategies around that.” The real test for light rail, therefore, is whether it is capable of encouraging compact development in the station center areas. Tri-Met estimates that $2.4 billion has been invested along the line, but whether this will result in a significant reduction in automobile ridership is too early to tell. It is possible, however, to see some of the changes that light rail has wrought. Development along the line Arrington points first to the changes downtown. “The most profound land use impact of the light rail line has been pulling downtown Portland across the Willamette River into the Lloyd district. It was a suburban activity center that just happened to be adjacent to the the downtown, it was very auto-oriented, very pedestrian unfriendly. It’s not perfect by any means, but that area has seen a fundamental transformation.” Holt says the Lloyd district is disconnected from everything else and only walkable to a limited extent, but he, too, says Portland’s greatest success story is the downtown and the city’s effort to bring people there to live. The River District, encompassing the Pearl District and the North River District, and the emerging Macadam District to the south of downtown are good examples, Holt says. “They have the density it takes to support an extremely active urban lifestyle.” On the Westside MAX line, Orenco Station is the most prominent transit-oriented development, but Arrington also notes several good infill projects in the Goose Hollow area, such as The Civic Stadium Apartments and Arbor Vista Condominiums. Along the older eastbound line, Arrington points to Center Commons and Russelville Commons which has apartments and retail on a site previously slated for auto-oriented uses. In Gresham, at the end of the line, ground is now breaking for the first commercial phase of Gresham Civic Neighborhood on a 62-acre site bisected by the light rail line. Gresham’s Director of Community Development Max Talbot says the city has already built a main thoroughfare, Civic Drive, and other streets to better control the footprint of commercial properties. The first phase of the Civic Neighborhood will include 310,000 square feet of retail and offices in two-story buildings. Though it may incorporate some aspects of the New Urbanism, Talbot says this phase will look fairly conventional. “The real cutting edge piece of this project will be the development around the light rail station with its mixed use.” Here the main developer, Center Oak Properties of Torrance, California, plans to build 300 apartment units, two thirds of which will be ownership units, and around 60,000 square feet of ground floor retail. Other possible future uses on the site include a multiplex cinema, a justice center for Multnomah County, class A office space, and a small hospital. Belmont Dairy, an infill model Most observers agree that a lot of good infill has developed away from the MAX line as well. One project that has attracted attention and won several awards is Belmont Dairy, a converted milk processing plant in the Sunnyside neighborhood. Developer Douglas Obletz credits the city with easing the development process. “Portland is willing to participate in innovative projects and that makes a big difference,” he says. Not only did Belmont Dairy have a smooth permitting process, it also received financing from City of Portland Livable City Housing and a block grant from City of Portland Community Development. The project also had several private financiers. Designed by Philip M. Beyl and Doug Circosta of GBD Architects, Belmont Dairy covers approximately 2.75 acres. In the first phase of construction 40,000 square feet of the plant was renovated to include 26,000 square feet of retail facing the street and 19 market-rate loft apartments. In addition, a new building with 66 subsidized apartments went up in the adjacent parking lot. The second phase of the project was completed in early 1999 and saw the construction of 34 new town houses on less than one acre. A third phase to begin two years from now will add 22 rental units in an abandoned truck maintenance building. Belmont Dairy is the first project to receive the prestigious Governor’s Livability Award twice, in 1997 and 1999. Pioneering Fairview Village Portland’s regional planning policies were of no help when developers Rick Holt and Charlie Haugh began planning Fairview Village in 1991, Holt says. The City of Fairview allowed the project to begin but did not actively support it, and the developers and designers Lennertz Coyle & Associates had to write all codes themselves. With the advent of 2040, this kind of scenario is becoming rarer, Holt claims. “Today communities will actually come find you and help you do it. They will establish bonds to do infrastructure and help you craft the code.” While the city continues to support Fairview Village, it is still biased against bringing rental units into the mix, Holt says, and the project is now approaching a 60-40 split between for sale and rental housing. In response to strong demand for low-end for sale housing, the developers have recently converted some of the village’s two-story apartment housing into condominiums priced from $85,000 to $135,000. Construction in Fairview Village began in 1995 and the project is now nearing 50 percent completion. Several civic buildings have gone up: a post office, a Montessori preschool, an elementary school, and a city hall. The planned retail center has yet to be built, but a 33,000 square foot health club is open for business, and a 152-unit apartment complex was built near the town center in 1999. Also a recipient of the Governor’s Livability Award, Fairview Village may be Portland’s best model of a sustainable, mixed-use community on a greenfield site. The sailing won’t be smooth for Portland as it tries to convince its residents that the city must grow at a higher density. Planners not only face strong opposition from home builders and developers, but also from citizens who tell pollsters that they want neither an expansion of the UGB, nor any dense development in their own neighborhoods. Portland residents are no more likely to give up a second car or the dream of a house on a large lot than any other Americans. Lennertz notes that he sees no political will to create blanket codes for small communities, but as local governments begin to implement the guidelines of the 2040 plan, Portland may finally have more effective tools for positive change on the neighborhood level. As a planning commissioner, Holt knows first hand how difficult it is to tell a property owner that you plan to bring dense, mixed use development to their land. Nevertheless, he is optimistic about Portland’s future. “We are just now stepping into the realm of deserving our reputation,” he says. “We are starting to make some hard calls, starting to win some of the fights.”