redevelopment

Why not Incrementalism?

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After many years in development and millions invested, the proposed mixed use redevelopment of the Lloyd Cinemas parking lot died with a whimper last fall. The abrupt failure of the nearly 700 unit development highlights the inherent risk of these megaprojects.

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The fancy renderings presented at a series of design review hearings showed a large instant neighborhood, with meandering internal pathways. Holst did a pretty decent job of making it look as good as possible. The view from the street looked like a whole district, with many buildings, sort of like how we think of a neighborhood. In reality, this was all one colossal development, and the simulacrum of diversity belied a monolithic reality. That becomes clear when one examines the site plan.

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What appear to be a group of separate buildings that coalesced organically is actually a group of megastructures and assorted accessory structures. This isn’t to say that we should never allow this to happen. Some master planned projects can create a quality place, when executed skillfully.

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This way of building is, however, an anomaly in the history of human habitation. While Popes and Caesars had the power to reshape districts, almost all building in cities has been incremental and small scale in nature. Until the rise of corporate investment banking, only the church and the crown had the power to build this way. The development of Portland was no different. Indeed, the Lloyd district’s own history is one characterized by the volatile and failure-prone nature of megaprojects.

Most of our city was developed on a grid system made up of modules of 50x100 foot lots. It’s far easier for a small local developer to purchase one or two of these and put up a modest building. Indeed, that’s mostly how Portland was built. When lots of parcels are consolidated, only the big national builders, fueled by institutional capital can compete.

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This post asks a simple question, why not try a more organic, incremental approach to properties like this? Instead of putting all the eggs in one basket, what could happen if a master developer parceled off a big block like the Lloyd Cinemas site and sold it off in small lots. A developer can buy one, two, or more, according to their ability and ambition. When the minimum buy-in is lower, the initial barrier to entry is reduced and the chances of something happing right now are much higher. For our little experiment, we decided to keep it simple, so we simply resurrected the underlying plat. These are the modules that were consolidated to make the current superblock:

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Here’s what that incremental buildout could look like. A few small projects start things off, and as value grows, bigger, more ambitious projects fill out the space resulting in a mix somewhat similar to the southern part of neighboring Sullivan’s Gulch. You might have to play some games with the incentives in order to get some real diversity, like offering incentives to early adopters and small local players. We think it would be worth it though.

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Developing this way produces a more organic, adaptable and resilient urban fabric. Individual parts and pieces can turn over on their own lifetimes, and a diverse array of investors and builders on this scale will foster more local participation, rather than sucking out the profits and funneling them out of state. One can imagine the potential of gradually returning the entire district to a human scaled grid resembling what might have developed had the place never been consolidated in the first place. We’re not suggesting this is necessarily the best, or the only way to reurbanize Lloyd and places like it, but we think it deserves serious consideration.

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Golf Courses and Green Spaces

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Over the last week, news stories in The Oregonian and the Portland Tribune have raised the issue of Portland’s public golf courses’ financial insolvency. It so happens that we’ve been mulling over the idea of redeveloping these properties for some time. As golf declines in popularity, redevelopment is becoming increasingly attractive to cities nationwide.

All else being equal, we’d rather not see these places change. But larger forces are gathering and so we’re putting this proposal out there to frame the inevitable discussion around the things we believe are necessary to preserve livability: visual continuity, public ownership, tree preservation, public green space, and of course, beauty.
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Just looking at the numbers, it’s tempting to take a maximum density approach and pack as many units as physically possible onto these sites. However we believe that a city designed by spreadsheet is not a city we want to live in. We have to recognize the value of the beauty these spaces hold and the wonderful break from the grid of the city. The open space of these courses also offers opportunities for multiple forms of active recreation, from cycle-cross to running, to adventure parks with climbing and zip line courses like this one we found while exploring Potsdam, near Berlin.

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Golf courses can also provide valuable ecological services including hosting pollinators and native plants and absorbing storm water. The 80 acre Oregon Garden occupies a former golf course near Silverton, and now boasts an extensive landscape garden as well as providing a home for Oregon’s only Frank Lloyd Wright building, the Gordon House.

It should look the same as it does today.
We should keep (almost) every tree.
The land must be publicly owned.
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A plan for redeveloping Portland’s golf course properties would have to balance the need for additional housing with the other benefits the open space can provide to the community at large. We took the Eastmoreland Golf Course for a test case. It’s adjacent to two light rail stations, and thus a good candidate for additional housing units. As one of us is a Reed alumnus, we’re sensitive to the neighborhood’s attachments to the open space and the beauty of the site, as well as how it enhances the surrounding community, and our design takes that into account. We think this plan, or something similar, if accepted, is worth a guarantee to the neighborhood that it can stay single family in perpetuity (with ADUs, of course) and place a permanent moratorium on demolitions. Quid pro quo is only fair. We’re completely sympathetic with neighborhood concerns and this would be entirely consistent with our general approach of balancing preservation with strategic infilling where appropriate.

The municipal courses, are of course, publicly owned, and we believe the land should stay publicly owned. The city can allow development on parcels created in the property with 99 year ground leases. The thing about land is, they’re not making any more of it, and the city should not just sell it off out of expediency.

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The design aims to maximize housing opportunity while providing publicly accessible green spaces, maintaining and enhancing the parkway character of SE 28th, minimizing negative impacts to surrounding neighborhoods and providing natural storm water management for the site and adjacent community. We began by establishing a parkway about 280’ wide along the existing eastern edge. This matches the block dimensions of the neighborhood to the east. This area would be completely free of development and would include trails and amenities. It would also provide drainage from the western portion of the site which gets very wet in the winter. Visually the experience of SE 28th should be unchanged from how it appears today.

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Taking this concept further, we envision diverting all the uphill storm water from the neighborhood into a seasonal swale or creek running the length of this parkway and connecting to the existing crystal springs creek. Our design prioritizes tree preservation, placing all development in existing fairways. We envision an extensive bike/ped network through the site including two new bike/ped crossings over McLaughlin Blvd. Finally, we’ve provided a suggestion about the architecture, favoring a quiet, subdued Scandinavian aesthetic resembling the neighborhoods we found around Copenhagen and Malmö. Finally, we would not touch the Crystal Springs Rhododendron garden, which is a true treasure to the whole region.

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We set out to achieve a high level of density, aiming for 40 dwelling units per acre.

We set out to achieve a high level of density, aiming for 40 dwelling units per acre.

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And here’s where we ended up:

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Given some time and budget, we’d love to develop this into a REAL concept. That would entail a few sample block drawings and some street sections, indicating how pedestrians and cyclists would experience the neighborhood. We’d also like to flesh out the program for public amenities and the incorporation of housing at a wide range of price points, including fully subsidized units. We will try to return to this in a future post, as time permits. For now, consider this a conversation starter and an overture to a dialogue on the future of this public resource.

The precedent: This is the kind of development Danes build in their station areas.

The precedent: This is the kind of development Danes build in their station areas.

We’ve gone as far as some rough modeling of how typical blocks could work. Here are a few examples of how the bits should work together:

A typical transect adjacent to the station

A typical transect adjacent to the station

Sidewalks are continuous on main streets. Bikes are separated from traffic. Drivers on intersecting streets must tiptoe through the bike and ped realms.

Sidewalks are continuous on main streets. Bikes are separated from traffic. Drivers on intersecting streets must tiptoe through the bike and ped realms.

Grade separated bike lanes, mid block crossings and on street parking for the mixed use areas and main north-south routes.

Grade separated bike lanes, mid block crossings and on street parking for the mixed use areas and main north-south routes.

Plan view of a typical street in this zone

Plan view of a typical street in this zone

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Taking one more cue from the Danes, we’d like to see places like this include features that make them complete neighborhoods like the ones we saw around station areas in Copenhagen. That means including daycare, supportive housing for people with mental mental health and developmental disabilities, and subsidized housing for people with low incomes or fixed incomes (i.e. elderly pensioners). All these things fit seamlessly into those communities and made them truly inclusive places.