The Burnside Blog

Posted By Mike Thelin on 01/23/2008

Portland’s most critical issue is not whether the city will grow, it’s how it will grow. Over the next couple of decades, Portland will likely change more dramatically than ever before. Are we ready?

Jesse Beason is City Commissioner and Mayoral Front Runner Sam Adam’s Senior Policy Advisor. At only 27, the Denver native is something of whiz kid. He’s been one of the driving forces behind Milepost Five, an affordable artist housing project on 82nd Avenue. MP5 is city-sponsored in spirit, but financed by private developers and some non-profit dollars. Its backers, included Beason, reason it’s a good model for future affordable housing in a city where land prices will force affordable housing developers to get creative.

Jesse and I chatted about ways to protect economic diversity in our neighborhoods as Portland grows and becomes more expensive while remaining architecturally interesting.

How do you make affordable housing happen where land is expensive?

I think there are a couple of ways. The city currently has very little ability to affect the private market. So there’s little [the city] can do besides build it ourselves.

What tools are we lacking?

One of the most common tools that cities do use to actually affect the private market is inclusionary zoning, which essentially mandates that any development above a certain size has to include a certain percentage of affordable units. The state has legislated [against] our ability to do that, but in places like San Francisco, Seattle, New York City and Chicago, they’re all doing inclusionary zoning.

But doesn’t it allow the developer to build the low-income portion elsewhere?

Each city tackles it differently. I think in San Francisco, you can actually pay into a fund an equivalent amount, and that money goes to build affordable housing elsewhere in the city. We do have tax abatement on certain units, but that only gets you so far.

The Civic was an interesting development. Could that be a good model development because there is a low-income component to it?

Yeah, I think so. It’s really about your leverage points. In that case [of the Civic], the housing authority of Portland owned some pretty prime real estate in the central core and was able to pull together various forms of financing and make it happen. Unfortunately at this point, with the construction costs the way they are, I think the land is not enough.

Commercial real estate operates on the principle of Highest and Best Use, but it seems that almost disproportionately in Portland, some developers aren’t afraid to buck that paradigm in favor of an interesting project that might not be maximally productive in economic terms.

I for one think we have a fair amount of civic minded and social-minded developers who really care about this place and care about the kind of impact their developments have. I think we have a fair amount of small-scale architecture firms that feel the same way, the same ones that the developers are often using that just approach it differently. And it’s interesting when you see national developers come in and approach it in their cookie-cutter way, and are surprised when they don’t get their way. I think developers aren’t used to coming into a city and having a project derailed by neighborhood activists.

That brings up a good point. National developer Trammel Crow came into the Mississippi neighborhood and built a gigantic project that’s not particularly good-looking while down the street the Historic Landmarks Commission was able to derail the project of a local developer and make it economically unviable. And it’s not going to happen now. So you have these vested neighborhood developers and design-driven architects, who live here and work here, who have had trouble building their projects.

I think that’s one of the larger problems that we face moving forward. I think that in some ways we haven’t done the best job at understanding the public channels at which to affect influence. I think there hasn’t been enough pressure from the folks who are trying to do these projects to have a major impact on the City. I would like to see more of the architecture and design community work on a strategy to move forward. You can point your finger at a very specific institution within the city and say they’re a huge part of the issue, but neighborhoods themselves play a big part of the role. On Mississippi, the neighborhood just kind of rolled over when Trammel Crow came in because TC basically said it would set back its project two feet on the sidewalk, and that was all that they had to do for the neighborhood. I think that the impact of a project like TC’s is so important in terms of the design and feel that it brings to the street, and that that wasn’t the focus of the neighborhood. I think it’s a loss for them.

Is there any question that Portland is going to grow?

The big question is whether we’re going to grow in the right way and who’s going to stay or be so turned off by the way that we grow, that they’re going to leave.

Are we asking the right questions about are growth in a public forum?

I don’t think that there has been enough visible discussion of what the growth will look like. Here, we’re so project-specific that it’s hard to visualize or really debate the long-term future of our city.