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Joe Rossi, manager of Rossi Farms, told the Memo last month that his family is leaving the farming business after 126 years. The Garre families, who have adjacent holdings, will work the 25-acre farm on Northeast 122nd Avenue but fresh vegetable sales will no longer take place on site. Rossi said that the farm’s benefit events, such as its summer barn dance, will be held this year at least, and there are no immediate plans to sell the farm. The Rossi family holdings once took in 300 acres, including the land that the Parkrose School District now occupies. We shed a journalistic tear for its passing.
Senn’s Dairy garden to break ground
Watch this space later this spring for the groundbreaking of Senn’s Dairy Park’s new community garden, the first community garden the Portland Parks Bureau has ever offered east of the I-205 Freeway. There will be 20 plots in the park at Northeast Prescott Street and 112th Avenue. As part of the project, the Parkrose Neighborhood Association and Friends of Senn’s Dairy Park are utilizing a $3,500 small grant from the East Portland Neighborhood Office to reach out to immigrants to try to get them interested in the garden and the park.
Red Apple owner unresponsive
David Thompson, owner-to-be of the Red Apple restaurant and bar at 16126 N.E. Sandy Blvd., had insisted throughout the review of his liquor license that he wanted to be a good neighbor to the Wilkes community. Now that he is near opening the business, however, he seems to be balking at signing a Good Neighbor Agreement, refusing to meet with representatives of the Wilkes Community Group or even return phone calls, according to Wilkes Chair Ross Monn and Neighborhood Crime Prevention Specialist Roseanne Lee.
Traffic calming coming
Some good news is that a series of speed bumps proposed for installation on Northeast 105th Avenue between Fremont and Prescott streets as part of last year’s Safe Routes to School program have been fully funded and will not need a 40 percent local match as originally thought. Not so good news: a traffic safety island at Northeast 102nd Avenue and Wygant Street, installed as part of the same program, has been hit five times.
Parkrose patrolman dismounts
The Parkrose community is reaping the benefit of a kind of police presence many thought had gone the way of the manual typewriter: foot patrol. Officer Robert Slyter and others have been assigned to walk through an area bound by Northeast 102nd and 122nd avenues, Marx and Prescott streets.
“They definitely have been a presence up and down Sandy,” Parkrose Neighborhood Association volunteer Mary Walker said. “Businesses and residents are very happy to see him here. When he parks on 112th and Sandy, it certainly discourages the “Johns” (customers) coming over from Vancouver.”
“This is more like Mayberry,” (the quiet and small town from “The Andy Griffith Show”) her husband, Brian, agreed.
“I make a huge amount of business contacts,” Slyter told the Memo. “I’m freed of my radio and have nothing to do but go in and out of businesses, introduce myself. I’m a lot more visible. Residents and businesses point things out to me, and I’m able to respond to them in a day or two.”
Asked to compare this kind of patrol to a car, Mary Walker said, “On the ground, (Slyter) gets a lot more information from people, more details. If all the police are doing is running around in cars, they’re just putting out fires. It’s the difference between parents being at home and just calling in.”
“They’re here,” Brian Walker added. “They’re in the living room, they’re real. It makes a big difference. The dope dealing and prostitution is way down.”
Slyter feels the patrol is an answer for this area, but not a universal model. “I don’t believe this type of patrolling would be effective everywhere,” he says. “Here there’s a concentration of businesses. It would be pointless to do this in an area where we weren’t having a lot of problems.”
Mid-county part of infill development talks
East Portland representatives played a prominent part in a forum last month on issues related to infill housing development.
Russell Neighborhood Association Chair Bonny McKnight, who also chairs the Citywide Land Use Committee, was co-convener of the event. In addition, a 28-person panel that discussed the issue included the following people: Dorene Warner of the affordable housing developer Human Solutions, who also chairs the Gateway Urban Renewal Program Advisory Committee; John May, the David Douglas School District Information Services Administrator; Jim Chasse, Powellhurst-Gilbert Neighborhood Association land use chair; and Linda Bauer of the Pleasant Valley Neighborhood Association.
Chasse said that Powellhurst-Gilbert has received “the most infill development of any neighborhood. We’re collecting people.” The community is “changing rapidly,” and infrastructure to deal with the change is not being provided, he said. A recent development “cut down 100 trees, and still met the city’s tree preservation ordinance,” he said. “And where is PDOT (Portland Office of Transportation) anyway?”
Part of the infrastructure is public schools. May said that David Douglas’s enrollment has been “increasing at the rate of three percent per year for the last ten years.” Again, they are having trouble keeping up.
Warner called outer east Portland “ground zero for a lot of issues.” Among other things, it has much of the city’s remaining developable space, and natural resources that are at risk for this very reason. Warner challenged another speaker’s assertion that it is not economically possible to provide multi-family units large enough for families with children. Human Solutions’ new Lincoln Woods development at 2833 S.E. 130th Ave. contains 70 affordable units on a two-acre site (“very densely packed but very beautiful”) that includes some units with up to five bedrooms.
The discussion continued, in a sense, at last month’s Hazelwood Neighborhood Association meeting. Eric Engstrom of the Portland Bureau of Development Services said that a large part of new development is taking place in east Portland, that its design leaves something to be desired, and that the city’s regulations also leave something to be desired. For example, he said, infill flag lots sometimes receive permits as condominiums, which are accessed by private driveways that do not meet city standards, bringing a new set of regulations into play. The city has regulations that theoretically restrict the shading of existing homes by tall new additions, “but you don’t have to deal with this if something else conflicts with it, and something almost always does,” he said. In some cases developers post a bond to ensure that they will provide certain amenities, then walk away from the obligation and simply let the city keep the bond, he said.
BDS planner Mark Bello said that one developer seeking a land division dealt with a directive to make the lots “of different width” by making one of them one hundredth of a foot wider. Robinson said to avoid preserving trees that are more than three feet in diameter, developers declare that all their trees are “two feet, 11 inches,” and this goes unchallenged. Often they cut down the trees on a lot before applying for development, thus avoiding the issue.
Hazelwood Chair Arlene Kimura said, “Some developers are willing to work with us. Many are not.” When they are not, the regulations leave “no way to address the issues. It’s a real source of frustration.” Builders should be required to provide some open space with any development, “whether it’s three units or 300,” she declared.
Hazelwood resident Michael Grant said that the developer of a recent 30-unit project, required to put in a water detention system, installed “a pit with a fence around it that’s a real eye sore.” The development has no place at all for children to play other than in the street. Grant said he attempted to bring these items up at a review hearing, “but after a few minutes I could tell from the official’s body language that it was a waste of time.”
Engstrom said that the Portland Planning Commission will take up these and other issues at a hearing at 7 p.m. May 22, probably at 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave., and will take public testimony.
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