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East Portland tour shows Planning Commission development issues

LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO

All aboard for the east Portland infill housing tour. On the bus, clockwise from the front are Jim Chasse, Powellhurst-Gilbert Neighborhood Association; Amy Cortese, Portland City Planning Commission; Don Hanson, Portland City Planning Commission; Linda Nettekoven, Southeast Uplift; Eric Engstrom, Portland Office of Transportation, and senior city planner Steve Dotterrer.

MEMO PHOTO: TIM CURRAN
“We went to your hearings, but you weren’t getting anything out of that, and we weren’t getting our issues on the table,” Bonny McKnight told the Portland Planning Commission.

So, in late September, the commission piled into a bus and McKnight and others showed city leaders what the development issues of east Portland looked like, up close and personal.

McKnight, chair of the Russell Neighborhood Association and the Citywide Land Use Committee, conceived the tour; the first of what she hopes will be a series covering different parts of the city. Barry Manning, a senior city planner assigned to east Portland, with input from local neighborhood leaders, organized this first effort. The subject matter was infill housing development and its design, traffic and parking issues, and tree preservation.

City Planning Director Gil Kelley said that east Portland is “one of the fastest-growing areas of the city, especially for families and low-income people.” Already, “If we were to carve it away from Portland, it would be the fourth or fifth largest city in Oregon.” (This produced a smirk from McKnight, a veteran of failed efforts to make the area the city of Columbia Ridge in the 1980s). “Infrastructure that the rest of the city takes for granted hasn’t been here historically,” Kelley said.

The tour avoided the heart of Gateway because the commission was likely to be most familiar with this area. It did traverse parts of Northeast and Southeast 122nd Avenue. Manning noted that this is currently “typical of main streets in east Portland, with four traffic lanes and a center turn lane.” For much of the way, this street “benefits” from having sidewalks and planting strips, which is not the case throughout the area. It is zoned for multi-family development, some of it better designed than others. Manning noted that for part of the street at least, there will now be design review to “let us take a closer look at design.” In Mid-county the tenants of such buildings, on average, earn 80 percent of area median household income or less, he said.

As the tour passed the East 122nd Avenue/Menlo Park and Ride location at 12202 East Burnside St., McKnight said that it fills by 7 a.m. on weekdays. TriMet had promised to install feeder bus lines to get riders to the MAX light rail stops, but it has failed to do so, “and that eliminates transit as a mode for the vast majority of people,” she said.

A positive note was a development south of Ventura Park School, where green space and street furniture have been installed through a Local Improvement District (a special assessment of local property owners).

On Southeast Main Street, in the Powellhurst-Gilbert neighborhood, the tour passed two rather glaring examples of poorly designed infill, at 11614 and 11715. On Southeast 118th Avenue, Powellhurst-Gilbert’s Jim Chasse said that infill development so far “has been well received; it fits the character of the street. It’s okay until it gets really skinny.” He added, “People assumed that the R2.5 zoning meant the lots had to be at least 2,500 square feet each.” (Changes in the code have allowed density at higher levels in some cases.)

However, Manning said, “We’re not seeing development at its allowed levels yet.” Both Chasse and Manning said when it comes, the canopy of tall Douglas firs that give the street its character would be threatened. “Trees are important,” Chasse said.

To the south of Southeast Powell Boulevard, residents pointed out, there are few commercial services. Commission member Tim Smith said that neither Southeast 122nd Avenue nor Foster Road offered good pedestrian crossing opportunities as such a street should have.

On Southeast Ellis Street, the tour passed an area that had been orchard land and now is in the process of being redeveloped for housing. The streets, now barely adequate for handling the traffic, seem certain to face bigger problems in the future. The tour passed a trail leading into Powell Butte. Commission member Don Hanson said later, “There’s a lack of useable fabric of open space. Powell Butte is huge, but how many people can get to it to use it?”

Later, as the tour passed the Springwater Corridor, Chasse said, “Thank God for bike trails, because otherwise people would have nowhere to walk.”

At one point, passing an unimproved street, Smith sarcastically called it “traffic calming and storm water treatment rolled into one.”

McKnight noted past efforts to save Glendoveer Golf Course as open space in the face of efforts to redevelop it. She also pointed out that Wilkes Park and Wilkes Creek had been preserved as open space through community efforts.

The feature that drew the most comment was a pair of new multi-unit developments on the east side of Southeast 136th Avenue. Parking for a separate two-lane alley served each multi-unit, laid side-by-side and separated by a fence.

Smith called it “a poster child for bad planning. It’s a waste of resources and land.” Commission member Amy Cortese agreed. A third member, former Chair Ingrid Stevens, said this feature “will stay with me.”

At the intersection of Southeast 162nd Avenue and Division Street, McKnight pointed to auto-oriented commercial development and asked, “How do you turn that into something urban?”

“I’m not sure it’s possible with streets this large,” Kelley replied.

The tour passed some large new developments on side streets in the area bounded roughly by Southeast Stark and Northeast Glisan streets and 146th and 162nd avenues. The commission members were visibly startled by the amount of development. Manning said east Portland has absorbed 9,900 units of new housing in the last 10 years. “We’re flat, so it’s easy to build here,” McKnight said.

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