Preserving the past while preparing for the future

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, August 1, 2012

For at least two decades, Inner Southeast residents have been wrestling with issues concerning growth.

Portland, one of the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the country, has much to recommend it — but that’s what draws people who want our quality of life.

Increasingly, they may want our weather; several years of very hard weather mixed with drought elsewhere in the country, and indeed around the world, seem to have left us in a magic little island of perfect weather — so far.

And while communities which always thought they’d have enough water — some of them not that far away on the Pacific Coast — are seeing their water supplies run dry, we are still blessed with plenty of water most of the time.

Inner Southeast neighborhoods have wrestled with whether planning for growth makes growth happen, or if ignoring the influx of new residents would somehow keep everything in their neighborhood exactly as it always has been.

Often, planning has won the day, but the result has not always pleased residents. Things just do not stay the way they have been, and how to keep the best of the past when the future is roaring down the street remains a serious concern.

Elsewhere in this issue of THE BEE, Merry MacKinnon reports on such a controversy in Eastmoreland. But Westmoreland is about to grapple with another result of zoning code which is being applied in an unanticipated way.

A developer who has been building large apartment houses with no included parking has announced plans to do the same just a block north of the Sellwood-Westmoreland Post Office, where four houses have long stood, adjacent to what recently was a night spot called “The Woods” (now closed), and just west of the Westmoreland merchant parking lot.

This has not been more prominent in the news, yet, because at last report the property had not yet been sold to the firm now previewing its plans. It was bought in the recent past by a developer for a smaller condominium complex (which would have had off-street parking).

Specifically, what is being announced at this point seems to be a four-story apartment building composed mostly of studio apartments — a total of about 100 of them. And, due to a quirk in the Portland zoning code, no parking need be provided for the 100+ tenants.

The quirk is that the property is zoned “commercial”, and the code does not require merchants to provide off-street parking. These, of course, are to be dwellings…but homes can be built on commercially-zoned land. The presumption, apparently, is that houses in a commercial zone would probably be converted to commercial use — and if they are not, surely only a car or two per property would be involved — so this would not be a problem. But, 100 apartments with no off-street parking is obviously going to pose a big problem for the relatively small Westmoreland business district, as well as the residential neighbors nearby.

It’s an area where the City of Portland has been very reluctant to remove any parking spaces to provide left turn lanes at Bybee at Milwaukie, as obviously needed as they are, because “the merchants need all the parking spaces for customers”.

Well, 100 new residents living in one block without off-street parking will be leaving a substantial number of cars on nearby streets, blocking out those retail customers (and adding more congestion to that busy intersection, too).

The city hopes that the majority of those studio apartments will be rented to people who have foresworn cars in order to use public transit, bicycles, and car-share programs, and perhaps many will be. But if only 40% of the apartment renters still have one or more cars, that would mean over 40 more vehicles parked on the streets in the vicinity of the tall new apartment building.

Matt Wickstrom of the City of Portland led a discussion of the issue at the SMILE Board meeting in Sellwood on July 18th, and reported that the proliferation of this sort of apartment building in a variety of neighborhoods around Portland currently, and the protests from those neighborhoods about the no-offstreet-parking issue, has caused the City Council to hire a consultant to study just what problems are caused to residents and businesses by this sort of thing, in real life.

But, he said, if the city were to change its zoning code to require some off-street parking for apartment buildings constructed within commercial zones, it would come far too late to impede this plan announced for Westmoreland — which is completely legal under current code.

So, this is your first alert about a new “growth” issue in the City of Roses. The only way to make a difference if something like this disturbs you, is to be engaged with your own neighborhood association, and ultimately with the Portland land-use-planning process.

Meantime, THE BEE will keep you informed, as usual, of issues affecting Inner Southeast Portland as they unfold.