SFUVancouver
Jun 27, 2007, 5:41 AM
I had an absolutely wonderful time in Portland! What a great city to visit! There really is something pretty special going on and I have been telling everyone within earshot about it ever since. I almost don’t know where to begin and this will be a far from complete account.
I arrived on Monday evening without plans or an itinerary, only a hotel reservation, some money in my pocket, and a full week ahead of me. Having carpooled down to Seattle on an unrelated day-trip for school, I continued on by Amtrak and caught my first glimpse of Portland from a rail bridge and saw a skyline bathed in a postcard-worthy sunset. Minutes later I set off on foot from the station to make my way to the Ace Hotel, putting my trust in my GoogleMaps print out and a good sense of direction. Sure enough, not even ten minutes later I was standing at 10th and Stark and saw all at once the beautiful old edifice of the Ace Hotel, a MAX LRT train rumbling by a couple blocks to my left, and a Streetcar gliding by a block up. Put all of that together and you’ve got a pretty amazing first fifteen minutes in the city.
Thank you to everyone for recommending the Ace Hotel. I had a thoroughly pleasant stay and couldn’t have been happier with my choice. The place is an interesting mixture of what felt like a handsome old office building, an art gallery/creative space, an interior design magazine spread, and an impossibly cooler version of what you wished your apartment was like. Needless to say, I loved it. Each room features a unique wall mural and mine was instructions in American Sign Language to say “she trembled when he kissed her”. Cool. The bathroom was amazing with a huge claw-foot tub and free-standing shower that was actually tall enough for me to stand fully upright. This in particular is a welcome novelty because the shower in my hundred-year-old apartment seems to have been built to accommodate undernourished children of no more than five feet. After checking in with the helpful and pleasantly genuine front desk person I dropping off my bag I set off to explore the Pearl district and get the lay of the land.
I hadn’t appreciated just how central the Ace Hotel would be for my trip, nor had I anticipated how much the short, square blocks would contribute to a fine-grained, walkable built environment. In a matter of minutes I had explored North into the Pearl and began to pick out reference points featured by Gordon Price in a recent issue of his Urban Studies newsletter PriceTags. Incidentally, please do yourself a favour and check out PriceTags (http://www.pricetags.ca/pricetags.html and http://www.sightline.org/publications/enewsletters/price_tags/pricetags90 in particular for the Portland/Vancouver issue). It is a fascinating resource and a glimpse into the mind of one of Canada’s brightest Urban Affairs personalities. Price is the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and was formerly a multiple-term City Councillor with the City of Vancouver and helped oversee the growth and development of the Yaletown neighbourhood downtown and the nascent Southeast False Creek neighbourhood that is now beginning construction in earnest. The latter will initially act as the Olympic Village for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and later, over the course of a ten to fifteen year build out, come to house 10-15,000 people and feature a built form that is more akin to the Pearl district than Vancouver’s iconic point tower-townhouse podium built form that was pioneered for Yaletown. Back to Portland.
To be completely honest I was a little under-whelmed by the Pearl District during my walkabout on Monday night. I, correctly, judged that a neighbourhood cannot be defined at 11pm on a Monday night. However it also drove home to me just how vital all the new residential development will be to making it a round-the-clock neighbourhood. I assume that there just isn’t the critical mass of people to warrant businesses being open that late on a weeknight. There certainly were a number of restaurants open but none that really appealed to a somewhat travel-weary university student looking for a bite and a drink. Most of the places that were open seemed quite up-scale and squarely targeted at single young professionals, a category whose ranks I haven’t quite joined just yet. Nevertheless, I loved every moment of my exploratory walk and as a future urban planner it was as fascinating to me at night and mostly abandoned as it would be the following morning when it was absolutely full of people and vibrancy. In the end I stumbled upon Rogue Ales Distillery and Public House which fit the bill of what I was in the mood for and I saddled up to the bar and ended up closing out the place. It was there that I was struck for the first time by how friendly Portlanders (is that the right term?) seem to be. I struck up conversations with everyone I met and without exception people were polite, friendly, open and honest. The only guy who seemed to be a bit of a jerk was actually in town on business and not a local. In Vancouver I’m used to a certain degree of stand-offishness (now that can’t be a word), and without getting into the pop psychology of why this is the case sufficed to say it was refreshing to be in a place where people don’t give you a brief bit of a look if you start up a conversation out of the blue.
The following morning I set off for my first full day of exploring. I retraced my steps in the Pearl and what a difference! It was, excuse the pun, like night and day. There were people everywhere, businesses of every sort were open and Jamison Park was absolutely lousy with kids playing in the water and their parents, mostly mothers, pushed strollers, carried babies and talked to their friends over coffee. Restaurant and café patios were full, there were people on bikes everywhere and the streetcars were out in force. What a sight! I can say without hesitation that the Pearl district that morning was as engaging and urban as any place in Vancouver or in any other mid-sized city I’ve visited. And the streetcars, wow! Naturally I had seen pictures of the Portland Streetcars prior to my arrival and I still have fond early memories of Toronto and its streetcars, which I now know to have been the famed PCC model, but to be standing in the midst of that park full of kids, surrounded by mid-rise condos, and to see a sleek modern streetcar full of people glide by, it was one of those “a-ha!” moments when it all came together and I knew first hand that something good is going on in Portland.
I rode the streetcar a great deal during my stay and it served as the central feature in my mental map of Portland. In fact it was so effective at increasing my geographic understanding of the place that I was able to throw away (recycle) my map the afternoon of my first full day and, believe it or not, by the end of the week I was giving out directions to other tourists and even to a recently-arrived local. That’s another thing, in my time in Portland I only met one person who was actually from Portland by birth. Everyone else was from somewhere else and to me that speaks volumes about Portland.
Vancouver is very similar in this respect with more than three-quarters of the region's 2.2 million people having been born somewhere else, more than half of whom are foreign-born. Some new stats just came out this week and the City of Vancouver is now a city where English is not the mother tongue for 50.6% of the population. During my trip I did miss the staggering ethnic diversity of Vancouver but it was more of a nagging feeling, as if something was missing but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. This isn't meant to be a negative critique of Portland, but more of a reflection of just ow utterly pervasive and positive Vancouver's multiculturalism really is. Ethnic and cultural diversity is as central to the Vancouver experience as the mountains -something that is always there and honestly quite comforting. I find I miss the mountains when I'm away. It is strange to have open sky in every direction. But I digress.
I definitely like the built form of the Pearl District. I like the blocky massing of the buildings and the extensive use of brick cladding. In particular, there is a new building close to the waterfront by Tanner Springs park that has a unique blackened type of brick that I have never seen before. It is beautiful, and varies from dark navy-grey to black with the suggestion of indigo depending on the light. Very neat. I was also impressed by some of the varied examples of reusing old buildings and adapting their purpose towards new residential and commercial uses. One building in particular punched windows through the side of a brick warehouse in an apparent residential conversion yet the building retained its aging wall-spanning painted advertisings and the modern addition on the top felt respectful without resorting to mimicry.
Portland definitely has more handsome warehouse stock to work with than Vancouver. Most of the residential development over the last decade and a half has come at the expense of truly crappy cinderblock and clapboard light industrial buildings and I think there is pretty much universal agreement that what was lost was not worth saving. With that said, it is a real shame that so many of the downtown Victorian and Edwardian houses have been lost. The ones that have been preserved are beautiful and have been respectfully and creatively integrated into the modern dense streetscape. I'm thinking about Mole Hill and those three or four houses on Cambie Street near the downtown library in Vancouver.
In Portland I especially liked a length of red brick one-storey warehouses on each side of 11th street in the Pearl that have been converted to townhouses with the expansive loading docks serving as porches. Those are among the very best looking urban townhouses I have ever seen and are easily on par or surpass the best examples of the hundreds of townhouses that development in downtown Vancouver has yielded over the last decade or two. In the Pearl district I couldn’t immediately discern which buildings were exorbitantly expensive and which were purposely affordable, assuming there is such an inclusionary build-out of the neighbourhood, and it is my understanding that there is. I found the materials, finishings, and public realm to be of uniformly high quality and the general absence of stucco and painted concrete is a very welcome change from the built environment in Vancouver.
I was also quite taken with the numerous pedestrian mews that seemed to cut through a number of blocks, presumably instead of automobile streets. Also there were pedestrian gaps between several buildings that appeared to be open to the public and allow for mid-block short cuts. The Southeast False Creek/Olympic Village Neighbourhood in Vancouver has a mandate in the official development plan that compels architects and developers to offer similar pedestrian linkages wherever there is to be mid-block cirulation. This is all part and parcel of Vancouver's committment to putting pedestrians, followed by bikes, transit, and goods movement above the private automobile in the City's heirarchy of transportation planning. In the Pearl District narrow streets and the general absence of large trucks and diesel buses in favour of the streetcar made the streets quite quiet and pleasant. I liked the smooth transition from the existing build-out of the Pearl to the higher density near the waterfront and on to what appeared to be functional light industrial areas by the highway bridge. Also, a very good use of space beneath the highway bridge for the Streetcar OMC barn. We've been grappling with what to do with the space beneath bridges in Vancouver and so far, with the execption of Granville Island, there has been a pretty universal failure to imagine creative uses of this space. In Portland it seems the space beneath the numerous wide highway briges is not automatically "lost", and the transit centre located beneath the elevated interstate highway on the other side of the Willamette by the sports stadium and the convention centre is used as weather protection for the Max passengers. Very smart.
What did feel “off” about the Pearl was the general lack of “everyday” businesses: the florist, the greengrocer, the independant clothing, music, or stationary store, the neighbourhood grocery store, butcher, greengrocer, the video store, salon or barbershop, plus explicitly civic institutions like a post office, community centre, or library. I understand a Safeway is being built in the area and that there is a major post office on the edge of the Pearl, and I do fully admit I wasn’t searching for these types of stores and likely missed them if they were there. But the newness of the neighbourhood is highly reminiscent of Yaletown in Vancouver and it also lacks many of these basic stores largely due to the high lease rates in brand new developments. Yaletown is lousy with cosmetic dentistry offices, pet and people spas (not together, though there’s a niche that could take off!), travel agencies, high-end restaurants, imported furniture and home furnishings shops, boutique clothing stores, etc., not to mention more Starbucks and clone cafes than you can shake an espresso at. It felt like the Pearl suffers from the same basic law of urban economics that compels new buildings to partly pay for themselves through high commercial lease rates. A green grocer or independent book store just cannot make a go of it until the leases come down or the population density goes up sufficiently to support them. I think the old adage that to get affordability you “build it and wait a generation” rings very true.
More than anything, it is the finer grain of the built environment in the Pearl district that I liked most and it just feels tighter and more organic than much of Yaletown and the other new dense districts of Vancouver. In the Vancouver context it is my opinion that the combination of ample buildable density and an (appreciated) underground requirement for parking that compels developers to assemble large tracts along our long but shallow downtown blocks in order to accomodate these underground garages and it is this fact more than any other that yields the third- or half-block long developments in Yaletown that stifles the emergence of a finer grained streetscape that I found in Portland. It is my understanding that part of the “deal” for development along the streetcar corridors of Portland is that developers get a relaxation on their parking requirements while also having to accept a special assessment on their property taxes that largely pays for the streetcar. It is my opinion that we largely lack that sort of streetcar/transit-oriented land use planning in Vancouver. This is a major pitfall, among many positives, of having a regional, rather than locally-controlled, transit agency. The result is that Yaletown is simultaneously lacking any meaningful transit(!) while being exceptionally dense. Believe it or not, I have heard it straight from the mouth of a transit planner from Translink, the regional transportation agency, that “we don’t need streetcars to yield development in Vancouver so why bother with a streetcar?”
In Portland the streetcar has been used as leverage to successfully compel developers to build to the maximum of their allotted density, while in Vancouver, virtually without exception, density is maxed out by developers everywhere and the City routinely bonuses up density by as much as half when developers purchase heritage density, include a hotel and/or civic amenity floor space, or when a development includes a fully-transferred public asset such as a park that is henceforth owned by the city. Introducing a streetcar, or new transit in general, is a largely an unnecessary factor for land development in Vancouver, mostly thanks to a walkable built environment and good existing transit, and thus, perversely, is it largely an afterthought for Translink if it is even thought about at all. With that said, we are experiencing a massive development boom in transit oriented development in the inner and outer suburbs thanks to expansion of the SkyTrain network. Yet in other parts of the inner suburbs of Vancouver proper, and downtown in particular, most new developments leverage existing transit and the developers know their product will move because housing demand vastly exceeds supply, even factoring in the absurdly high housing prices ($700K average price for a detached home in the City of Vancouver, and the Canadian dollar is worth 94 cents to the US dollar!). But back to Portland.
I took the streetcar to the South Waterfront precinct and I feel it has a long ways to go to be more than a promising construction site. However it is amazing to see modern streetcar-led urban development, complete with fresh tracks laid through a brownfield development site with more cranes than buildings. The real draw for me was the Aerial Tram. Wow! You spent your money in the right place with the design of that. It's incredibly modern and sleek, and it successfully avoids looking like a toy while also being aesthetically pleasing enough to be considered an asset and not a visial blight. I can understand the residents' concerns about a tram passing over their homes but, at the same time, living adjacent one of the world's major highways strikes me as an immessurably greater issue than the tram passing silently overhead.
The trip by tram to OHSU was of particular interest because I’m doing a self-directed research project this summer about potential options for greater transit connectivity between my mountain-top university, Simon Fraser University, and the regional SkyTrain network at the bottom. The similarities between SFU and OHSU are remarkable, though the latter is far more built-up. Having seen and experienced the seamless connectivity between the mountain top and the base, I have returned an advocate for a similar system here. SFU has about 26,000 students, maybe 15-18,000(tops) of whom are based out of the Burnaby Mountain campus on a daily basis. The x-factors for transit demand is the soaring cost of personal automobile use, sustained growth of the school, and the rate of growth for the residential development, UniverCity, that SFU is building to bring vibrancy to this decidedly commuter campus, all the while growing the school’s endowment by several hundred million.
Over a 25 year build out, of which we are about seven or eight years into, UniverCity, as it is known, will grow to about 7,500 dwellings and feature as many as 12-15,000 residents, including student sub-letters. UniverCity is trying to make the mountain feel like more of a balanced college town and come 2040, the 75th anniversary of the school, there could be upwards of 40,000 people living, working, or going to school up here and the already-stretched bus connections sure won’t do the trick. While exploring OHSU I stumbled across a farmer’s market, apparently one of many doing business at any given time in Portland. I bought some absolutely delicious strawberries and listened to the Cuban band that was playing. You couldn’t ask for anything better on a sunny afternoon.
Another day I took the Max out to Orenco Station and explored that New Urbanist development. It is remarkable to see such a large realization of what fundamentally is a nostalgic take on the standard suburb. I mean that in the best way possible too. It is a lovely place, with handsome rowhouses, a nice park, complete with band gazebo, and friendly, happy young couples walking dogs and children, sometimes both of which were leashed. It didn’t feel Disneyesque or like Celebration Florida, which was featured in the movie The Truman Show. It did strike me as a response to what people today think things used to be like, regardless of whether they were ever actually like that. The fences were black metal, reminiscent of wrought iron instead of the cliched white picket fence, the roads gently curved and this accentuated the handsome rowhouses, and the club house is reminiscent of a train station. Yet it is still a single purpose chunk of land and there wasn’t a store to be seen when I was dying for a cool drink. With all of that said, bravo, truly. It is a huge leap forward in suburban housing and it delivers on the institutionalized “American/Canadian Dream” of a home away from the city. The fact that it is adjacent the Max line is a phenomenal step in the right direction and I would be fascinated to know what sort of ridership that station has.
I was very impressed with the Max system as both a passenger and a pedestrian sharing the streetscape with it. I’ve never rode light rail before and it wholly exceeded my expectations. LRT is unfairly(?) bashed by some in Vancouver because we’re fortunate enough to have the SkyTrain system, which is a step or two further along the rail transit continuum. The conventional wisdom is that LRT is slow and intrusive and this is compounded by the fact that it likely stacks up poorly in many indicies compared to SkyTrain, which is a pretty exceptional rapid transit system. Taken in its own right LRT is very, very competent and the C-Train LRT line in Calgary has as many daily boardings as our vaunted SkyTrain. Having used Max I’m now convinced that LRT definitely has a role to play in the continuum of rail-based transit in Vancouver and it was faster, had a smoother ride, was quieter, and much more adaptable than I had expected.
In the city Max moves at an acceptably slow pace, in my mind this is for safety, rider comfort, and better integration into a pedestrian streetscape. Once it got out of the city centre and opened up the throttle, wow, can it ever fly! It is easily as fast as SkyTrain and much, much quieter. The cars are larger than most of the SkyTrain fleet, and the numerous spaces to hang-up bikes inside the train is downright ingenious. You are welcome to bring bikes on SkyTrain but you feel like jerk for taking up so much space in the door circulation areas and you are strongly discouraged from taking your bike during rush hour, not that there would ever be room anyway. I rode the Yellow Max Line out to the NE quadrant and also out to the Airport just as something to do and if I ever fly into PDX I will take Max into the city without a second thought. That section along Hwy 205 (?) is phenomenal and Max is as quick as freeway traffic. I definitely didn’t expect that.
I have to say the highlight of the trip was discovering, quite by accident, the NW district. I was riding the Max out to Orenco and saw PGE field from the train and noticed there was a game on Thursday. On my return I bought a ticket, for what turned out to be soccer, and then went off exploring in a generally Northern direction. I stumbled quite by accident into the Alphabet district. What a great neighbourhood! It feels a lot like the West End neighbourhood in Vancouver, old, established, full of character. I ended up coming back the following morning for breakfast on 23rd having only explored 21st the first time. The streets felt like a mixture of Commercial Drive, Kerrisdale, and 4th Avenue, not that I expect these Vancouver references to mean something to everyone. While exploring the NW district I filled up the last of my 2 gig memory card for my camera only three days into the trip. I set out by streetcar to head downtown to buy another card (brand name 4 gig card on sale for 45 bucks!).
It is that sort of serendipitous itinerary-making that the connectivity of the streetcar makes possible and it is invaluable, in my opinion, for someone to feel in control and effortlessly mobile. For a tourist it was reassuringly simple to know that the streetcar went through NW, the Pearl and then Downtown, and so when I came across the streetcar tracks and found a stop a half-block away I knew where it would take me. For comparison’s sake, had a bus pulled up I likely wouldn’t have taken it since I had no idea where it went, nor was a bus a preferable mode of travel. Portland’s wayfinding and streetcar signs are absolutely excellent, complete with a five minutes’ walk radius identified on the sign. They are so good that I am going to forward several photos I took of them to Vancouver City Hall. Vancouver truly needs this civic amenity and it is just one of many things, along with the parking standards that tell you how long one can park for in an area, that now seem glaringly absent from Vancouver.
I had a great time at the soccer game and ended up moving to sit/stand/cheer with the local “Timbers Army” fans. I was the only one who sang the Canadian National Anthem at the start of the game but when I was done people around me turned and applauded! Try to imagine that happening in any other city? I reckon you would be booed, hopefully good-naturedly, at virtually any sport in virtually any city. I dutifully visited and shopped at Powell’s Books and headed home with nine or ten books on planning, transportation, and Portland. It was so refreshing to have the price be the price. In Canada we add on the tax in our head without even thinking about it and the posted price bears little resemblance to the final price at the till. This adds up to an extra 13% on purchases in BC when you include provincial and national sales taxes. Then again those taxes buy nice things like a national health care system, subsidized first-rate higher education, half a billion dollars in new Vancouver buses in the last 18 months alone, four new additions to the Provincial ferry fleet (one sank, necessitating a replacement but let’s ignore that shall we?), and most importantly, a brand new subway for Vancouver from downtown to the airport and the City of Richmond that is under construction at the moment. I don’t mind the taxes at all but it was a nice break to have the price be the price. Having the Canadian dollar trade so well against the USD helped a lot too. The last time I was in the states for any length of time the Canadian dollar was worth about 63-65 US cents. Now it’s trading at about 94 US cents. I’ve gone from losing almost 40 cents on the dollar to losing less than 10! In fact I wouldn’t have even taken my trip if our dollar wasn’t where it is.
Well this has turned into a long, rambling account and all I really need to say is that I loved Portland.
It is amazing, almost impossible even, that I was able to spend a week in a U.S. city without a car, and yet I had immense mobility, and thoroughly enjoyed myself without feeling like I was missing out on anything by being a pedestrian. The Portland transit system is an absolutely immense asset and whether it can be measured or not, the pedestrian mobility it offers makes the city a much more attractive place to visit and in me you officially had a transit tourist. I spent close to a thousand dollars on my trip and with the exception of the ludicrously cheap Amtrak ticket, all of it went into your local economy at local businesses. I stayed at the great locally-, or at least regionally-owned Ace Hotel, I ate at locally-owned restaurants, drank at locally-owned bars, paid my fares to the locally-owned transit operators and not to Hertz or National Car Rental, etc., and I bought books and some meaningful souvenirs like Oregon wine, at locally-owned stores. Imagine how much less local economic impact my thousand dollars would have if I spent it on gas, parking, a car rental, a chain hotel, ate at chain restaurants, and shopped at chain stores? You would have had salaries and little more. Instead, because of decisions made by politicians, planners, business people, entrepreneurs, and average citizens, the Portland I experienced was local, place-specific, growing, and unique. It wasn’t Vancouver or Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles. It was Portland.
I’ll end off by repeating what I have been telling my friends in Vancouver: Portland is a great city. It is smaller than Vancouver in almost every respect, but it is friendlier, cleaner, and seemed to have proportionately more interesting stuff, as if there was less “filler” between interesting streets or neighbourhoods, and it is now my favourite US city. Vancouver needs streetcars! LRT isn’t too shabby either, though I am still decidedly in the SkyTrain camp for regional connectivity.
Bottom line: I will certainly return to Portland and I had a truly great visit.
I arrived on Monday evening without plans or an itinerary, only a hotel reservation, some money in my pocket, and a full week ahead of me. Having carpooled down to Seattle on an unrelated day-trip for school, I continued on by Amtrak and caught my first glimpse of Portland from a rail bridge and saw a skyline bathed in a postcard-worthy sunset. Minutes later I set off on foot from the station to make my way to the Ace Hotel, putting my trust in my GoogleMaps print out and a good sense of direction. Sure enough, not even ten minutes later I was standing at 10th and Stark and saw all at once the beautiful old edifice of the Ace Hotel, a MAX LRT train rumbling by a couple blocks to my left, and a Streetcar gliding by a block up. Put all of that together and you’ve got a pretty amazing first fifteen minutes in the city.
Thank you to everyone for recommending the Ace Hotel. I had a thoroughly pleasant stay and couldn’t have been happier with my choice. The place is an interesting mixture of what felt like a handsome old office building, an art gallery/creative space, an interior design magazine spread, and an impossibly cooler version of what you wished your apartment was like. Needless to say, I loved it. Each room features a unique wall mural and mine was instructions in American Sign Language to say “she trembled when he kissed her”. Cool. The bathroom was amazing with a huge claw-foot tub and free-standing shower that was actually tall enough for me to stand fully upright. This in particular is a welcome novelty because the shower in my hundred-year-old apartment seems to have been built to accommodate undernourished children of no more than five feet. After checking in with the helpful and pleasantly genuine front desk person I dropping off my bag I set off to explore the Pearl district and get the lay of the land.
I hadn’t appreciated just how central the Ace Hotel would be for my trip, nor had I anticipated how much the short, square blocks would contribute to a fine-grained, walkable built environment. In a matter of minutes I had explored North into the Pearl and began to pick out reference points featured by Gordon Price in a recent issue of his Urban Studies newsletter PriceTags. Incidentally, please do yourself a favour and check out PriceTags (http://www.pricetags.ca/pricetags.html and http://www.sightline.org/publications/enewsletters/price_tags/pricetags90 in particular for the Portland/Vancouver issue). It is a fascinating resource and a glimpse into the mind of one of Canada’s brightest Urban Affairs personalities. Price is the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and was formerly a multiple-term City Councillor with the City of Vancouver and helped oversee the growth and development of the Yaletown neighbourhood downtown and the nascent Southeast False Creek neighbourhood that is now beginning construction in earnest. The latter will initially act as the Olympic Village for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and later, over the course of a ten to fifteen year build out, come to house 10-15,000 people and feature a built form that is more akin to the Pearl district than Vancouver’s iconic point tower-townhouse podium built form that was pioneered for Yaletown. Back to Portland.
To be completely honest I was a little under-whelmed by the Pearl District during my walkabout on Monday night. I, correctly, judged that a neighbourhood cannot be defined at 11pm on a Monday night. However it also drove home to me just how vital all the new residential development will be to making it a round-the-clock neighbourhood. I assume that there just isn’t the critical mass of people to warrant businesses being open that late on a weeknight. There certainly were a number of restaurants open but none that really appealed to a somewhat travel-weary university student looking for a bite and a drink. Most of the places that were open seemed quite up-scale and squarely targeted at single young professionals, a category whose ranks I haven’t quite joined just yet. Nevertheless, I loved every moment of my exploratory walk and as a future urban planner it was as fascinating to me at night and mostly abandoned as it would be the following morning when it was absolutely full of people and vibrancy. In the end I stumbled upon Rogue Ales Distillery and Public House which fit the bill of what I was in the mood for and I saddled up to the bar and ended up closing out the place. It was there that I was struck for the first time by how friendly Portlanders (is that the right term?) seem to be. I struck up conversations with everyone I met and without exception people were polite, friendly, open and honest. The only guy who seemed to be a bit of a jerk was actually in town on business and not a local. In Vancouver I’m used to a certain degree of stand-offishness (now that can’t be a word), and without getting into the pop psychology of why this is the case sufficed to say it was refreshing to be in a place where people don’t give you a brief bit of a look if you start up a conversation out of the blue.
The following morning I set off for my first full day of exploring. I retraced my steps in the Pearl and what a difference! It was, excuse the pun, like night and day. There were people everywhere, businesses of every sort were open and Jamison Park was absolutely lousy with kids playing in the water and their parents, mostly mothers, pushed strollers, carried babies and talked to their friends over coffee. Restaurant and café patios were full, there were people on bikes everywhere and the streetcars were out in force. What a sight! I can say without hesitation that the Pearl district that morning was as engaging and urban as any place in Vancouver or in any other mid-sized city I’ve visited. And the streetcars, wow! Naturally I had seen pictures of the Portland Streetcars prior to my arrival and I still have fond early memories of Toronto and its streetcars, which I now know to have been the famed PCC model, but to be standing in the midst of that park full of kids, surrounded by mid-rise condos, and to see a sleek modern streetcar full of people glide by, it was one of those “a-ha!” moments when it all came together and I knew first hand that something good is going on in Portland.
I rode the streetcar a great deal during my stay and it served as the central feature in my mental map of Portland. In fact it was so effective at increasing my geographic understanding of the place that I was able to throw away (recycle) my map the afternoon of my first full day and, believe it or not, by the end of the week I was giving out directions to other tourists and even to a recently-arrived local. That’s another thing, in my time in Portland I only met one person who was actually from Portland by birth. Everyone else was from somewhere else and to me that speaks volumes about Portland.
Vancouver is very similar in this respect with more than three-quarters of the region's 2.2 million people having been born somewhere else, more than half of whom are foreign-born. Some new stats just came out this week and the City of Vancouver is now a city where English is not the mother tongue for 50.6% of the population. During my trip I did miss the staggering ethnic diversity of Vancouver but it was more of a nagging feeling, as if something was missing but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. This isn't meant to be a negative critique of Portland, but more of a reflection of just ow utterly pervasive and positive Vancouver's multiculturalism really is. Ethnic and cultural diversity is as central to the Vancouver experience as the mountains -something that is always there and honestly quite comforting. I find I miss the mountains when I'm away. It is strange to have open sky in every direction. But I digress.
I definitely like the built form of the Pearl District. I like the blocky massing of the buildings and the extensive use of brick cladding. In particular, there is a new building close to the waterfront by Tanner Springs park that has a unique blackened type of brick that I have never seen before. It is beautiful, and varies from dark navy-grey to black with the suggestion of indigo depending on the light. Very neat. I was also impressed by some of the varied examples of reusing old buildings and adapting their purpose towards new residential and commercial uses. One building in particular punched windows through the side of a brick warehouse in an apparent residential conversion yet the building retained its aging wall-spanning painted advertisings and the modern addition on the top felt respectful without resorting to mimicry.
Portland definitely has more handsome warehouse stock to work with than Vancouver. Most of the residential development over the last decade and a half has come at the expense of truly crappy cinderblock and clapboard light industrial buildings and I think there is pretty much universal agreement that what was lost was not worth saving. With that said, it is a real shame that so many of the downtown Victorian and Edwardian houses have been lost. The ones that have been preserved are beautiful and have been respectfully and creatively integrated into the modern dense streetscape. I'm thinking about Mole Hill and those three or four houses on Cambie Street near the downtown library in Vancouver.
In Portland I especially liked a length of red brick one-storey warehouses on each side of 11th street in the Pearl that have been converted to townhouses with the expansive loading docks serving as porches. Those are among the very best looking urban townhouses I have ever seen and are easily on par or surpass the best examples of the hundreds of townhouses that development in downtown Vancouver has yielded over the last decade or two. In the Pearl district I couldn’t immediately discern which buildings were exorbitantly expensive and which were purposely affordable, assuming there is such an inclusionary build-out of the neighbourhood, and it is my understanding that there is. I found the materials, finishings, and public realm to be of uniformly high quality and the general absence of stucco and painted concrete is a very welcome change from the built environment in Vancouver.
I was also quite taken with the numerous pedestrian mews that seemed to cut through a number of blocks, presumably instead of automobile streets. Also there were pedestrian gaps between several buildings that appeared to be open to the public and allow for mid-block short cuts. The Southeast False Creek/Olympic Village Neighbourhood in Vancouver has a mandate in the official development plan that compels architects and developers to offer similar pedestrian linkages wherever there is to be mid-block cirulation. This is all part and parcel of Vancouver's committment to putting pedestrians, followed by bikes, transit, and goods movement above the private automobile in the City's heirarchy of transportation planning. In the Pearl District narrow streets and the general absence of large trucks and diesel buses in favour of the streetcar made the streets quite quiet and pleasant. I liked the smooth transition from the existing build-out of the Pearl to the higher density near the waterfront and on to what appeared to be functional light industrial areas by the highway bridge. Also, a very good use of space beneath the highway bridge for the Streetcar OMC barn. We've been grappling with what to do with the space beneath bridges in Vancouver and so far, with the execption of Granville Island, there has been a pretty universal failure to imagine creative uses of this space. In Portland it seems the space beneath the numerous wide highway briges is not automatically "lost", and the transit centre located beneath the elevated interstate highway on the other side of the Willamette by the sports stadium and the convention centre is used as weather protection for the Max passengers. Very smart.
What did feel “off” about the Pearl was the general lack of “everyday” businesses: the florist, the greengrocer, the independant clothing, music, or stationary store, the neighbourhood grocery store, butcher, greengrocer, the video store, salon or barbershop, plus explicitly civic institutions like a post office, community centre, or library. I understand a Safeway is being built in the area and that there is a major post office on the edge of the Pearl, and I do fully admit I wasn’t searching for these types of stores and likely missed them if they were there. But the newness of the neighbourhood is highly reminiscent of Yaletown in Vancouver and it also lacks many of these basic stores largely due to the high lease rates in brand new developments. Yaletown is lousy with cosmetic dentistry offices, pet and people spas (not together, though there’s a niche that could take off!), travel agencies, high-end restaurants, imported furniture and home furnishings shops, boutique clothing stores, etc., not to mention more Starbucks and clone cafes than you can shake an espresso at. It felt like the Pearl suffers from the same basic law of urban economics that compels new buildings to partly pay for themselves through high commercial lease rates. A green grocer or independent book store just cannot make a go of it until the leases come down or the population density goes up sufficiently to support them. I think the old adage that to get affordability you “build it and wait a generation” rings very true.
More than anything, it is the finer grain of the built environment in the Pearl district that I liked most and it just feels tighter and more organic than much of Yaletown and the other new dense districts of Vancouver. In the Vancouver context it is my opinion that the combination of ample buildable density and an (appreciated) underground requirement for parking that compels developers to assemble large tracts along our long but shallow downtown blocks in order to accomodate these underground garages and it is this fact more than any other that yields the third- or half-block long developments in Yaletown that stifles the emergence of a finer grained streetscape that I found in Portland. It is my understanding that part of the “deal” for development along the streetcar corridors of Portland is that developers get a relaxation on their parking requirements while also having to accept a special assessment on their property taxes that largely pays for the streetcar. It is my opinion that we largely lack that sort of streetcar/transit-oriented land use planning in Vancouver. This is a major pitfall, among many positives, of having a regional, rather than locally-controlled, transit agency. The result is that Yaletown is simultaneously lacking any meaningful transit(!) while being exceptionally dense. Believe it or not, I have heard it straight from the mouth of a transit planner from Translink, the regional transportation agency, that “we don’t need streetcars to yield development in Vancouver so why bother with a streetcar?”
In Portland the streetcar has been used as leverage to successfully compel developers to build to the maximum of their allotted density, while in Vancouver, virtually without exception, density is maxed out by developers everywhere and the City routinely bonuses up density by as much as half when developers purchase heritage density, include a hotel and/or civic amenity floor space, or when a development includes a fully-transferred public asset such as a park that is henceforth owned by the city. Introducing a streetcar, or new transit in general, is a largely an unnecessary factor for land development in Vancouver, mostly thanks to a walkable built environment and good existing transit, and thus, perversely, is it largely an afterthought for Translink if it is even thought about at all. With that said, we are experiencing a massive development boom in transit oriented development in the inner and outer suburbs thanks to expansion of the SkyTrain network. Yet in other parts of the inner suburbs of Vancouver proper, and downtown in particular, most new developments leverage existing transit and the developers know their product will move because housing demand vastly exceeds supply, even factoring in the absurdly high housing prices ($700K average price for a detached home in the City of Vancouver, and the Canadian dollar is worth 94 cents to the US dollar!). But back to Portland.
I took the streetcar to the South Waterfront precinct and I feel it has a long ways to go to be more than a promising construction site. However it is amazing to see modern streetcar-led urban development, complete with fresh tracks laid through a brownfield development site with more cranes than buildings. The real draw for me was the Aerial Tram. Wow! You spent your money in the right place with the design of that. It's incredibly modern and sleek, and it successfully avoids looking like a toy while also being aesthetically pleasing enough to be considered an asset and not a visial blight. I can understand the residents' concerns about a tram passing over their homes but, at the same time, living adjacent one of the world's major highways strikes me as an immessurably greater issue than the tram passing silently overhead.
The trip by tram to OHSU was of particular interest because I’m doing a self-directed research project this summer about potential options for greater transit connectivity between my mountain-top university, Simon Fraser University, and the regional SkyTrain network at the bottom. The similarities between SFU and OHSU are remarkable, though the latter is far more built-up. Having seen and experienced the seamless connectivity between the mountain top and the base, I have returned an advocate for a similar system here. SFU has about 26,000 students, maybe 15-18,000(tops) of whom are based out of the Burnaby Mountain campus on a daily basis. The x-factors for transit demand is the soaring cost of personal automobile use, sustained growth of the school, and the rate of growth for the residential development, UniverCity, that SFU is building to bring vibrancy to this decidedly commuter campus, all the while growing the school’s endowment by several hundred million.
Over a 25 year build out, of which we are about seven or eight years into, UniverCity, as it is known, will grow to about 7,500 dwellings and feature as many as 12-15,000 residents, including student sub-letters. UniverCity is trying to make the mountain feel like more of a balanced college town and come 2040, the 75th anniversary of the school, there could be upwards of 40,000 people living, working, or going to school up here and the already-stretched bus connections sure won’t do the trick. While exploring OHSU I stumbled across a farmer’s market, apparently one of many doing business at any given time in Portland. I bought some absolutely delicious strawberries and listened to the Cuban band that was playing. You couldn’t ask for anything better on a sunny afternoon.
Another day I took the Max out to Orenco Station and explored that New Urbanist development. It is remarkable to see such a large realization of what fundamentally is a nostalgic take on the standard suburb. I mean that in the best way possible too. It is a lovely place, with handsome rowhouses, a nice park, complete with band gazebo, and friendly, happy young couples walking dogs and children, sometimes both of which were leashed. It didn’t feel Disneyesque or like Celebration Florida, which was featured in the movie The Truman Show. It did strike me as a response to what people today think things used to be like, regardless of whether they were ever actually like that. The fences were black metal, reminiscent of wrought iron instead of the cliched white picket fence, the roads gently curved and this accentuated the handsome rowhouses, and the club house is reminiscent of a train station. Yet it is still a single purpose chunk of land and there wasn’t a store to be seen when I was dying for a cool drink. With all of that said, bravo, truly. It is a huge leap forward in suburban housing and it delivers on the institutionalized “American/Canadian Dream” of a home away from the city. The fact that it is adjacent the Max line is a phenomenal step in the right direction and I would be fascinated to know what sort of ridership that station has.
I was very impressed with the Max system as both a passenger and a pedestrian sharing the streetscape with it. I’ve never rode light rail before and it wholly exceeded my expectations. LRT is unfairly(?) bashed by some in Vancouver because we’re fortunate enough to have the SkyTrain system, which is a step or two further along the rail transit continuum. The conventional wisdom is that LRT is slow and intrusive and this is compounded by the fact that it likely stacks up poorly in many indicies compared to SkyTrain, which is a pretty exceptional rapid transit system. Taken in its own right LRT is very, very competent and the C-Train LRT line in Calgary has as many daily boardings as our vaunted SkyTrain. Having used Max I’m now convinced that LRT definitely has a role to play in the continuum of rail-based transit in Vancouver and it was faster, had a smoother ride, was quieter, and much more adaptable than I had expected.
In the city Max moves at an acceptably slow pace, in my mind this is for safety, rider comfort, and better integration into a pedestrian streetscape. Once it got out of the city centre and opened up the throttle, wow, can it ever fly! It is easily as fast as SkyTrain and much, much quieter. The cars are larger than most of the SkyTrain fleet, and the numerous spaces to hang-up bikes inside the train is downright ingenious. You are welcome to bring bikes on SkyTrain but you feel like jerk for taking up so much space in the door circulation areas and you are strongly discouraged from taking your bike during rush hour, not that there would ever be room anyway. I rode the Yellow Max Line out to the NE quadrant and also out to the Airport just as something to do and if I ever fly into PDX I will take Max into the city without a second thought. That section along Hwy 205 (?) is phenomenal and Max is as quick as freeway traffic. I definitely didn’t expect that.
I have to say the highlight of the trip was discovering, quite by accident, the NW district. I was riding the Max out to Orenco and saw PGE field from the train and noticed there was a game on Thursday. On my return I bought a ticket, for what turned out to be soccer, and then went off exploring in a generally Northern direction. I stumbled quite by accident into the Alphabet district. What a great neighbourhood! It feels a lot like the West End neighbourhood in Vancouver, old, established, full of character. I ended up coming back the following morning for breakfast on 23rd having only explored 21st the first time. The streets felt like a mixture of Commercial Drive, Kerrisdale, and 4th Avenue, not that I expect these Vancouver references to mean something to everyone. While exploring the NW district I filled up the last of my 2 gig memory card for my camera only three days into the trip. I set out by streetcar to head downtown to buy another card (brand name 4 gig card on sale for 45 bucks!).
It is that sort of serendipitous itinerary-making that the connectivity of the streetcar makes possible and it is invaluable, in my opinion, for someone to feel in control and effortlessly mobile. For a tourist it was reassuringly simple to know that the streetcar went through NW, the Pearl and then Downtown, and so when I came across the streetcar tracks and found a stop a half-block away I knew where it would take me. For comparison’s sake, had a bus pulled up I likely wouldn’t have taken it since I had no idea where it went, nor was a bus a preferable mode of travel. Portland’s wayfinding and streetcar signs are absolutely excellent, complete with a five minutes’ walk radius identified on the sign. They are so good that I am going to forward several photos I took of them to Vancouver City Hall. Vancouver truly needs this civic amenity and it is just one of many things, along with the parking standards that tell you how long one can park for in an area, that now seem glaringly absent from Vancouver.
I had a great time at the soccer game and ended up moving to sit/stand/cheer with the local “Timbers Army” fans. I was the only one who sang the Canadian National Anthem at the start of the game but when I was done people around me turned and applauded! Try to imagine that happening in any other city? I reckon you would be booed, hopefully good-naturedly, at virtually any sport in virtually any city. I dutifully visited and shopped at Powell’s Books and headed home with nine or ten books on planning, transportation, and Portland. It was so refreshing to have the price be the price. In Canada we add on the tax in our head without even thinking about it and the posted price bears little resemblance to the final price at the till. This adds up to an extra 13% on purchases in BC when you include provincial and national sales taxes. Then again those taxes buy nice things like a national health care system, subsidized first-rate higher education, half a billion dollars in new Vancouver buses in the last 18 months alone, four new additions to the Provincial ferry fleet (one sank, necessitating a replacement but let’s ignore that shall we?), and most importantly, a brand new subway for Vancouver from downtown to the airport and the City of Richmond that is under construction at the moment. I don’t mind the taxes at all but it was a nice break to have the price be the price. Having the Canadian dollar trade so well against the USD helped a lot too. The last time I was in the states for any length of time the Canadian dollar was worth about 63-65 US cents. Now it’s trading at about 94 US cents. I’ve gone from losing almost 40 cents on the dollar to losing less than 10! In fact I wouldn’t have even taken my trip if our dollar wasn’t where it is.
Well this has turned into a long, rambling account and all I really need to say is that I loved Portland.
It is amazing, almost impossible even, that I was able to spend a week in a U.S. city without a car, and yet I had immense mobility, and thoroughly enjoyed myself without feeling like I was missing out on anything by being a pedestrian. The Portland transit system is an absolutely immense asset and whether it can be measured or not, the pedestrian mobility it offers makes the city a much more attractive place to visit and in me you officially had a transit tourist. I spent close to a thousand dollars on my trip and with the exception of the ludicrously cheap Amtrak ticket, all of it went into your local economy at local businesses. I stayed at the great locally-, or at least regionally-owned Ace Hotel, I ate at locally-owned restaurants, drank at locally-owned bars, paid my fares to the locally-owned transit operators and not to Hertz or National Car Rental, etc., and I bought books and some meaningful souvenirs like Oregon wine, at locally-owned stores. Imagine how much less local economic impact my thousand dollars would have if I spent it on gas, parking, a car rental, a chain hotel, ate at chain restaurants, and shopped at chain stores? You would have had salaries and little more. Instead, because of decisions made by politicians, planners, business people, entrepreneurs, and average citizens, the Portland I experienced was local, place-specific, growing, and unique. It wasn’t Vancouver or Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles. It was Portland.
I’ll end off by repeating what I have been telling my friends in Vancouver: Portland is a great city. It is smaller than Vancouver in almost every respect, but it is friendlier, cleaner, and seemed to have proportionately more interesting stuff, as if there was less “filler” between interesting streets or neighbourhoods, and it is now my favourite US city. Vancouver needs streetcars! LRT isn’t too shabby either, though I am still decidedly in the SkyTrain camp for regional connectivity.
Bottom line: I will certainly return to Portland and I had a truly great visit.