Montgomery Park Area Plan - MPAP

[bvpcvm]

Originally Posted by FiveOverPun

I don't mean to be rude, but anybody who thinks Portland's economic future is going to be built on "workshop[s] and 'maker' spaces" has dramatically lost track of what is happening in the real economy.

TBF, this whole project began before COVID, when people still actually worked in offices. But I agree at this point. We definitely need more housing up there than we do office space.

[maccoinnich]

Originally Posted by DMH

Please explain yourself.

I haven't had a chance to write a response before now, but RED_PDXer and FiveOverPun beat me to a lot of what I was thinking when I first read that letter.

At a time when there's a lot of debate about Portland's future (including on here), I find it very sad (if not surprising) that the NW District Association would look at the chance to transform a vacant post-industrial site into something like what's been built in Slabtown over the last decade to great success, and say "no, thank you".

To argue that there's no public benefit to the rezoning is baffling to me. The new housing would be a public benefit, including the affordable housing. The new park space would be a public benefit. The extension of the streetcar to one of the largest office buildings in the state, via the increasingly busy north end of NW 23rd Ave, would be a public benefit.

If the rezoning doesn't go ahead, the future of the Esco site isn't lots of little maker spaces for local artisans. It's most likely something along the lines of a distribution warehouse for Amazon, which could be built by-right without any neighborhood involvement.