Downtown Portland News

[2oh1]

Originally Posted by MarkDaMan

I'd love so much if the Jackson Tower in the Square, now in default, went through a condo/apartment conversion.

Oh my god. I love Jackson Tower. If that thing went condo, my first response would be Shut Up And Take My Money!!! ...followed by a deep sigh... because I doubt I'd be able to afford it.



They don't build 'em like that anymore.

[dizflip]

Originally Posted by MarkDaMan

Super appreciate the work that Xavier Stickler put in to improve this corner. I stopped by during the false summer last week and took a couple pics.



and the Shake Shack patio:

Between this and Din Tai Fung and Less and More Coffee opening around Pioneer Courthouse, downtown Portland may be quite busy this summer.

Be crazy if Pioneer Place were to somehow attract another consumer magnet by the name of Uniqlo.

[Derek]

It’s a shame Din Tai Fung is opening in the basement of Pioneer Place. I wish they’d get away from their “only opens new locations in malls” business model.

[maccoinnich]

I wouldn’t be upset if Din Tai Fung helped bring more retailers in Pioneer Place. It’s in a weird “not dead, but not thriving” spot right now.

[pdxsg34]

Nordstrom says it has no plans to close downtown Portland store

Nordstrom has no plans to shut down its full-line downtown Portland store or its discount Nordstrom Rack store, according to a spokesperson.

The Business Journal reached out after news broke that Nordstrom was leaving downtown San Francisco. Others contacted Nordstrom about the Portland store, too.

"We'd love to work with you to get the word out that we do not have plans to close our downtown Portland store and are committed to serving our customers in Portland," spokesperson Grace Stearns wrote in an email.

Nordstrom (NYSE: JWN) has a total of eight full-line and Rack stores in Oregon, according to company figures. It has plans to open a Rack in Salem this fall.

Continues ($)

[PhillyPDX]

I guess these downtown firms have two choices: get out, or trying and get in yourself to make your immediate office area better. These folks are trying the latter. Hope it works. I wonder if this announcement was hinging of clean-up action 1/2 block away at 4th/Washington.

https://www.oregonlive.com/dining/20...-cart-pod.html

[dizflip]

Seems like a lot of positive news coming out of downtown lately. My favorite food cart of all time, Gyro Place, got kicked out of their old spot where the Ritz now stands and moved to the Oak and 5th pod.

[CorbinWarrick]

My concern would be being around the corner from the abandoned Washington Center building. If we don’t clean that up with hard crack downs I’m afraid it would deter regular folks to come to this new food pod

[DMH]

Originally Posted by CorbinWarrick

My concern would be being around the corner from the abandoned Washington Center building. If we don’t clean that up with hard crack downs I’m afraid it would deter regular folks to come to this new food pod

The Washington Center at SW Washington and 4th has already been cleared out and boarded up weeks ago to shut down the illegal drug trade. Now it is up to the building owner to figure out what he should do with his 3/4 block. Meanwhile, count me as one who applauds Expensfy's CEO's bold effort to re-energize the SW 5th & Oak half-block food cart pod as Midtown Beer Garden! It will definitely be a positive influence in bringing people back to that part of Downtown. It is great that it will open soon so folks can enjoy the summer months in the beer garden.

[maccoinnich]

Here's another article:

Midtown Beer Garden Will Open in Downtown Portland Summer 2023



The 5th Avenue Food Cart Pod which has been closed for a little while, is going to reopen as the Midtown Beer Garden later this summer (slated for July). Considered on of the city’s oldest and largest food cart pods, it is located at SW 5th Avenue between SW Harvey Milk & SW Oak Streets. Expensify along with ChefStable, are behind this project to revitalize this prime spot in downtown Portland.

The pod property is more or less empty and looks like a vacant lot, but there has been construction activity going on there for the past couple of weeks. Leases for the carts that were there previously ended on April 30, and Expensify was able to help all the carts get prepared to be towed to a storage lot during the period of construction. All carts were moved by Thursday, May 4; construction started on May 8.

Matt Allen, Expensify’s Marketing & Partners Manager, told me, “We’re working at a breakneck speed to get Midtown Beer Garden open because we displaced many vendors during their busy season. We’re offering a free month’s rent when they return, and it appears that all the old carts will be back, which we’re very excited about.”

....continues at Bridgetown Bites.

Also, I moved some population related discussion to the Oregon Population Thread Including PSU and Census Data thread

[downtownpdx]

Such great news re: midtown food pod. I recently watched a travel vlog from an Australian couple, and their first US foodie tour stop was Portland. It was generally a positive video but they were directed to this pod by Google or something as part of a day long tour of the city, and they left before ordering because the area felt sketchy. So nice to see this area get a shot in the arm - kudos to Expensify CEO and Chefstable, along with the other heroes of this city like the PSU student who created the plaza by Shake Shack. This is how a city comes back.

[PhillyPDX]

And recent news about daytime camping bans on public property. Not sure if it’ll actually be enforced, but these things do matter. Significantly so for downtown businesses and employees. Positive energy at last, but it needs to be sustained.

[MarkDaMan]

Originally Posted by PhillyPDX

And recent news about daytime camping bans on public property. Not sure if it’ll actually be enforced, but these things do matter. Significantly so for downtown businesses and employees. Positive energy at last, but it needs to be sustained.

^Here's more info about the proposed daytime camping ban.

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023...land-property/

Mayor Seeks to Ban Daytime Camping on City of Portland Property
The prohibition would banish tents from 8 am to 8 pm daily.
By Anthony Effinger and Sophie Peel
May 16, 2023 at 4:28 pm PDT

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is working on a proposal to ban camping on city property from 8 am to 8 pm, in an effort to stop more permanent tent clusters and other structures from forming on city streets and in parks, according to people familiar with the mayor’s plans.

Unsheltered people would be prohibited from camping at any time, day or night, near schools, day care centers, and other shelter sites. Wheeler aims to bring the new rules to fellow members of the Portland City Council for a vote before the end of the month, a person familiar with the plan said.

Wheeler’s push comes as other cities in the region seek to comply with a law passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2021 that requires local laws about sitting, lying and sleeping on public property to be “objectively reasonable as to time, place and manner with regards to persons experiencing homelessness.”

The city of Beaverton, for example, is holding hearings on complying with the state law, which started as House Bill 3115 in the 2021 regular session. The law requires cities to comply by July 1. Beaverton is holding the first of two hearings on the matter this evening, according to a city website.

...(continues)

[colossalorder]

The Southwest Fifth Avenue Food Cart Pod Will Get a Major Glow Up

Originally little more than a parking lot with carts, Portland’s oldest food cart pod will soon have a bar cart, an events stage, and seating for hundreds

https://pdx.eater.com/2023/5/18/2372...-redevelopment

[maccoinnich]

Are people coming back to downtown Portland yet? Here’s what the numbers say



Portland has endured an unusual stretch of superb spring weather, with blue skies and mild temperatures that coincided fortuitously with the big Cinco de Mayo celebration and the Rose Festival on the city’s waterfront.

At the same time, major downtown employers have begun calling staff back to the office more frequently. Amazon and the city of Portland both began requiring office workers to spend significantly more time at their desks last month.

So, three years after the pandemic hit Portland, is activity finally picking up downtown? The latest data are a mixed bag.

Parking and transit data show only modest growth in May, with numbers that remain far below 2019 levels.

...continues at the Oregonian.

[sopdx]

I feel the city needs more cultural/entertainment draws to the core. Perhaps some combo, market, or food hall akin to the Terminal Market in San Francisco, Rotterdam's Market Hall https://www.holland.com/global/touri...arket-hall.htm. or Les Halles in Lyon, https://thisislyon.fr/food-and-drink...alles-de-lyon/. Kind of large food cart area on steroids with more fresh items, and more related shopping. Perhaps a market district could grow up around it.

[stan]

Originally Posted by sopdx

I feel the city needs more cultural/entertainment draws to the core. Perhaps some combo, market, or food hall akin to the Terminal Market in San Francisco, Rotterdam's Market Hall https://www.holland.com/global/touri...arket-hall.htm…

Always felt one of the lost opportunities of the last decade was the failure of James Beard Market idea. No idea if it could have actually supported itself, but it would have be an amazing project. Would have loved for it to be located at the Morrison Bridgehead. Bizarre that an area that is roughly the center point of downtown’s waterfront is half a cloverleaf intersection. The ramps have been closed for a while due to work on the bridge and the world hasn’t ended. Would love for that to happen permanently.

Relatedly, looks like Portland Parks is going to buy the Morrison Bridgehead https://www.portland.gov/council/doc...ead-aquisition

“This ordinance will allow Parks to acquire approximately 3.26 acres of land at the Morrison Bridgehead for increased public event capacity year-round and will be added to Waterfront Park. The site will provide much needed parking for existing events, as well serving as an area that can support its own various festivals, fairs, and other year-round events.”

So that area doesn’t look like it’ll change in the short term, maybe sets up possibilities for the longer term?

[AdamUrbanist]

What struck me about the James Beard Market proposal is that it was more focused on building an iconic building than on buildlng the institution that building would serve. In the best case scenario it takes 10 years to fundraise and build a project like that. In the meantime there's no reason you couldn't start a daily market in a parking lot or in a large retail space. I'd love to see a proposal for a year round market that might one day justify a grand market hall

[subterranean]

I'm not on board with this idea that public agencies and other big institutions should be forcing remote workers back in an attempt to resuscitate some downtown businesses. We remote workers have now seen a very real and dramatic quality of life improvement and most of us don't want that life anymore.

If anything, WFH has been a boon for certain neighborhood commercial districts and this is just shifting those dollars away again. We talk as planners about building cities full of 15-minute neighborhoods and then elected officials counterintuitively force tens of thousands of people back into their dirty death machines several days per week to commute downtown. During the peak of the pandemic, traffic eased and greenhouse gas emissions plummeted. Oh, how quickly we're willing to throw that away.

Rather than trying to force a transition that almost no one wants, how about we evolve and find creative ways of supporting a downtown in transition, starting with adding tens of thousands of new housing units? Greater Downtown still has some thriving districts, let's continue to focus on supporting those while building thousands of new housing units. The rest will follow once we hit critical mass.

Forcing thousands of people back into downtown so that some huge commercial real estate firms can re-pad their pockets and a few lunch spots stay open is myopic and incredibly unfortunate. Downtowns as we know them may just have been a blip on the screen, a temporary result of capitalism that is no longer necessary for many cities, at least in their incarnation as a centralized human filing cabinet of office workers.

[2oh1]

It's funny how the comments above are two completely different conversations, but both are talking about the same thing, in different ways.

And both are right.

James Beard Market was a major missed opportunity - and - the changing landscape of work and workers means downtowns have to adapt in order to thrive.

Originally Posted by subterranean

I'm not on board with this idea that public agencies and other big institutions should be forcing remote workers back in an attempt to resuscitate some downtown businesses.

The way I see it - and I could be wrong - I expect a shift in the workforce where workers who want to work remotely will shift into jobs that allow them to do so, and they'll probably accept a lower salary in exchange for a better quality of life. And companies that don't allow remote work will (hopefully) have to pay more to acquire talent. I figure this will shake out over the next few years, at which point office leasing will reach a new normal.

In the meantime, a lot of cities are going to struggle with high office vacancy rates, which mean a lot of downtowns will suffer unless they can adapt.

Cities that went through downtown revitalizations during the past few decades are obviously in a better position to make it through some lean years. And we're definitely one of them.

Downtown Portland has such great bones, and it's got plenty of areas just waiting for new life. The Morrison bridgehead and the blocks around it are a good example. And the Goodman lots. Oh, my, god, the Goodman lots. And stretches along SW 2nd. Etc. I'm sure you'd name other areas too, which are ripe for revitalization.

There's so much opportunity to bring so much more life into downtown. The more the city can make downtown 'the' place to be, the more businesses downtown will be able to encourage workers to want to work there. But we have to be honest about the timeline. That's at least a decade's worth of effort, and it assumes we have the leadership to do it. Hopefully, we do.