Portland rolls out its Infill Design Toolkit
Refinements to infill development guidelines are intended to foster density and creativity
Daily Journal of Commerce
POSTED: 04:00 AM PST Thursday, January 8, 2009
BY TYLER GRAF
With the release of the Infill Design Tool-kit guide, the city of Portland is attempting to enumerate and remove some of the long-standing barriers to infill development.
The tool kit is a compilation of work that the city first undertook about three years ago, when planners recognized that there were obstacles to dense infill development. The tool kit is now one-stop shopping for developers and builders curious about changes to the city’s recommendations for infill development for neighborhoods.
“This is supposed to be a carrot-type approach, rather than a stick,” said Shawn Wood, a city planner with the Bureau of Development Services, who worked on the tool kit.
The primary goal of the tool kit is to find design compatibility that works within the evolving context of neighborhoods, according to people who worked on the project.
But that can be a difficult concept to parse. In years past, compatibility has meant maintaining design details for a neighborhood. This time around, writers of the tool kit have emphasized the evolving patterns of design.
This will accommodate change, while at the same time preserve cherished design aspects of a neighborhood, the tool kit states. That means the way development within a neighborhood is naturally progressing will provide as much design context as the neighborhood’s architectural history.
Greg Acker, formerly with the Office of Sustainable Development and now with his own private architecture firm, said aspects of the tool kit morphed out of the city’s renewed emphasis on building courtyard housing and designing skinny lots. That dates back about three years.
“(The point) has been how to increase density,” Acker said. “With courtyard housing, for example, the point was to figure out how to get (those developments) to work with people and vehicles.”
Courtyard apartments were once a mainstay of the city, and examples of these types of developments pepper neighborhoods throughout the city.
The city has actively tried to develop more of these projects, as they typically provide more communal space for residents while keeping density higher than it would be otherwise.
But as much as the city looks back, it also wants to look forward. Wood said the city wants to continue “zooming out, looking at the context of neighborhoods” and not simply at what the zoning code states.
Yet many of the code changes that have taken effect over the years have been to minimize the impact of parking, he added. Rear parking for infill development has historically been frowned upon, due to its removal of outdoor space toward the back of a development.
The city has changed that policy recently, so developers can add an overhanging deck covering parking areas, to make up the space lost with the addition of the parking spots.
“Too often, vehicular access was up front because there was no way to get it behind,” he said.
He calls these changes a “liberation of infill development” rather than a confinement, which typically comes with evolving ordinances.
And in keeping with the city’s call for openness, the tool kit states that windows and main entrances should open toward the street, in order to avoid the appearance of buildings turning their backs or sides toward the street.
For courtyard developments, this means orienting main entrances toward the open courtyards. For the authors of the tool kit, this ensures that there’s a “semipublic” expanse that leads to the sidewalk and street.
“We need to keep looking at whether a neighborhood is changing,” Wood said. “Maybe it used to be just single-family homes, and everybody had a 20-foot setback, but now 15 lots on the street have been redeveloped and it looks like everything else will redevelop as well.”
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I always felt sort of like all the nice ped-friendly density of 23rd 'ended', going south at this corner -- after this redevelopment, maybe they'll fill in the Plaid Pantry parking lot site and a few of those other lots nearby ...
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