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Originally Posted by Encolpius
Forumers: honestly, I don't understand outbursts of aggression like these. Your targets are, after all, members of the community who appear to care passionately about the well-being of their neighborhoods and take the time to involve themselves in the sort of public process that, by your own admission, most of you couldn't be bothered to turn up for (thank you to those who do, and report them to us). They're not opponents of density, they're not mouthpieces for out-of-town interests or sprawl developers; they just happen to disagree with you (for mostly well-articulated reasons) about the relationship between building height and livability.
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With the exception of the woman who lives in the Eliot—a high rise building!— I mostly agree with you that the opponents of height were testifying because they believe it's the best thing for the city. I think they're wrong, and it's important to realize how radical a change it is. They are proposing completely altering height limits that have been in place now for four decades, without any public consultation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Encolpius
Are you perhaps misunderstanding their point of view?
As the woman with the pretentious Brit accent points out, high density does not automatically mean buildings taller than 100 feet. 'Even BPS’s own publication... reported [that] Portland does not need height to compensate for any foreseeable shortage of development capacity.' If density can be achieved (and perhaps spread over a far larger area of the central city and eastside) without towers, then why is building high so imperative? I haven't heard any very articulate reasons on this forum so far, just variants of a false dilemma between highrises or no new development whatsoever.
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People sometimes point to Paris as a model for a dense, medium rise city. It's true that Paris is very dense, but it achieves that by being
very consistently dense. If there are any single family detached houses in the inner arrondissements, they're certainly very rare. This is not a model that's replicable to Portland. From a theoretical point of view, we could decide to tear down all the houses in Ladd's Addition and replace them with 8 story buildings, but in a city where 4 story building at 33rd & Division are controversial, I don't see it happening.
A lot of people at the hearing spoke about their desire to save the historic buildings in the West End. I entirely agree with them. The collection of churches in particular is one of the things that makes the neighborhood special. But if we remove them from the list of developable sites, and we want to massively increase the population in the West Quadrant, then we have to be realistic about how where we're going to get that capacity.
Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard talked about how unaffordable Hong Kong and Singapore are, as if that is inextricably linked to the fact that they have many high rises. She darkly referred to "global investors" and the "World Bank". Well, San Francisco is a mostly low rise city (outside of the Financial District) and it's now unaffordable to anyone who doesn't work in the tech industry. The London property market is now completely dominated by petrol money and Russian oligarchs, despite the fact that it too is mostly low rise.
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Originally Posted by Encolpius
The South Waterfront, which has been deliberately built as high as the market will sustain, is by all accounts (I haven't lived in Portland for a while so tell me if I'm grossly mistaken here) a dreary place that doesn't feel very 'Portland' at all; in fact, it lacks the diversity of street life and cultural activity that distinguish what most of us think of as 'urban'.
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I would encourage you to go see South Waterfront again next time you're in Portland. The neighborhood initially had an issue that a lot of capacity was released into the market right as the global economic crisis hit. For a few years, there were not many people or businesses there. In the last few years it was really changed, and a lot of new businesses have opened up. Go there today, and the streets are actually fairly busy with people. The area where the streetcar, tram, and bicycle valet all meet is one of my favorite urban scenes in Portland. With its large number of cyclists, its LEED buildings and its wonderful open spaces it is a very 'Portland' neighborhood, unless your notion of 'Portland' is very narrowly drawn to only include the streetcar suburbs.
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Originally Posted by Encolpius
The sections of the Pearl District built to lower height limits have a much different feel. They feel simply like pricier, snootier versions of older Portland neighborhoods like NW, Buckman or Boise-Eliot. Ms. Crowhurst Lennard gives plenty of reasons ( link that mac posted), grounded in very recent social science research, why neighborhoods composed predominantly of 'human-scale, five- to eight-story, stepped back, mixed-use building[s] around an interior garden courtyard' promote a more vibrant community and collective life, and a more sustainable and affordable city overall. A height limit of 100 feet would produce a neighborhood of buildings like these. What's so intolerable about that? |
And yet in the Pearl we have a model of a very livable community with many buildings over 100'. The map below, taken from the Block 136 Design Review, shows the heights of existing buildings in the Pearl. Notably it includes the three of the buildings in the Brewery Blocks, the 937, the Encore, the Casey, the Metropolitan and the Edge Lofts, all of which I think are pretty successful projects. Immediately outside of the Pearl there is the Indigo, which is a great mixed use building that has a great presence both on the skyline and at the street level.
I'm not going to repost why I thought that article in the NW Examiner was terrible, but you can read my comments below it. In short, it was full of non-sequiturs and statements without any evidence to back the statements up.
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Originally Posted by Encolpius
Moreover, why is it impossible for some people to have a rational conversation about the future of cities without caricaturing their opponents as Morlocks? Didn't the awful twentieth century sufficiently teach us to beware of this haughty and disdainful variety of 'urbanism'?
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I feel like you might have nailed it here. Although I'm not incredibly familiar with Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard's career, my guess is that she's of an older generation of urbanists that reacted again the worst examples of mid-20th Century urban planning. And that's fine; someone needed to. I grew up in Scotland, which built high rise social housing with great enthusiasm in the 1960s. Scotland is now tearing down all those towers with equal enthusiasm. We shouldn't be doing towers in the park style planning. But no one is proposing that, and the Portland Zoning Code has plenty of provisions to prevent it. (Ground floor active uses, maximum setbacks, transit street main entrances, etc etc).
In summary, I think the people testifying were doing so from a position of what urbanists like Leon Krier tell them about tall buildings, and not from a position of what the reality on the ground in Portland is.
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The people who show up to these things should really be carted off to the loony bin. If these people had their way, downtown would be leveled except for two story buildings.
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