I posted a last month about the first downtown Portland building to be turned into a parking lot. Surface parking lots downtown are an historic 1960s and ’70s legacy that current city planners trying to erase. A whopping 29 percent of Old Town is surface parking lots, but turning lots back into buildings is much harder than tearing the structures down in the first place. Planners and historians are squabbling over height limits for new buildings and the Portland Development Commission is considering offering Uwajimaya grocery $10 million to build on an Old Town parking lot.
Anyway, today local blog Cafe Unknown has these amazing old photos of Portland. Check out this same stretch of downtown (shot in opposite directions) from 1968 and 1935:
The amazing thing is that no matter what other promises are made, the area surrounding the interchanges always turns into a neglected, weed-infested, cracked-cement blight.
Highways make dirty hippies & gutter punks look like great neighbors, in comparison. Too bad there was no Google Streetview in ’68.
As usual with planning, the answer is absurdly simple, but it’s pulling it off that’s crazy difficult if you’re in a hurry.
The land the lots are on have to be worth enough to justify the investment of creating a building*. The only reliable way to get dense, new development (if that’s what you really want**) is to make the area a super desirable place for a lot of people to live and work. Portland’s already an awesome place to live, the problem is fostering the requisite jobs.
I’m of the (simplistic) opinion that if we keep the area safe, visually attractive, well connected to good transit, etc the rest will take care of itself if we can effectively foster quality job growth. I think planners often want to rush this process along (i.e. without waiting for the jobs), and that leads to a list of failures, including a lot of ideas that arguably wouldn’t have been failures if they had been allowed to grow more organically.
* Leaving out the credit crunch, for now.
** For example, I avoid the Pearl now. I already avoid Old Town, but if (when) it becomes Pearl East, I’ll probably avoid it then, too. I like our city the way it is, size-wise, but it would be great if we could retain more of the hyper-educated people who move here, but fail to acquire quality jobs and ultimately move to some other city that’s able to support them financially. I know some nativists say, “good riddance,” but I think our city is improved by adding as many well-educated people as we can.
Ditto Colin’s comment. If there is a demand for more robust land uses on those sites, they will redevelop automatically.
This is the limitation of saying “planners want to see this happen.” Who cares? Do planners own the lots? Are we taxpayers going to pony up millions of dollars in incentives to make redevelopment happen on each of these lots?
What would you build right now anyway? There is a glut of office and residential space on the market. There is a strange obsession at the city and PDC that everywhere must be “revitalized” at once, and that the public must be involved.
I agree with Blabby and Colin. Just pointing out that I think the planners and City Hall would say “If you build it, they will come.”
It is interesting to compare those two pictures to Dresden pre and post WWII. It doesn’t look much different.
Bombers/too many cars, at the end of the day you can’t tell them apart.
Also – those two pictures were shot from opposite directions? If only there was some technology that could have rotated one of them before you republished!