Is Portand’s livable quality getting better? If you’re an architect, maybe you think so. For others, not so much.

Portland 1917 and 2017. We designers need to ask ourselves tough questions: is this really getting better? By whose judgment? How are those judgments made, and under what biases?

In the last decade or so, a new fashion has come to dominate Portland’s architecture and planning circles.  We might think of it as “Little Vancouver” – aggressively modern buildings, often tall or bulky, surrounding well-manicured landscapes of public space.  The buildings are often extravagant, artfully expressive, and sometimes darlings of architecture critics.

In Vancouver BC, former planner Larry Beasley referred to that city’s approach as a version of New Urbanism.   But we might also regard them as a modestly more urban reincarnation of the “Towers in the Park” formula of the 1930s utopian architect Le Corbusier, or other varieties of the same modernist movement he championed.  Some of the elements of New Urbanism are tacked on — some mixed use, some transit, some green features.

The trouble is, Le Corbusier’s modernist utopia — embraced enthusiastically by the likes of General Motors and the freeway-building Robert Moses — did not quite work out as planned.  Around the world, it ended in dystopian landscapes of functionally segregated, resource-guzzling proto-sprawl.  This was the regime eviscerated by critics like Jane Jacobs – herself a darling of Portland planners of a generation ago.

So it’s curious that many Portland architects and planners now seem persuaded that this new-retro approach is a wonderful thing.  This time around, we will get more density as a result of these buildings, and that adds to sustainability.  Even better, we will be able to install wonderful new “green” technologies on and around these buildings.  The buildings will be stylish canvases for our contemporary artistic expressions.  And we can use the high profits from these buildings (and their increasingly wealthy buyers) to set aside affordable housing, save some historic buildings, and even create some new public space (Director Park is a proudly cited example).  This is a good industry for the city, fueling jobs and improving its attractiveness.

What a deal!  It’s all good, right?

Unfortunately the research evidence (to say nothing of a half century of other sad evidence) does not bear out this optimism.  In fact, studies show that tall buildings have up to 60% more embodied energy than lower ones – and that’s on top of the significant embodied energy investment required to build a new building, in relation to an adaptive reuse of an existing building.  But we’re getting fewer adaptive reuses, thanks to a massive wave of tear-downs to make way for new buildings. 

Other critical evidence flies in the face of claims.  Many green buildings do not work out as planned, and the claim that density is automatically a guarantor of sustainability is simplistic at best.  Greater affordability does not automatically come with additional units, as Vancouver has demonstrated.  Real estate does not obey the simplistic laws of supply and demand; location is a critical variable driving cost.  So is height.  Put simply, it matters where you build,  no less than how much you build.

So why is it that our architecture colleagues — a community to which the two founders of this blog belong, we should note — seem so credulous and so immune to the evidence, not only of research but of ordinary experience?  Why is the gulf so big between what architects and planners judge to be good buildings, and what pretty much everybody else thinks?

More pointedly, why, on the best evidence, are we slowly but persistently destroying the livable quality and heritage of Portland, with the best of apparent intentions?

It turns out that there is good research on this question too.  Environmental psychologists have documented a number of cognitive and professional biases at work within the architectural and planning communities.  For example, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that “architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.” The researchers traced this aesthetic blindness to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations: “Evidence that certain cognitive properties are related to building preference [was] found.”

A similar cognitive bias is explained by what is known as “construal level theory.”  Architects and planners, having a psychological distance from the actual lives and experiences of people within their buildings and landscapes, must “construe” the criteria that they deem to be of value.  Often these criteria are at odds with the values and concerns of actual citizens and residents, and the architects often focus instead on the more exotic and precious concerns of other architects — formal manipulations, witty professional references and the like.  But these issues bear little relation to the actual quality of life of citizens — and in that there is a troubling question of professional ethics.  In short, what is the purpose of architecture, beyond its capacity to please architects and their connoisseurs?

Another factor is more prosaic — the role of architects as marketers for large-scale industrial developments.  In effect we become packagers of a product, and our irresistible “packaging” is our art, combined with the expert allure of our universities.  You might like the result because it’s shiny and new.  If you don’t like it, you are a “philistine,” who doesn’t appreciate good art, or expert intelligence.

This we shut down debate by imposing our expertise, and spurning more robust traditional alternatives as “pastiche,” “kitsch,” and similar architectural curse words.  But in such an economically dependent condition, it is hard for us to look critically at the source of our own livelihoods, and more tempting to continue the apologist narratives, helping to explain (to others and to ourselves) how benevolent it all really is.

As the writer Upton Sinclair famously said, “it is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their salary depends on their not understanding it.”

An image by the architects Rem Koolhaas, satirizing the chaos and the inanity of supposed “green” buildings in Dubai and elsewhere.

“The work we do is no longer mutually reinforcing,” said the architect Rem Koolhaas, “to the point that each new addition reduces the sum’s value.”  Perhaps that’s because, in our effort to create something marketably exciting and new, we have lost the coherence and beauty of good human environments with robust natural qualities, of the kind we can see all around us — including in Portland’s own history.

Well, whatever we do, we mustn’t copy the past, according to the most egregious self-serving tenet of the faithful.   Yet our ancestors practiced just such a revivalism repeatedly — in the Arts and Crafts, the Renaissance, Georgian London, 19th Century Paris, and thousands of other periods and places —  and it produced some of the most successful, most loved, most long-lasting and sustainable places in human history.  But whatever we do, we must never, ever build anything like them again?  Instead, we are told, we need buildings “of our time.” It seems we deserve to be punished with crappy environments – but at least they are “modern”.

Thankfully, the research evidence clearly points out such cognitive follies, which are the results of systematic errors of thinking.  We can see these biases and illusions at work in the fascinating research of psychologists like Daniel Kahneman (the subject of a new book by Michael Lewis) and the “bounded rationality” described by Herbert Simon and others.  This rich and growing field offers us much to think about.

The question is, can we use these insights to break open our own illusions, and begin to see more clearly how Portland can be a truly better city?

A new proposal for a tall modernist building in Goose Hollow, a historic low-to-mid rise neighborhood in Portland. The project presented at a February neighborhood meeting by Mithun Architects, and other members of the development team. The project goes before the Design Commission on March 23rd, 2017.

Portland City Council unanimously approves referral of Auditor independence proposals to voters

City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero. (Photo: LC- Andrew Theen/The Oregonian)

“Portlanders will vote in May whether to strengthen the independence of the elected auditor who oversees Portland’s Independent Police Review Division and evaluates the performance of the city’s bureaus.

“The Portland City Council voted unanimously Wednesday (Feb 1) to put before voters changes to the city’s charter that would give the auditor greater independence over spending, hiring and legal decisions.

“Mayor Ted Wheeler called the unanimous decision “historic” and noted that Portland City Council needs to give the public confidence in a time when “government accountability is under siege.”

http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/02/portland_voters_will_decide_on.html

City Commissioner Dan Saltzman introduced an amendment that would greatly weaken the Auditor’s proposal, placing the Ombudsman’s role in City code instead of the City Charter.  That amendment failed 4-1.

The Ombudsman earlier found undisclosed potential conflicts of interest in a key City of Portland Stakeholder Advisory Committee.  That committee, the West Quadrant Plan SAC, was advising the City on real estate development deregulation, as part of the Central City 2035 Plan.  The Ombudsman found that members of the SAC are public officials under ethics laws, and that the City erred in not requiring such disclosures.  The Saltzman family is also known to have a number of development interests around the city.

 

 

“376 Portland homes were demolished last year” – Portland Chronicle

Source: Portland Chronicle contributor.

The Portland Chronicle has listed the 376 homes that were demolished last year, many in close-in neighborhoods with historic fabric.   The Chronicle also notes that the year before, 326 homes were demolished.  That is a pace of about 3,500 homes per decade.

Is this destruction needed to accommodate new growth, as some claim?  The evidence is not there.  According to a housing supply background study done for the Portland Plan in 2010, infill without demolition could accommodate large numbers: “Construction on underutilized lots alone could add more than 120,000 units. ”  An informal survey of the large number of parking lots and under-utilized sites across the city seems to confirm that enormous untapped capacity.

In related news, five adjacent historic homes in Goose Hollow were slated for demolition as the result of a preliminary proposal for redevelopment of a condominium tower at SW 18th and Madison.  The plans were disclosed in a pre-application meeting at the City of Portland on December 16.  There were later reports that the proposal is temporarily on hold, but the ultimate fate of the buildings does not appear positive:

Ironically, the homes are immediately adjacent to an empty parking lot.  There are no known plans for development for that site.

Source (all): Google Maps.

 

Is Portland violating the principle of subsidiarity in its neighborhood involvement system?

Portland’s model of neighborhood involvement is often held up as a standard of political participation for other cities. But recent revelations of problems within the Office Neighborhood Involvement (including the City Auditor’s recent review that found a “trifecta” of problems) call into question whether the city’s heyday of political activism – stopping freeways, building parks and plazas and the like — has given rise to another, more cynical era of cronyism and tokenistic representation (a question we have explored elsewhere in this blog).

Such a condition doesn’t require malevolent intent. It only requires that people become complacent, resting perhaps too much on their past laurels. It requires that City officials allow those with strong self-interests to seize their opportunities, and rationalize to the rest of us how their actions will create jobs, or build sustainability, or generate funding to do other things.  But these claims get scant examination for their validity.

Worse, when those claims or their consequences get challenged with grassroots dissent, there is a temptation to characterize this activism as a form of intolerable NIMBYism, and those who speak out are characterized as cranks, or small vocal elements of a political fringe, or “retirees with too much time on their hands.” Sometimes, those who speak out do indeed feel frustrated and marginalized, and sometimes that frustration manifests in angry expressions.

But of course, this dissent is what democratic citizenship is all about, and it is what grass-roots activism is all about. People are passionate, and sometimes vocal, and sometimes, yes, angry — especially when they feel they are not being heard or respected.  Welcoming this activism, this dissent, should be what the Portland neighborhood involvement system is all about too, surely.

Of course, those who once wanted to build very destructive freeways, and demolish treasured buildings, and displace entire neighborhoods of minorities (as they indeed did in Portland’s unhappy past) did not greet the citizen activists of the 1970s with welcome arms. Those activists were disparaged and marginalized then.

So it is a rich irony, and a troubling one, that we seem to have returned to the days when neighborhood representatives are now regularly disparaged and marginalized by representatives of developer interests, sometimes sadly joined by representatives of the City, and sometimes, their sympathetic allies within the neighborhood involvement system itself.  Worse, they are subject to political pressure and control, using funding mechanisms, insurance regulations, and other subtle ways of putting neighborhoods under the thumb of City Hall.

This is not a sign of healthy democratic neighborhood involvement, but rather, a symptom of a broken system.

The principle of subsidiarity is an important one to invoke at this point. Subsidiarity is widely discussed in many countries today, and within United Nations proceedings.  It is regarded by many as a precondition for healthy democratic participation and political justice. It boils down to the familiar idea that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and from their informed participation at many levels, including the grass roots. The “higher” levels of government are in fact subsidiary to the lower levels, and to the people themselves.  (There is a relation to the idea of “polycentric governance” proposed by Elinor Ostrom, Jane Jacobs and others.)

Under Portland’s current neighborhood involvement system, that principle has, somehow, become inverted. The neighborhood associations have become administrative subjects of the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, and of the coalition system by which ONI administers its services. The money, insurance protection, websites and other benefits inevitably, intentionally or not, come with strings attached. There are subtle, and sometimes not subtle, exercises of political pressure and restraint on behavior from above. For a grass-roots democratic organization, this amounts to a subversion of democratic autonomy and free expression.

It is true that the neighborhood associations need more accountability, more transparency, and more participation from a fuller representative cross-section of their neighborhoods. But it is equally true that the entire neighborhood involvement system needs this and other reforms, from top to bottom. It is not helpful to suppose that the problem is that certain citizens are choosing to become active in issues they care about, and not helpful to disparage these same people. That is a symptom of a system that is in an advanced state of dysfunction.

It would seem that the new Mayor Wheeler and Commissioner Eudaly, both with agendas of greater transparency and accountability, bring with them an opportunity to examine the neighborhood involvement system, and explore the range of needed reforms. We hope they will start with the principle of subsidiarity, and work with the goal of a more constructive and more subsidiary relationship between citizens and their City.

Portland City Auditor proposes Charter amendments to assure greater accountability and transparency

Portland City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero believes there is a problem with the current structure of City government.   The Auditor’s office, which is charged with reviewing the actions of other Executive Branch bureaus, is not sufficiently independent of those same bureaus, she says.   This too-cozy relationship subjects the Auditor to potential political pressure and funding restrictions,  in conflict with Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards.  The result, she says, is a lack of ethical transparency and accountability in City affairs — not incidentally, a key campaign issue for the two newest members of the Council, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Chloe Eudaly.

At a January 10th workshop, Hull Caballero presented concrete proposals to re-organize the position of the Auditor and make other reforms, which would require an amendment to the City Charter.  That amendment would have to be approved by the voters in a May 16th election.  The City Council will take up the question at a hearing on January 25th at 2pm at City Council, 1221 SW 4th Avenue.  Citizens are invited to testify in person, or by email to Commissioners, the City Clerk, and the Auditor.

The hearing should be telling.  Mayor Ted Wheeler criticized the City heavily for a lack of transparency and accountability in government as a candidate, and this would seem an opportune time to make good on his campaign pledges for reform.  Chloe Eudaly, also just elected as Commissioner, has indicated she strongly supported the proposals.  Commissioners Fish and Saltzman are less clear in their positions (Saltzman was absent from the January 10th workshop) while Commissioner Fritz was openly opposed.  (It should be noted that Commissioner Fritz until recently headed the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, the subject of a “scathing” report by the Auditor. She was removed from that position against her wishes by Mayor Wheeler.)

Three guest speakers strongly supported the Auditor’s proposals at the workshop: Gary Blackmer, past Portland City auditor for many years, and later Director of Secretary of State’s Audits Division for many years. Craig Kenton, Dallas City Auditor, who recently led a similar review in Dallas; and Kristen Chambers, attorney, National Lawyers Guild member, stakeholder on other accountability stakeholder committees.

The 2011 Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (also referred to as the “Yellow Book”) specifically requires Auditors to address threats to their independence. This is what the Auditor hopes to accomplish with these charter changes.

The Auditor’s three proposals are:

  1. An ability to hire independent legal counsel.
    Current structure requires legal support to come from the City Attorney, who is hired and reports directly to City Council. Being required to use them as legal counsel for internal investigations is an obvious conflict of interest. The Auditor is both watchdog and “the watched.”
  2. The right to present the Auditor’s budget directly to City Council.
    The current structure requires the Auditor’s budget to be processed first by the Budget Office, which is hired and reports directly to City Council. The Charter change would ensure the Auditor’s Office is autonomous, appropriately funded and insulated from political interference. The City of Dallas Auditor reported that that City recently went through a similar revision, and he recommended the budget solution now used by the City: a standing percentage of the annual city budget is given to the City Auditor’s office.
  3. The right to make personnel, management, and procurement decisions independently for the Auditor’s Office.
    The proposal would ensure the Auditor’s Office is autonomous from the Office of Management and Finance and other bureaus. The Auditor will periodically procure or conduct internal quality control reviews and report the results to the public.

Link to the Auditor’s announcement is here.

Recent news article on the workshop:

http://portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/340293-220453-council-reaction-mixed-to-city-auditors-reform-proposals

Does Portland have a planning ethics problem?

Willamette Week’s illustration showing an increased height benefit received by one of the advisors to the Central City 2035 Plan, as the result of changes recommended by the advisors.

Portland’s new Mayor Ted Wheeler made it clear during the campaign that he thinks Portland has a significant problem with ethical transparency, notably in its planning processes.  “We need a city government committed at all levels to increased transparency and accountability in governing, and it appears this is an area where they have fallen short,” he told the Northwest Examiner during the campaign.

Then-candidate Wheeler was speaking about the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and their West Quadrant Plan Stakeholder Advisory Committee, part of the Central City 2035 plan that is now moving through review.  The City Auditor had just found that members of the Committee had not disclosed potential conflicts of interest, including some with significant development interests in the area. “The public deserves confidence that city decisions aren’t being made with undisclosed interests influencing the process,” said Wheeler.

Now that he is in office, many people wonder how the new Mayor will handle the issue.

From the Northwest Examiner last year:

“Portland city officials have not been overly concerned about possible conflicts of interest among citizens who advise them on policy matters… This casual attitude toward citizen advisers may be ending as a result of an Oct. 21 [2015] report by Ombudsman Margie Sollinger of the City Auditor’s Office.

“Sollinger supported the essence of an anonymous complaint filed with her office in June. The complaint charged that property owners, builders, developers, architects and others with a financial stake in development filled 24 of the 33 seats on the West Quadrant Stakeholders Advisory Committee. [Advising on elements of the Central City 2035 Plan, including increased building heights and other potential developer benefits.]

“Furthermore, all but one of the 17 members who voted to increase building height limits and relax development restrictions had real or potential conflicts of interest, the complaint asserted.

“Members of the committee were not asked to disclose their property interests at any point in a two-year process during which they met 16 times and produced a plan later approved by City Council.

“I have concluded that the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability did not properly train SAC members about their legal obligations,” Sollinger wrote. “I have also concluded that it appears likely that individual SAC members did not comply with their obligations to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

““As a remedy, I have recommended that the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability call for SAC members to publicly disclose any potential conflicts before the Planning and Sustainability Commission or the City Council adopts a final plan in 2016,” [Sollinger said.]

“I commend the citizen activists who brought this to the auditor’s attention and her push to require transparency from all appointees to advisory committees about potential conflicts of interest,” [said then-Mayoral candidate Ted Wheeler.]

http://nwexaminer.com/auditors-report-financial-interests

UPDATE:  The City Attorney did direct the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to request the disclosure statements from SAC members after the fact. Five of the 33 members of the West Quadrant SAC did not comply, including several prominent developers with holdings in the area:

http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/05/20/developer-greg-goodman-defies-request-to-disclose-financial-interests/

 

 

One of Portland’s great treasures – its remarkable grid of walkable streets

Portland’s walkable, transit-supportive street grid is the envy of many other cities. Principal streets are continuous at a 1/4 mile spacing across barriers – even rivers and freeways. This is an important feature, as research has shown (see e.g. http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/UrbanNuclei.pdf)

As we’re assessing what we in Portland need to do to build on our livable heritage, and how we can exchange lessons with other cities, it’s worth stopping occasionally to look at the powerful assets we do have.  One of our most important assets is surely our famously walkable street grid – a holdover from the 19th Century streetcar city design, based in turn on the Continental Land Survey with its 1-mile grid system.

Here’s an article from a while back celebrating this treasure, and pointing out the important lessons it has to offer to other cities.  Those are lessons we can still learn too, as we look to re-connect and revitalize sprawling parts of the city, and the region.

Portland’s Remarkable Model of Modern Walkable Urbanism

Ted Wheeler becomes Mayor, names ONI as “most in need of reform” (tied with the Police Bureau)

Willamette Week’s illustration of their “pop quiz” for the new mayor.

The current issue of Portland’s Willamette Week has a “pop quiz” for the newly inaugurated Mayor Wheeler, who starts his position today. One of the eyebrow-raising questions concerned the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, or ONI: “True or false: ONI is the city bureau most in need of reform.”

His response: “It’s tied for first place.”  (With the Police Bureau, we later learned.

The Office of Neighborhood Involvement is a feature of pride for a city that has a reputation for citizen activism and strong neighborhood representation in government affairs.  But recent developments have exposed deep problems in the department, and perhaps in the City’s wider culture of stakeholder representation.  The Mayor’s comments come less than two months after a scathing article in The Oregonian:

“City auditors have found a trifecta of problems inside Portland’s office promoting neighborhoods and civic engagement, including poor oversight, unequal funding and unfinished plans.”

Among other issues, the Oregonian article described unequal funding for citizens in different parts of the city, with notably higher funding in the core than in the periphery:

“In the last fiscal year, officials doled out $2.1 million to the seven district coalitions that serve as umbrella groups for various neighborhood associations. Of that, the East Portland Neighborhood Office and the Central Northeast group each received nearly the same amount of money — just under $300,000. But the east office represents nearly 150,000 people, three times as many residents as Central Northeast, meaning it received about $2 for every person in its dominion compared to about $6 for the other group.”

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2016/11/audit_finds_problems_inside_po.html

Learning from other cities

View of European cities from the International Space Station at night. London is at lower left, Paris at center right.

Increasingly, the forefront of innovation and economic growth is occurring at the level of cities and their regions, and less so at the level of national governments. Cities are also interacting more directly with each other, and learning from one another’s successes — and mistakes. To play our part in facilitating that kind of “peer to peer exchange” with Portland, we will pass along timely discussions from other cities about issues similar to those we face.

We start with an article from the UK’s Building Design magazine from last year, on the explosive growth of tall buildings in London — a phenomenon occurring in many cities around the world. (And beginning to be a significant phenomenon in Portland too, notably because of increased allowable building heights under the new 2035 Comprehensive Plan.)

Is this trend, fueled by increasingly global real estate capital, a source of “manna from heaven” to do progressive things, as some in Portland seem to think? Will it help with housing affordability, by creating more supply to meet demand? Will it create a more sustainable city? This author, Ike Ijeh, looks at other cities like Paris and St. Petersburg — and concludes that the boosterish claims are problematic, to say the least. (As we have also argued, citing research evidence.)

From Ijeh’s article:

“And in the background to all this, consternation persists about the profusion of foreign investor-backed luxury residential towers sprouting across the city while thousands of Londoners are in the grip of an affordable housing crisis, a situation that has pressed the mayor of Hackney to call for the rejection of fiercely criticised skyscraper plans for Bishopsgate Goodsyard within his own borough. And in an unprecedented move, even a City of London councillor yesterday voiced serious concerns about the “uncontrolled” extent of high-rise development within the City….This chaotic convergence of events once again underlines how London’s approach to tall buildings is in disarray.”

Ijeh compares London to Frankfurt. Here, he argues, the City had no historic, human-scale core left to speak of; so they frankly embraced tall buildings within a coherent but limited area. Whether or not you agree with him that this monocultural district of corporate offices was a good idea (we don’t) we hope you will find his article thought-provoking.

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/tall-buildings-height-vs-heritage/5077474.article

Why an equitable city is good for everyone’s bottom line – and a city of exclusion and displacement is headed for disaster

All of the current representatives of the Portland City Council live within the red circle. None are from Portland’s ethnic communities, and only one is a woman.

Portland has a reputation for being progressive and socially just. But are we really so different from other cities that favor winners (mostly in the core) over losers (mostly away from the core)?  Is our current wave of runaway growth, displacement and homelessness showing up our deeper failures?

Other cities justify this kind of “trickle down” approach under the pervasive economic theory that it’s ultimately best for everyone’s bottom line to favor society’s winners.  Are we in Portland perhaps unconsciously accepting this theory too, and merely making tokenistic gestures towards greater equity — as if to say “it’s a nice ideal up to a point, but… business is business?”

But what if the theory is actually wrong?  The urban economist Jane Jacobs made a strong case that sustainable economic growth comes not by favoring winners, but by maintaining creative diversity and opportunity across the fabric of a well-connected city. Indeed, she warned in her last prophetic book that, if we don’t recognize the inevitable failures of our current approach, we may be hurtling into a “dark age ahead”…

From Public Square:

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2016/12/15/tale-two-futures