Comments on: Gresham speeds up design standard revisions /news/2010/04/21/gresham-speeds-up-design-standard-revisions/ Building and Construction News in Portland, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:38:14 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.6 By: Nick Bjork /news/2010/04/21/gresham-speeds-up-design-standard-revisions/#comment-20265 Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:38:14 +0000 /?p=52107#comment-20265 Josh,
Thanks for clarifying. I have made some slight changes that, I feel, better represent your stance. I have a question though. How will the council decide on which types of retailers to include and which ones to exclude? It seems to me that you might encounter some retailers that fall between the cracks, and are heald to innappropriate standards. This would ultimately make it harder to do business in Gresham, a misnomer that is already present. Would you pinpoint specific companies? Thanks for reading. Best of luck to you and the Council.

]]> By: Josh Fuhrer, Gresham City Councilor /news/2010/04/21/gresham-speeds-up-design-standard-revisions/#comment-20205 Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:32:10 +0000 /?p=52107#comment-20205 As a point of clarification, I didn’t suggest that we should only have design standards for specific types of retailers; rather I said that we need design standards on all types of retail, but that we need to have different square-footage maximums for different types of retailers, not just a blanket square footage maximum for all types of retail.

For example, we may want a more restrictive maximum square footage limit on discount stores than we do on department stores or grocery stores. A one-size fits all approach for retailer size doesn’t make sense. We need to be more thoughtful about our approach so that we can encourage a diversity of retailers in our community that we don’t currently have, while protecting local small businesses from the big box discount stores.

The crux of this issue is that we want to put restrictions on the kind of discount stores that hurt local small business, while making it possible for the types of retailers we do want to see in our community to come here. This is the programmatic side of the design standards project.

The design side of the design standards project contemplates how retail buildings look, what materials are used, how they interact with the streetscape and the surrounding buildings, accessibility, sustainability, landscaping, and so on. We should have standards for these design issues on all retail developments, while differentiating the square footage limits we place on different types of retailers.

-Josh Fuhrer, Gresham City Councilor.

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