As I have discussed in the last few weeks, suburban development patterns during the past 70 years have had serious detrimental impacts on the human scale, mobility needs and infrastructure costs of our cities and towns.  But those impacts are only the ones that we experience directly.  Several less obvious impacts may be of more consequence: individual and community health, societal equity, climate change.

Health consequences are related to the dramatic decline of walking in our daily lives, a result of most of us having become increasingly reliant on the automobile.  Rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other conditions are all seriously affected by the pattern of our built environment.  Even the Surgeon General has taken note of this with his call to action, !. The Centers for Disease Control made walking a high priority along with combating chronic diseases caused – or aggravated – by reduced physical activity.

On equity issues, the suburbs are not at all conducive to housing, serving and employing those with fewer resources.  Low density housing is too spread out to be cost effectively served on a per capita-per acre basis.

Transportation is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s no coincidence that the explosive growth of emissions tracked with the growth of carbon fueled vehicles to serve our suburban lifestyles.

All of these factors point to the need to become much more aggressive in the next few decades about rethinking and redeveloping our urban and suburban landscapes.  In Oregon we have strong planning laws that help guide us in making difficult choices about the places where we live, work, shop, and recreate.  These include urban growth boundaries as well as policies for walkable, denser, transit-served areas and accessible green spaces.

While challenging, we have some valuable tools to create much healthier, equitable and sustainable places.

Brian Campbell has been involved in land use planning in Oregon for more than 26 years.

The post Blog: Creating places that are more sustainable appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Much of what we, as highly mobile Americans, take for granted about our current lifestyles is built on the assumption that we should be able to park close to, if not at, the place where we’re going. It’s an unconscious thing.  I do it all the time, getting a little frustrated when I have to search more than a minute or two for close-by parking. And my family and friends are always complaining about lack of parking.

But here’s the reality: Parking is a by-product of our auto-dominated society.

For a whole host of reasons, Portland and most other cities are moving toward a more urban way of living, and away from organizing our lives around the automobile. The drivers for this include the higher societal cost of suburban sprawl when all costs are considered; the imperative to move to more efficient, less costly housing forms (think multifamily) for larger numbers of people; the attractive lifestyle choices inherent in urban living to an increasing number of young people and retirees; and the need to become far more energy efficient as we move into an era of increasing risks associated with climate change.

In the 1970s, Portland made a choice to limit the number of parking spaces downtown in order to revive the central city by encouraging people to use transit. It worked.

Now we need to do the same in those areas along high capacity transit lines that will become far more densely populated in the future. In these areas we are already seeing tensions arise over parking. But limiting parking in these areas is necessary to encourage more and more people to make the transition to a lifestyle that is far more dependent on walking, biking and transit.

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In my blog posts, I’ve already talked about the concept of sustainability and its relationship to planning. Another word that has increasingly become part of that conversation is “resilience.” Both are important in understanding how planning needs to be used to help create more livable communities and regions.

The two terms refer to very similar results, and some people use them interchangeably. But I believe the best way to think about resilience is as a major component of overall community sustainability. I think about resilience in terms of the viability of the natural systems, community infrastructure, and other key systems that are critical to the long term ability of a community or region to survive and thrive.

Perhaps the most critical of these is the human connection to water, from its importance in the health of the regional ecology to its conveyance systems for use by humans, to flood control, to its importance for commercial and recreational use.  The resilience of these water-related systems is critical to the future livability of a place.

The same thing can be said of the network of systems by which people move themselves and their goods, which includes all of the various transportation systems and the modes of travel on them. Ensuring that the streets, pedestrian ways, rails, waterways, airways and their related means of travel are well supported and work well together are critical to the resilience of a community.

In addition, there’s the electrical grid and the accompanying power facilities on which we depend, education systems, and a number of others. The key point is that their resilience, their ability to withstand the tendency of man-made elements to deteriorate and otherwise become inadequate over time, is critical to sustaining human life. The importance of planning for the resilience of these systems cannot be over-stated.

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In the past I’ve talked a lot about the main areas of growth and development for Portland’s long-term future – the urban centers and major corridors. But recently a number of controversies have surfaced within neighborhoods about the impacts of changes (teardowns, incompatible design, etc.) that are ongoing as redevelopment occurs in those areas composed of mostly single-family houses. Is anything happening to address these issues?

With the Comprehensive Plan update nearly complete, attention at the city staff level over the next year or two will turn to implementation measures – most prominently the zoning code, which sets the regulatory structure for development and redevelopment. The code update will follow the direction of the Comprehensive Plan and concentrate on the centers and corridors (the Mixed Use Zones discussed previously) in the coming year; however, there are proposals in next year’s budget to address these ongoing issues as well.

Specifically, there is a proposal to revise the standards for single-family areas to address compatibility concerns, lot coverage and height requirements, “skinny lot” development, while providing some flexibility for needed infill development and redevelopment. A companion proposal would update the historic resources inventory over a period of years in order to provide a more rational basis for determining which buildings merit retention, and where redevelopment is appropriate.

Finally, there is also a need to update the standards for multifamily-zoned areas, especially as the existing stock of apartment buildings is aging and will need significant upgrades in the future.

Over and above basic zoning standards, one of the much discussed ways to address these neighborhood concerns is to expand design review outside the central city. However, state law restricts where that can occur. In future posts I’ll talk about how and where that might make sense.

The post BLOG: Teardowns and other hot neighborhood issues appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

In the past I’ve written quite a bit about the reliance the city of Portland has placed on its “centers and corridors” strategy to absorb most of the new residential growth the city is anticipating in the future. It’s a strategy that has its roots in the city’s 1972 Downtown Plan, has been enshrined as the cornerstone of Metro’s regional growth strategy since the adoption of the 2040 Growth Concept in the mid-1990s, and is a major element of the new draft Comprehensive Plan.

In the last few years we have begun to see a major surge in three-to-five-story buildings with commercial space on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors, especially in many parts of inner east Portland such as Southeast Division Street and North Williams Avenue. These areas are changing dramatically as a result, and there has been a good deal of controversy, particularly about potentially increased traffic and taller buildings adjacent to single-family houses. As part of the new Comprehensive Plan and accompanying zoning code revisions, the city has been working on the Mixed Use Zones Project, which aims to completely overhaul the way it regulates these types of projects.

The new Comprehensive Plan proposes to revise what’s been allowed in most commercial areas, creating a vibrant mix of uses throughout the central city, in smaller commercial centers, and along major transportation corridors throughout the city. The MUZ project directly addresses concerns about how these mixed-use projects will integrate into the fabric of existing neighborhoods. The early concept work looks very promising, with major attention to building heights and transitions to adjacent housing, basic design standards, and incentives for community benefits such as affordable housing, historic preservation, and key community services such as grocery stores, day care and publicly accessible outdoor space.

As this work progresses I’ll be commenting further about how it will be helping to transform Portland as it grows.

The post BLOG: Making higher density work appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

I made another trip to Houston last week, which provoked some thoughts about the contrast between what has happened as a result of planning in Portland over the last few decades, and the situation in Houston.

As mentioned before, Houston has long been the anti-planning poster child for its lack of zoning as an implementation tool. They do have a planning department, though I definitely will have to find out what functions they perform if I keep writing about the city.

In the inner-ring neighborhoods around downtown, the lack of coordination between land use and transportation planning combined with the lack of any zoning controls on land use is enabling widespread unplanned redevelopment. Houses throughout these neighborhoods from as early as 1890 are being torn down and replaced with townhouses and apartment developments; most have no access to transit within a mile or more, and even then it’s spotty. In some cases massive apartment complexes are being erected with no transit service within any reasonable walking distance.

Portland has been criticized lately for allowing similar redevelopment projects in certain areas. However, the major difference is that these projects are allowed only where there is significant transit capacity within easy walking distance. Metro just renewed, through the November ballot, its commitment to protect the integrity of single-family neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area while encouraging higher intensity land uses, including significant housing density, in high-capacity transit corridors.

The difference between the two regions could not be more dramatic. Houston will continue to see massive traffic buildup in these newly popular inner areas to match their suburban traffic nightmare, while Portland will show much greater increases in density while maintaining a much higher quality of life in similar inner neighborhoods.

The post BLOG: Houston vs. Portland appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The last couple of posts I’ve talked about some of the planning issues in Houston, including issues having to do with “walkability” and livability generally. I also recently spent time in France, and it’s always interesting to revisit those special places Americans have come to love as examples of great livability – specifically, those classic features of both big cities and small villages that make it easy to walk to take care of one’s daily needs in a very charming setting.

But the last few times we’ve been in Europe, it’s evident that elements of an auto-centric life are starting to creep in. We stayed with friends in the village of Labastide-d’Anjou in southern France for a couple of days, and it had all the elements of a thriving small town – the bakery, café, small grocery stores and other services all concentrated within a few blocks of the town square and church. But right at the edge of town, just off of the regional highway, was a new strip mall with a large amount of convenient parking right in front of seven or eight stores, including a supermarket.

France has tried very hard to preserve what it recognizes as its most valuable asset – the scenic beauty, vibrancy and quality of life of its countryside. More than almost any other factor, that is what has made France the most visited country on Earth. And it has happened only because of extensive direct subsidies to French farmers, keeping them on their land and making good use of it. But the corollary policy has always been to keep the towns and villages compact and economically vibrant as well.

If either is eroded, France will lose a major economic mainstay. If a successful strip mall leads to a hollowed-out town center, the consequences for that village, and eventually others, may be quite unfortunate.

The post The ‘Walmartization’ of France? appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Last time I talked about Houston‘s incredibly poor walkability – a major attribute of what makes a community livable. Of course, there are many measurements one could devise for defining livability, and most planners would say that walkability is among the most important. But not everyone sees it that way.

On Sunday, Oct. 19, after we got back, I read a David Brooks article in the New York Times talking about the different growth models at play in Houston and the San Francisco Bay Area. Basically, he’s comparing them as another way of talking about the “political segmentation” going on in this country, but in doing so he gets into a major planning issue: what constitutes a truly “livable” city.

Brooks uses studies by Chapman University professor Joel Kotkin in making the case that “Houston wins when it comes to livability, especially for people who want to have children.” His primary evidence is that comparing the annual earnings per job and the cost of living, “Houston ranks top among major cities.” Brooks does acknowledge the Bay Area’s “creativity and charm” and even mentions that it’s “great for walking,” but concludes that it’s a “luxury region, unaffordable and wildly unequal.”

Anyone who knows the Bay Area recognizes that there is some truth in that statement, and Portland and other cities also struggle to achieve a high degree of livability for all. But a true measure of livability includes a whole range of factors, including economic measures that also take into account the personal and societal costs of transportation and greenhouse gases, among others.

Using the simple math of one economic measure as the only indicator of livability is very misleading. In Portland we have long recognized there is a more sophisticated and accurate way to talk about livability, and that does include walkability.

The post BLOG: Is Houston the most livable city? appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

It’s no secret that Oregon Health & Science University has compiled short lists of firms still in the running to design and construct two new buildings in Portland’s South Waterfront District. However, university officials have declined to name these finalists that responded to a request for proposals in August.

Now, industry sources say six teams of architects and general contractors are vying for the projects.

Industry professionals, who requested anonymity, confirmed that the three teams moving ahead in the interview process to design and build the $340 million Center for Health and Healing South are ZGF Architects with Hoffman Construction, NBBJ and GBJ Architecture with Turner Construction, and SmithGroupJJR and Mahlum Architects with Mortenson Construction.

Sources said teams interviewing for the contract to design and build the $160 million Knight Cancer Research Building are ZGF with Mortenson Construction, SRG Partnership with McCarthy and Andersen Construction, and Perkins + Will and Hennebery Eddy Architects with Skanska.

The university anticipates having a design-build team in place for the Center for Health and Healing South in mid-December and one for the Knight Cancer Research Building by early January 2015.

The estimated 675,000-square-foot Center for Health and Healing South will hold ambulatory surgery services and outpatient clinics for cancer treatment and cardiovascular surgery. It also will house the clinical trials for OHSU‘s Knight Cancer Institute, an 80-bed guesthouse, a conference center, a central utility plant and a parking garage.

The approximately 330,000-square-foot Knight Cancer Research Building will have research labs, administrative offices, a conference center and parking. Plans to construct the center got a boost last year when Nike co-founder Phil Knight promised to give $500 million to the Knight Cancer Institute if OHSU could raise $500 million more in two years.

Construction is scheduled to start on both buildings is scheduled to start in March 2016 and finish by July 2018.

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So, last time I talked about all the great things about “walkability” when it comes to the quality of urban life. As part of my recent travels I was in Houston for six days visiting my daughter’s family, and it provided quite a dramatic contrast. It’s by far the least walkable city I’ve ever been in.

As most planners are aware, Houston achieved some notoriety by being the only major city without zoning. So you might think that would be the most notable planning feature. But from my observation, the lack of zoning does not seem to have caused any major land use compatibility issues. But it may have played a role in the incredible lack of attention to the walking environment.

Even in the better neighborhoods, sidewalks are clearly an afterthought. Most blocks have some form of narrow sidewalk, although many are in such bad repair that they are unwalkable (especially with a baby stroller), or are interrupted by stretches of dirt and/or mud. But at least there you can always walk in the street. The design of public spaces along major streets is even worse, with signs, telephone poles and other obstacles when there is an actual sidewalk.

So, of course even in the good weather months few people walk, even in downtown. The exception is underground. There, almost every block has been developed to include a tunnel system that links most of the high-rise buildings together. There are literally dozens of miles of tunnels, and that is where people circulate from one building to another, eat lunch, have coffee, and do some shopping – what little there is in downtown. However, tunnels eventually close, on different schedules because they are private property.

More on Houston in the next post.

The post BLOG: Goin’ to Houston: What’s walkability? appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.