Portland developers are working feverishly to get ahead of inclusionary zoning regulations the City Council is expected to adopt this fall.

The state law that lifts a ban on municipal requirements for affordable housing creates an incentive for developers to move quickly: Any project for which a permit application has been granted will be grandfathered in.

For developers, that means entering the planning process this summer or early fall will save them from the headaches of wrestling with regulations whose shape remains uncertain. It also means the early birds won’t have to include units that produce lower revenue amid pressure to provide housing for lower-income Portlanders.

The Bureau of Development Services is working to avoid a logjam later this year, spokesman Ross Caron said. The agency plans to hire 23 more staffers to deal with the expected rush of applications on top of an already busy development pipeline.

“Over the next several months, as we hire and train new staff, we should be able to manage any increase in workload created by the inclusionary zoning changes,” Caron said in an email.

As city officials move toward enacting inclusionary zoning by the end of the year, developers are working to get ahead of it.

Cairn Pacific plans to apply this summer for permits to redevelop the George Morlan Plumbing building, at 2222 N.W. Raleigh St., as part of a dramatic makeover of the Slabtown neighborhood. But the developer doesn’t expect to begin construction this fall.

“We’re going to go through entitlements this summer while we have certainty on what the code is,” Cairn Pacific principal Tom DiChiara said.

In effect, Cairn Pacific stands to rack up predevelopment costs for a project that won’t go vertical anytime soon.

DiChiara and other developers fear that if the inclusionary zoning regulations are heavy-handed, profitability will suffer. If that happens, fewer projects will get built, and housing supply will remain restricted, according to developers.

“It’s a margin business,” DiChiara said. “Despite the economy, margins are thinner than they have been. If some of the worst predictions come through, it will have a pretty chilling effect on development.”

The key to addressing Portland’s housing emergency is to keep building to meet demand, DiChiara said.

“Supply is the answer to affordability in Portland,” he said.

The impending regulations add an unknown variable to projects at a time of increasing costs for land and properties. That has some developers pushing projects up and others waiting.

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen,” said Sam Rodriguez, senior managing director at Mill Creek Residential Trust. ”Everybody’s either accelerating their projects to get them in before, or not going into projects before they know what it is. There probably will be a slowdown in the pipeline until there’s more information.”

City officials said they’re working with industry experts and analysts to ensure the regulations don’t halt housing development.

“We need to make sure that however inclusionary zoning works, the market works,” said Shannon Callahan, housing policy director for Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman. “We want these units to actually get built.”

The city has hired David Rosen and Associates of New Haven, Connecticut, and local firm ECONorthwest, to analyze the economic effects of various affordable housing regulations. The goal is to make sure the regulations don’t put the brakes on development, Callahan said.

The Portland Housing Bureau and Saltzman are considering how to shape the regulations, in consultation with the economic firms and a panel of 13 local developers, architects and public officials convened by Saltzman.

The inclusionary zoning panel includes prominent developers such as Dike Dame of Williams & Dame and Gregory Goodman of Downtown Development Group. It also includes representatives of the Portland Housing Bureau and various nonprofits. Architects are on the panel too, including Nolan Lienhart, director of planning and urban design at ZGF Architects.

“We’re essentially using them as a sounding board,” Callahan said.

The committee is hearing from developers to keep it simple.

“Overarchingly, folks would say the simpler it is for the development community to understand, the better,” Callahan said.

The inclusionary zoning regulations are likely to be placed in the city’s zoning code, Callahan said. The Planning and Sustainability Commission is slated to consider the zoning changes in early September. The City Council would then ultimately decide whether to approve them.

Meanwhile, the City Council on Thursday was set to consider enacting a construction excise tax that would fund future affordable housing projects.

Saltzman lobbied the state Legislature to pass the bill allowing for municipalities to regulate inclusionary zoning and create an excise tax; Gov. Kate Brown signed it into law in March. Saltzman is championing the regulations on the City Council.

“He definitely wants to take advantage of the opportunity to bring inclusionary zoning to Portland as soon as we can, and we expect to have that done by the end of the year,” Callahan said.

The state law lays out the boundaries for inclusionary zoning in Portland. Any new rules would apply only to projects of at least 20 units. No more than 20 percent of units can be required to be rented or sold as affordable housing, tied to 80 percent of the area median income.

Developers are also keenly interested in what incentives Portland will offer. The state law requires cities to offer developers at least one from a menu of incentives to compensate for including affordable units.

These incentives can include full or partial property tax exemptions, fee waivers, density allowances, expedited permitting and additional height. Also, developers may pay a fee in lieu of building affordable units.

Dennis Allen, managing director of Holland Partner Group, said he would like to see the city of Portland offer property tax waivers. Holland was able to greatly increase the density of its Orenco Station project in Hillsboro after earning a “vertical housing” tax exemption, he said.

The tax break enabled Holland to build more expensive structured parking instead of surface parking. That freed up space for additional housing units.

“What really happened is we were able to do a more dense product,” Allen said. “We tripled the units that we were doing there.”

Local governments recoup the property tax revenue later, Allen said.

“After that tax break expires, the city of Hillsboro will have triple the amount of property tax revenue,” he said. “It’s kind of like found money. They could take that incremental revenue and use that to fund affordable housing.”

Saltzman’s committee is looking at the experiences of other cities that have enacted inclusionary zoning regulations. Allen said inclusionary zoning has proved to be only modestly successful elsewhere.

“If you study the cities that have mandatory inclusionary zoning, there really aren’t any of them that have built more than a couple of hundred units a year,” he said. “We need to do better. A couple of hundred units a year isn’t sufficient. We need a couple of thousand units.”

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In response to a highly noticeable design change to a prominent high-rise project, the design approval process in Portland should change, according to some city officials.

Commissioner Dan Saltzman and Bureau of Development Services Director Paul Scarlett are two of them. Both called the difference between renderings of a new Burnside bridgehead tower and the way it looks now, under construction, a “concern.”

“I think this raises a larger policy issue,” Saltzman said. “We need to look more closely at who’s making sure that what’s going up was designed and approved by the (Portland Design Commission).”

Central Eastside gateway

Designed to hold a conspicuous place across the Willamette River from downtown, the Yard tower is intended to function as an urban gateway to the historically industrial Central Eastside. The 21-story mixed-use building features landscaped terraces level with the adjacent bridge. The main tower, nearly a parallelogram, is situated diagonally against the surrounding streets.

The project is Skylab Architecture‘s largest to date, and Hood River-based Key Development‘s first in Portland. When completed, it will hold 276 residential apartments, 400 parking spaces and nearly 20,000 square feet of office and retail space.

But the issue here is the building’s exterior.

show a glittering facade of intermixed glass and metal, with more glass panels near the top. But some observers are dismayed that unlike those drawings, the building has more metal and less glass.

The project team – which also includes Portland-based Guardian Real Estate Services and Andersen Construction – this week held a topping-out ceremony, signaling that construction is coming to an end. Completion is set for this summer.

Rendering vs. reality

Kevin Cavenaugh’s firm, Guerrilla Development, is behind one of the other two buildings going up at the Burnside bridgehead – the Fair-Haired Dumbbell. That project received its share of criticism when its designs were unveiled, so it’s surprising, he said, that Yard, with a more conventional design, has drawn so much ire from the public.

Cavenaugh commutes to the Central Eastside. He said he watched with growing concern last fall as Yard gained its skin.

“Every day I waited for more glass, and every day I’d drive across the bridge, it wouldn’t come,” he said. “I said to everyone, ‘Just wait. Jeff (Kovel, Skylab’s founder) is one of the most talented guys on the West Coast, let alone in Portland. It’s going to look great.’ Now I feel like calling up my friends and saying, ‘Sorry, I was wrong.’ ”

And Cavenaugh wasn’t alone. Beginning in October 2015, commenters began to turn on the much-anticipated Yard project as soon as the glazing and metals started going up. One person compared its look to a prison.

“I thought this was going to be sexy as hell, but it’s looking more like it’s going to be imposing and foreboding,” wrote a commenter named 2oh1.

Another commenter, Derek, wrote, “I’m thinking this is going to be another project where the renderings were almost too good to be true.”

Meanwhile, architect Shawn Sullivan of Sullivan Architectural, was suspicious of the project plans from the start.

“I wondered … when I looked at their sketches – how are they going to meet the energy code?” he said.

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What happened?

The problem that city officials and observers in the building community have with the tower isn’t necessarily that it looks bad; rather, it’s that builders are constructing what they’re permitted for, and what they’re permitted for isn’t what the Portland Design Commission approved.

“We need to honor the permit they’ve been issued,” said Kara Fioravanti, a supervising planner with BDS and a staff liaison with the seven-member design commission. “That’s just the situation we’re in.”

Following an initial meeting with the design commission, the Yard project team responded by making approximately a dozen requested changes, and returned for a Type II review with city staff. Windows were not discussed. A permit was issued.

The process rolled along and plan examiners in the building life-safety division identified that Skylab’s designs allowed too much heat loss to meet current energy code. The project team had its choice among different ways to meet the code, and elected to add metal and remove some glass.

Rebecca Esau, head of BDS’ land use division, said Skylab could have learned about the need for fewer windows had it checked in with personnel in the building life-safety division.

“We encourage applicants to work with the building life-safety portion of reviewers, which typically happens at the building permit stage,” she said. “They opted not to do that at the building permit stage.

“We suggest it to applicants. At this time, we don’t have a tool to force them to spend that time and money to do that analysis.”

Scarlett said citizens have complained, and the bureau has already responded with changes. Examiners now look for energy code compliance earlier in the process. But around half of the BDS staff was hired after the recession ended.

“This is the last thing we want happening; I can tell you that for sure,” said Terry Whitehill, BDS’ section manager overseeing plan review.

Skylab principal Jeff Kovel said he followed the city’s process to the letter, and did so working within a limited budget.

“Design review is not something you just go and do voluntarily,” he said. “We rely on the planners to define the process. We submitted our plan to the city and they reviewed and approved it and issued a permit.”

Plus, energy code has tightened in recent years and most buildings around town wouldn’t conform to it, he said.

Kovel also claimed that the renderings aren’t as different from reality as some people have said.

“They’re actually very, very similar,” he said. “They’re extremely similar.”

Disconnected

Michael McCullough served 12 years on the Portland Design Commission, leaving in 2007. He said that in many cases, including this one, an architect should be aware of all the design requirements that could be applied to a project.

“I think there’s some culpability on both the part of the architect and the regulatory agencies,” he said.

McCullough called the Yard issue a “prototypical” example of a lack of communication between the BDS and the design commission. Another from his tenure on the board was the Mosaic Apartments at 1410 S.W. 11th Ave., he said. That project was rendered with crystal-clear glazing, but mechanical engineers added highly-tinted, reflective glass that gave the finished product an “entirely different” look.

“The design commission was outraged by that,” McCullough said, “and the architect kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘eh, it happens.’ If design commission approves something and some other building gets built, it negates the whole process. If it isn’t adhered to, those people are wasting their time.”

Part of the problem is that the design commission is looking only at rough sketches, Esau said. “And BDS is looking at … building elevations and construction drawings,” she said.

Renderings can sometimes give the public unrealistic expectations, according to Barbara Sestak, an architecture professor at Portland State University.

“They can’t possibly capture all the intricacies,” she said. “The purpose of a rendering is to persuade people, and give a flavor. They’re not exact.”

Now what?

PSU urban studies professor Ethan Seltzer sees two issues here. The first is staffing at the city. The BDS was cut in half when the recession hit, from about 330 staff members in 2008 to around 160 three years later. In most cities, staffing waxes and wanes along with building activity. Permit fees more or less pay the wages of plan reviewers.

“What that means is that you have kind of a feast-or-famine approach to staffing,” he said. “And it’s hard to build up a consistent, dedicated core of expertise to do design review. It’s not that the people doing it don’t have expertise; it’s just that institutionally, there’s not enough memory. And there’s not enough commitment over the long haul to do it well.”

The other issue Seltzer sees is a lack of attention to design review as a policymaking issue.

“I think it’s been a while since the City Council weighed in … on what it’s trying to do with design review,” he said. “It feels like there is a tremendous amount of process involved – lots of reviews, lots of re-reviews – I’m not sure the process we have now is the process we intended to have.”

Saltzman, the city commissioner who oversees BDS, said Scarlett has already approached him about realigning staff to bolster enforcement. But there are myriad issues that examiners must watch for, and that number grows with each new law.

“I think a more focused enforcement division would lead to less confusion on something like the Yard,” Saltzman said.

Many professionals in the Portland building community are critical of the design review process. Sullivan said designers often don’t know a definitive project cost until working through the city’s entire preconstruction process, at which point a project might no longer be economically feasible for a developer.

“Design review pushes for this big, beautiful building to anchor a rapidly developing extension of downtown, without ever discussing the cost,” he said.

Cavenaugh was more blunt.

“I hate the design review process,” he said. “I hate the concept of other people designing my building for me. And some of their requests are really onerous. But to prop up the commission and staff, I’d really like to see some more teeth in what their final edict is. Obviously, I think most people in town would agree with that.

“This is a pretty big freaking deal, and my guess is there’s going to be some changes.”

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Julie Livingston, an architect and senior project manager with affordable housing provider Home Forward, is the newest member of the Portland Design Commission.

The Portland City Council last week unanimously approved a Bureau of Development Services staff recommendation to appoint Livingston to serve a four-year term on the volunteer commission that reviews major developments within city design districts.

Livingston fills an architect position that’s been vacant since Lango Hansen Landscape Architects principal Jane Hansen stepped down last fall. City staffers are still seeking another architect, design or land development professional to fill a second vacancy created when THA Architecture principal David Keltner left the seven-member commission in March.

Tim Heron, a senior planner with the city, worked closely with Commission Chairman David Wark to review more than 20 applications to fill the two vacancies. Although city staffers also nominated Vallaster Corl Architects founding partner Don Vallaster to fill one of the vacancies, City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who oversees BDS, recommended that the council appoint only Livingston.

“I’m holding that (second) vacancy because I really wanted someone from an underrepresented community to round out our commission membership,” Fritz said before the council voted to appoint Livingston. “Julie certainly adds a lot of value in the scope of work that she’s done, and I really appreciate her service.”

Heron said BDS will repost an announcement seeking design and development professionals interested in serving on the commission with the aim of attracting a more diverse pool of applicants. City staffers also are anticipating an additional vacancy when Commissioner Guenevere Millius, whose second term ended late last year, resigns at the end of this summer, he said.

Livingston filled her new role as design commissioner for the first time on Thursday. She said she become familiar with the commission through her work managing the planning of new affordable housing projects for Home Forward. She admires Portland’s design review process.

“It’s a gift to our urban environment,” she said. “Developers, architects (and) contractors are all willing to go through this. I think that’s truly remarkable. It’s an amazing process.”

Serving on the commission seemed like a great way to give back to her community by promoting quality architecture and urban design, she said. As a design commissioner, Livingston said she would especially like to promote design equity.

“It’s been very important to me to raise the bar for everyone: Better design, better construction that serves everybody who lives in our city,” she said. “Everybody deserves to live in an environment that meets our needs.”

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Portland Maps, the popular, city-operated website that displays assessors’ records, building permits and other public information about individual properties, is moving into the era of mobile technology.

The geographic information system (GIS) website has remained unchanged since city staffers created it more than 15 years ago, so an upgrade is long overdue, said Matthew Freid, information systems manager with Portland’s Bureau of Technology Services. Besides sporting a retro appearance, the antiquated website hasn’t kept pace with advances in technology and doesn’t work well on smartphones or tablets, he said.

“It’s becoming increasingly incompatible with modern systems,” he said. “The new site is designed to work on any screen size. It’s touch-enabled, our hope being that people use it outside the office. Bringing it into that mobile process, that was our thesis design statement.”

City officials recently launched a beta version of the updated site, portlandmaps.com/beta, with the aim of gathering public input on the new Portland Maps. Making the beta version public will allow Freid and other city staffers developing the new site to identify any glitches and ensure that it can handle a high volume of users, he said.

“Current Portland Maps is still going to be there,” he said. “The expectation is that people can use (the beta site). We’d like them to give us feedback … Our intent is to get more people using it in a novel way.”

Once any bugs and performance issues have been worked out, the beta version will likely replace the current Portland Maps site within the next six months, he said.

The update to Portland Maps coincides with the Information Technology Advancement Project, an initiative to move the city’s development review process to a paperless system, said Ross Caron, a spokesman for the Bureau of Development Services. BDS staffers are working closely with city GIS specialists to develop an electronic permitting system that will include a mapping function with layers showing different information about specific properties, such as floodplains and zoning designations.

The updated Portland Maps site will also assist BDS staffers who are responsible for setting the addresses for new developments, Caron said.

“When you come in and apply for a permit, one of the steps you would do is identify the property using a GIS interface,” he said.

Freid said he and other city staffers have been working for the past year and a half to develop the updated Portland Maps. Among the advantages of the beta version of Portland Maps over the current site is a more easily navigable online mapping interface, similar to Google Maps, he said. Users of the beta site can also pinpoint where they are on the map and find information about nearby properties. Other new features include a satellite image view, an address search bar that offers suggestions, more detailed utility line mapping and the ability to bookmark specific properties and share information from the site via email or social media.

The current version of Portland Maps is widely used by both city staffers and the general public and receives thousands of daily page views, Freid said.

“People have come to rely on it,” he said. “It’s an internal resource as well as an external resource.”

But there are drawbacks to the site and a large goal of updating Portland Maps is to make it more user-friendly, Freid said.

“We’re this central clearinghouse for all this GIS information and trying to have that authoritative data source that people can get to easily,” he said.

One drawback to the current site is finding information about a specific property without the address, he said. The ability to sync GPS-enabled devices to the beta Portland Maps eliminates this problem.

“This can take advantage of a GPS,” Freid said. “There are a lot of places in the city where there is no address, and trying to get (the current) Portland Maps to go to a place where there wasn’t an address was hard to do.”

The new Portland Maps will be a great resource for contractors and others in the architecture, construction and engineering industries, he said. Information included on the site includes city staff phone numbers and emails to learn more about building permits filed for a particular property and details about easements and the location of utility lines. In the future, zoning and height limits will likely be added to the site.

Freid encouraged industry professionals to test out the beta site and offer feedback via the “about” tab.

“It will help us build a lot of the pieces of how people use it,” he said. “We’re also going to be doing tons and tons of analytics. A big piece of this is getting people to try and use it.”

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The Portland Design Commission in the coming months will gain three new members to replace departing ones.

David Keltner plans to step down from the commission in the next few weeks, city planner Kara Fioravanti said. That will leave the seven-member commission – already with a vacancy after Jane Hansen left this past September – short two people. Also, city staffers have sought applicants to replace Commissioner Guenevere Millius. Her term ended in December, but she is continuing to serve on the commission until at least one vacancy is filled.

Bureau of Development Services staffers plan to forward their recommended candidates for the three vacancies to Paul Scarlett, director of the bureau, in the next couple weeks, Fioravanti said. To join the commission, candidates must then be approved by City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who oversees BDS, and the rest of the Portland City Council, according to Fioravanti.

The city’s hope, Fioravanti said, is to have the new commissioners on board to start reviewing proposed major development in city design districts within the next month or two. In the meantime, city planners have carefully scheduled upcoming hearing dates to ensure enough commissioners can attend to achieve a quorum, she said.

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Developers working on Oregon Health & Science University projects in the South Waterfront District have applied to the city for early assistance.

Eric Wilson of SRG Partnership applied for design advice for the planned eight-story Knight Cancer Institute Research Building. The 332,000-square-foot building would be constructed slightly north of the Skourtes Tower completed recently at 2730 S.W. Moody Ave.

The new research building is slated to include below-grade parking, food services and retail space, offices, a conference center, research laboratory space and research support facilities, according to information filed with the Bureau of Development Services.

Also, Stephanie Becker of ZGF Architects‘ Portland office is seeking design advice for two new OHSU buildings in the South Waterfront.

The first building – pegged for Block 29, bounded by Southwest Moody and Bond avenues and Curry and Whitaker streets – would be a 12-story, 360,000-square-foot, ambulatory care facility constructed atop existing underground parking, according to plans filed with the city.

Building one also includes plans for a two-story skybridge across Whitaker Street to connect Block 29 with the existing Center for Health and Healing.

The second building – on Block 28, bounded by Southwest Curry and Whitaker streets, Bond Avenue and River Parkway – will be approximately 264,000 square feet. The 10-story Block 28 building will feature a mix of uses, including one level of below-grade parking, a conference center and retail on the ground floor, more vehicle parking on floors two through five, a central utility plant on level six and guest housing on the top four floors.

Block 28 will have a single-story skybridge connecting the fourth floor to the new building on Block 29 across Bond Avenue.

Both project teams are tentatively scheduled to appear before the Portland Design Commission on April 16.

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Developers are queuing up another mixed-use building in the convoy of development on the Con-way Master Plan site.

Alex Yale, co-founder and principal at Portland-based YBA Architects, has applied to the Bureau of Development Services for design advice on a proposed seven-story, mixed-use building on the west half of Block 290 (developers call it Block 290W), at 1417 N.W. 20th Ave.

“We’re going in very early to get design advice on the overall mapping of the project,” Yale said. “We’re looking at having buildings fully enclose a public square in the center of the block.”

Yale’s team designed a pinwheel-shaped set of buildings around a public courtyard. The design is intended to maximize visibility of ground-floor storefronts and provide a “gateway” from the new developments to the west into the public park planned for development on the property directly to the east (on Block 290E).

“We worked a lot with the neighbors on the project and got a tremendous amount of feedback,” Yale said. “They really wanted an enclosed European-style square, which is very unique to Portland.”

Preliminary plans for the Block 290W project include graduated building heights of between one and seven stories.

“It’s unique in that the height steps all the way down to one story to get variety and improve sight mapping in the public square,” Yale said.

Though plans are far from final, he said that Block 290W will have approximately 100 residential units on the upper floors, with the ground level dedicated to commercial tenants. In addition, the development will have underground car parking.

“There’s going to be a full-plate parking lot underneath and we’re way over a one-to-one ratio,” Yale said. “I think we’ve got room for about 180 parking stalls for about 100 units.”

The plans that the design team will submit for design advice are very conceptual at this point, Yale said. The number of parking stalls could change, and the developer isn’t certain whether the housing will be apartments available for rent or condominiums available for purchase.

“It depends on what the market calls for by that time,” Yale said.

The Block 290W project site is the southwest portion of a superblock bounded to the north and south by Northwest Raleigh and Pettygrove streets, respectively, to the west by 21st Avenue and to the east by 20th Avenue.

When the superblock is fully developed, Northwest Quimby Street will bisect the parcel, creating a private drive for residents, Yale said.

Block 290, on the southernmost property within the 17-acre Con-way Master Plan approved by Portland City Council in 2012, is the third Con-way project to move ahead. This summer, the $150 million Con-way Slabtown development will open with a New Seasons Market and an adjacent 113-unit apartment complex. Meanwhile, the permitting process has begun for an effort to add two mixed-use buildings featuring about 370 residential units, 600 vehicle parking spaces underground and 500 bicycle parking spaces.

Crews also are renovating the 32,000-square-foot LJC Building as part of the master plan development.

Outside of the master plan, YBA Architects is working on another project – Q21 – on the block to the west and adjacent to Block 290W. The mixed-use building will have 160 market-rate apartments, 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and 12,000 square feet of office space.

“My goodness it’s really happening fast down there,” said Mark Barry, an appraiser and owner of Barry & Associates. “The whole Con-way area is really seeing a lot of movement.”

Barry on Wednesday spoke at a forecast luncheon, saying that although vacancy rates in Northwest Portland are marginally higher than elsewhere in the metro area, he still believes demand will absorb the new units coming online over the next year.

“Finally, Portland-metro is getting some traction,” he said. “This will be, by far, the busiest year ever for multifamily construction in Multnomah County.”

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If you want to gauge the vitality of building activity in Portland, the city’s Bureau of Development Services is a good place to start.

During the recession, as construction ground to a halt, the bureau found itself facing a serious financial shortfall. A lack of projects meant that the permit fees that make up about 95 percent of the bureau’s operating budget dried up. As a result, the BDS was forced to trim its staff numbers from 315 to 145, according to Paul Scarlett, the bureau’s director.

Last year, though, developers and building industry professionals rejoiced when construction cranes began to rise once again against the city’s skyline, and the bureau announced that with the help of City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, it had received approval to begin refilling some of the empty positions.

Some of the recent BDS hires are former bureau employees who had been lost to layoffs. Others are new faces. But they all have one thing in common in addition to their ease with blueprints and development codes.

“Since the recession, we’ve really put a lot of emphasis on hiring people who not only know the technical portion of their jobs, but who also focus on customer service, the working relationships,” Scarlett said.

Scarlett understands the value of filling the department with good people.

“We survived (the impact of the recession) in part because of the compassion and high level of commitment of our employees,” he said.

Even though the number of employees is increasing, Scarlett says the bureau is still looking at ways to continue efforts started during the recession to streamline processes.

The bureau recently conducted an internal survey that will be used to help find out what is and what isn’t working, especially for new employees. Even something as simple as creating a suggestion box can make a big difference, Scarlett said.

There are also strides being made to implement a high-tech system for tracking permits that will give customers around-the-clock access to forms and permits while saving money and reducing a reliance on paper.

The bureau also is in a good place financially.

“The funding is very strong, and we have a healthy reserve,” Scarlett said. “We have reserve goals in some cases of 30 to 35 percent. We have pretty much wiped out deficits in those that we’ve had over the past years.”

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A Portland developer has plans to add 104 apartment units in North Portland, slightly south of a 206-unit building under construction.

The Bureau of Development Services on Feb. 20 issued a construction permit for a five-story apartment building with at-grade parking and ground-level retail space at 3270 N. Vancouver Ave., near the intersection with Cook Street.

The property owner, according to information filed with the city, is Portland-based Cook Street Lofts LLC. The Oregon Secretary of State‘s business directory names Lance Inouye as a registered agent of Cook Street Lofts. Inouye is chief financial officer at PREM Group and formerly was CFO at Gerding Edlen Development Co. LLC.

The owner has hired Vancouver, Wash.-based Gaither & Sons Construction Co. for the $9 million project. Jordan Gaither of Gaither & Sons did not want to comment on the project without the developer’s permission, but city records indicate that the largest apartment will measure 788 square feet.

Across Cook Street from the project site – the former site of a Wonder Bread bakery – the 206-unit Cook Street Apartments is nearing completion. Sierra Construction Co. is building five stories of studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units over ground-floor retail space with underground parking for Lake Union Partners, a Seattle-based company that previously developed The Addy apartments at Northwest 18th Avenue and Northrup Street.

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In the midst of a building boom, aspects of Portland’s development review procedures are being questioned by City Commissioner Amanda Fritz and neighborhood groups that have appealed project approvals issued recently.

Fritz, who oversees the city’s Bureau of Development Services, recently challenged its Land Use Services Division to “raise the bar” for project reviews based on criteria such as neighborhood compatibility, environmental factors and quality design. The directive comes as the division has hired more staffers and streamlined procedures to respond to increased demand for services.

In a memo to the division dated Feb. 5, Fritz mostly discussed discretionary reviews where city approval is based more on subjective guidelines than code adherence.

“I don’t support the philosophy of cramming in density at all costs,” she wrote. “You do not need to ‘get to yes’ with every project. A no, especially up-front in the process, can also be good customer service.”

As the BDS rebuilds itself and hires more staffers, Fritz said she’d like to make clear her expectations for city planners to carefully consider neighborhood concerns during the land use review process. She cited that the City Council last year overturned planners’ approvals of two proposed developments. More recently, neighborhood groups have appealed to the City Council the approvals of two more planned projects.

“Land Use Services staff also serve neighbors as customers, as well as the applicant,” Fritz wrote.

BDS officials are taking Fritz’s comments to heart and figuring out ways to ensure that proposed projects are held to a higher standard, said Rebecca Esau, Land Use Services Division manager.

“We’re having discussions here on what does that mean to raise the bar,” she said.

It will be important for city planners to remember how many neighborhoods in Portland have been reshaped by post-recession development, Esau said.

“Near and dear to (Fritz’s) heart are the neighborhoods and neighborhood concerns,” she said. “Now we’re back to this big boom so neighborhoods are seeing change. We’re hearing an outcry of concern about infill development and compatibility.”

Earlier this month, neighbors of Seattle-based Security Properties‘ Block 136 mixed-use project in the Pearl District and Kehoe Northwest Properties‘ Tess O’Brien Apartments in Northwest Portland filed separate appeals of the Portland Design Commission‘s approvals. Both appeals to the City Council claim that the proposed projects are incompatible with the surrounding neighborhoods, and cite flawed city procedures in gathering public feedback on the plans.

Ron Walters, who lives near the proposed Tess O’Brien Apartments project site and is involved in the appeal of the project, said Fritz’s memo resonated with him.

“A customer service mentality is good, but not if you’re trying to be part of a fair and judicious process,” he said. “The public are customers too. I think her memo is great. It’s spot-on. It tells me there’s a flaw in the process.”

The memo addresses many of the issues that Walters said he wrote to Fritz about late last year after becoming frustrated with the design review process for the Tess O’Brien Apartments. Concerns he raised included that the Design Commission continued to review the project after voting to deny the proposal, and that the neighborhood association wasn’t given enough notice ahead of subsequent hearings to craft an official response.

“My argument is this is not how the process works, and that’s what I heard Amanda say,” Walters said.

The Northwest District Association, which filed the appeal of the Tess O’Brien project approval, raised concerns about procedural errors during the design review process. But the NWDA’s main concern is compatibility, said Gustavo Cruz, its board president. The two proposed six-story apartment buildings, at 1953 N.W. Overton St. and 1950 N.W. Pettygrove St., won’t fit in with the existing shorter structures in the neighborhood, he said.

“The main issue has to do with the massing and scale of the project given its location,” Cruz said. “It looks a bit out of place.”

Cruz lauded Fritz’s reminder to city planners of the importance of considering neighborhood compatibility. He agreed that planners shouldn’t shy away from turning down projects that don’t suit the neighborhood.

“As long as zoning allows, developers are going to build as much as they can while the market is hot,” he said, “and sometimes it doesn’t fit in with the neighborhood. That customer service mentality can go too far sometimes, and that’s what Amanda Fritz was talking about, and I appreciated that and so did other members of our board.”

Developer Marty Kehoe, owner of Kehoe Northwest Properties, said he was baffled by the NWDA’s claim that the project is incompatible with the neighborhood. After four hearings with the Design Commission, Kehoe said he’s confident that the development will relate to nearby structures, including several that are just as tall.

“We’ve designed a building that’s very compatible with its surroundings, and it represents the classic-style apartment buildings,” he said. “The process was lengthy and exhaustive and very expensive for us, but we came out the other end of the process with a consensus that the buildings are very good looking and fit into the neighborhood. It blends in very well. It’s not oversized.”

Kehoe has concerns with Fritz’s memo and her directive for city planners to apply subjective criteria to land use reviews.

“If the city has a clear and concise code and criteria for developers to follow, we will follow it,” he said. “The code needs to remove subjectivity and ambiguity. As long as the city code has clarity and it’s not up to interpretation … then us developers are fine.”

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