With the recent release of the expansive , the city established a daunting goal: creating equity for all groups.

One of the groups mentioned was the elderly population, which is expected to more than double in the Portland-metro area in the next 25 years, according to a 2006 study performed by Portland State University. The Portland Plan lists 10 actions that would help make the city more age friendly; some include creating more accessible housing, aligning housing and transportation investments and educating city staffers about age issues.

Although no specific programs or initiatives are in place yet, the plan could have a big effect on future development, according to Alan DeLaTorre, project coordinator for . The institute is working with the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to create an “action plan” to implement actions outlined in the Portland Plan. No regulations will be imposed, but stipulations and incentives are being considered for the action plan, which will be released later this year.

“We’re very excited because this is the first time the city has articulated a considerable effort to address these issues,” DeLaTorre said. “We are looking to create a set of development guidelines that inform people on how to develop in a more age-friendly and universal way.”

Portland was one of the first U.S. cities to be named an age-friendly city by the World Health Organization. However, the plan reveals that many more improvements can be made.

Many of the actions mentioned in the plan relate to housing development. A lot of the housing being built in Portland is “Peter Pan housing,” according to DeLaTorre, because it doesn’t provide amenities for residents as they age, such as wide hallways for wheelchair access, entry ramps and first-floor bathrooms.

One incentive being considered is a system development charge waiver for home additions with accessibility features. Also, more exemptions could be provided for accessible housing if the city’s Limited Tax Exemption program were improved.

“It’s these types of strategies that might be connected to age-friendly development,” DeLaTorre said. “Currently, the Portland Housing Bureau has a set of strategic priorities, and aging is not among those; we want to change that.”

An initiative being considered is reduction of barriers faced by retirement communities and adult care homes. Many aging individuals lack options as they begin to need assistance for basic needs and health care, according to a study being reviewed by PSU graduate students and BPS officials. The initiative would alter the city’s zoning code to encourage more development of adult care homes and exploration of opportunities to incorporate adult home care models into public housing developments.

Initiatives also are being considered for where housing developments are built. Many older people in the city are limited to where they can walk for food, medicine and transportation, DeLaTorre said. This problem could be changed by adding accessibility and affordability requirements to the city’s transit-oriented development property tax abatement.

Creating more age-friendly housing would not only benefit elderly people, but also developers, said Margaret Neal, director of the Institute on Aging.

“Recognizing that older adults are a very large consumer group, meeting those needs I think is going to be an incentive toward development,” she said. “They are going to be purchasing the (housing) that is most optimal for them.”

Other initiatives being proposed for the action plan relate to the development and maintenance of pedestrian infrastructure, such as sidewalks and streetlights; the creation of more green spaces; and the inclusion of more accessible features in retail and commercial buildings. One idea being considered is to create incentives for commercial developers to exceed American with Disabilities Act standards and use universal design strategies.

Part of the process in developing the action plan is determining which issues are affecting the elderly the most and how they can best be addressed, DeLaTorre said. But many of these proposals could lay the groundwork for future policies.

In order for the actions laid out in the plan to be realized, public-private partnerships must be formed, Neal said. That will take time, but the city has already made tremendous progress, she said.

“As a country, we have always focused on the importance of independent and rugged individualism, but we are age denying; we don’t really want to think about the later years,” she said. “One of my goals is to help people understand that if we design for people with disabilities and people as they grow older, it will benefit everyone.”

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Preservation in the Portland Plan

Two “actions” listed in the latest draft of the Portland Plan relate to historic preservation:

• Develop and implement new approaches, such as area-specific development standards or design guidance, to ensure new development and infill is both affordable and responsive to the distinctive characteristics of Portland’s neighborhoods.
• Inventory historic resources in neighborhood hubs and along civic greenways and develop a strategy to preserve key resources.

The phrase “historic preservation” doesn’t appear in the 183-page document that includes the draft . Of course, city planners note that no single issue is outlined in much detail in the plan – a broad overview of the city’s goals for the next 30 years. Nevertheless, preservationists are concerned about the future of historic buildings if more heed isn’t given to them in the city’s visioning documents.

One of the priorities mentioned in the Portland Plan calls for creating a “healthy, connected city,” in the form of higher-density, “20-minute” communities. But it’s unclear how that density would be achieved, said Cathy Galbraith, executive director of .

“It really ignores the abundant historic and vintage but unprotected resources in those neighborhoods,” she said. “If we don’t pay attention … how many properties are we going to lose?”

Galbraith and other preservationists are concerned because the city’s historic resources aren’t identified fully. The last major update of the city’s historic inventory occurred in the early 1980s, and at that time many east Portland neighborhoods were excluded altogether.

When developers follow goals included in the Portland Plan, a historic building could be torn down rather than preserved, Galbraith said.

“You have to know what you have before it can be protected,” she said.

Eric Engstrom, a principal planner for the city, said that preservationists aren’t the only ones concerned about the Portland Plan’s contents.

“We’ve been hearing a lot of, ‘What does it mean to be or not be in the plan?’ ” Engstrom said. “We’re trying to address that.”

People have spoken up for youth, seniors and disabled persons. Others want to know about planning for emergencies, such as a large earthquake, Engstrom said. He expects the plan to change before it is finalized by City Council next spring, but not every bit of testimony can be addressed.

It makes sense for groups to lobby for inclusion in the Portland Plan, however, Engstrom said. The plan will form the basis for an update of the city’s comprehensive plan, which will spell out in more detail the plans for “physical” changes to the city over the next 30 years.

Galbraith understands that process completely, she said.

“It’s much harder to pick up and add issues (in the comprehensive plan) when they’re not mentioned in the Portland Plan,” she said. To Galbraith, historic preservation is “as important as water resources and open space.”

“(Historic buildings) are a non-renewable resource; they just happen to be a resource that was built over time, by people,” she said.

The is compiling comments to suggest that preservation be a high priority, according to attorney Carrie Richter, the commission’s new chairwoman.

“In a perfect world, we would love to inventory the entire city,” Richter said, noting that many city officials would advocate for such a goal if financial resources were available. “But that’s an expensive endeavor. It makes sense to be strategic.”

Richter hopes the city will lay out a plan to prioritize the inventory of historic resources in areas where high-density goals are established.

“The areas that make the most vibrant neighborhood hubs are historic areas, like Hawthorne, Division and Belmont. And those are areas where inventories are inadequate,” Richter said. “We don’t want to increase density to the detriment of the resources that are there.”

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The Portland Plan is coming, and people who recall the River Plan, which the city of Portland enacted last year, will find this one familiar. Like the River Plan, this new plan has been developed through a bottom-up planning process. This involved several years of community meetings and public outreach, resulting in more than 20,000 comments from residents and businesses.

And like the River Plan, which has been appealed to Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals and the Oregon Court of Appeals, the Portland Plan may have a negative impact on the family-wage jobs in the working harbor.

The Portland Plan will be adopted by City Council and used to guide the city’s land-use decision-making process over the next 25 years. Many of the policies adopted in the Portland Plan will eventually find their way into the city’s adopted comprehensive plan and zoning code, so now is the time to positively influence those decisions.

The Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission has already held two hearings on the draft plan this month, and will hold another today, at 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave., conference room 2500, from 5:30 to 9 p.m.

One of the guiding principles of the Portland Plan is advancement of social equity. To its credit, the plan recognizes that one of the key strategies needed to achieve this goal is creation of well-paying, family-wage jobs. In doing so, the plan tries to tailor specific strategies to “geographic districts that have distinct issues.”

In the Gateway neighborhood, for example, the plan proposes a special funding strategy to create an education center, based on a partnership between several local school districts, Portland Community College, Portland State University and the city. The education center will help provide students with better workforce skills and better access to family-wage jobs.

Like the River Plan, however, the Portland Plan could threaten the thousands of family-wage jobs in the working harbor. Much of the area is devoted to river-dependent industrial businesses, including heavy manufacturing and freight distribution facilities critical to the rest of the region’s economy and unable to move elsewhere.

The plan proposes to focus business development on only five industry clusters, including “advanced” manufacturing (which is not defined), athletic and outdoor equipment, clean technology, software, and research and commercialization.

By the city’s own measure, the harbor accounts for approximately 40,000 well-paying jobs and 900 private-sector businesses – approximately one out of eight jobs in the metro region. But it appears that most of the existing industries in the harbor will not be recognized and supported by specific policies in the Portland Plan. This is either an oversight or a policy choice that needs to be corrected.

In the end, the success of the Portland Plan will largely depend on the resources available to implement it. Without significant growth in family-wage jobs and per capita income, the city’s equity goals will largely become an exercise in trying to do more with less.

With that said, the Portland Plan acknowledges that the path forward requires the city to work smarter, be more practical and be more ready to take on difficult conversations. One of the keys to achieving this is for the city to more fully engage the business community, including the working harbor.

For purposes of the Portland Plan, it is important for the city to have a laser-like focus on job creation, education, infrastructure and the support of existing area businesses, because these are the critical investments that make job growth and equity possible. Now is the time for people in the business and industrial community to offer their views of the Portland Plan.

Phil Grillo is a partner in the Portland office of Davis Wright Tremaine. He represents the Working Waterfront Coalition. Contact him at 503-778-5284 or at philgrillo@dwt.com.

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The city of Portland and IBM have finished a yearlong project that both hope will help better guide the Portland Plan, the city’s long-term planning effort.

IBM helped the city develop an interactive model of the relationships that exist among the city’s core systems. These include the economy, housing, education, public safety, transportation, healthcare/wellness, government service and utilities. The resulting computer simulation allows Portland leaders to see how city systems work together and in turn identify opportunities to become a smarter city.

IBM first approached the city in late 2009 about the company’s System Dynamics for Smarter Cities model. The idea was to create a model that allowed city officials to reduce the unintended negative consequences of municipal actions on citizens, as well as uncover hidden beneficial relationships among city policies.

“The City of Portland has served as a living laboratory during our year-long collaboration to explore how complex city systems behave over time,” said Michael Littlejohn, vice president of strategy for smarter cities at IBM, in a press release on the matter. “While other analytical approaches rely on breaking a problem down into smaller and smaller pieces, the model we’ve created recognizes that the behavior of a system as a whole can be different from what might be anticipated by looking at its parts.”

The work on the model assisted the city in identifying the priority areas for the Portland Plan and setting 25-year objectives, the amount of time the model projects out. These are Economic Prosperity and Affordability, Education, Equity, and Healthy Connected Neighborhoods. The model will also be used to create a metric and track the progress of the plan as it’s implemented.

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The city of Portland has decided to delay any further work on the River Plan until the city’s new comprehensive plan, the Portland Plan, is completed in two years.

After both the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals and the Court of Appeals sided against the River Plan, which would have enforced new zoning and mitigation standards along the Willamette River, the city has decided to pull back on any more work.

After passing the North Reach portion of the River Plan earlier this year, the Working Waterfront Coalition, an industry group representing businesses in the Portland Harbor, immediately appealed the plan to LUBA. LUBA then sided with the industry group, asking the city to complete several tasks before the new zoning can go into effect. Businesses and property owners are concerned about losing too much developable land.

The major step needed for the city to comply is to create an Economic Opportunities Analysis. City staffers are in the middle of creating that document, but according to Chief Planner Joe Zehnder, the city wants that analysis to be incorporated into the comprehensive plan before moving forward.

Zehnder said the city wants to reopen discussions with stakeholders about the zoning and regulation in the plan in the coming months.

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In the constant battle of industry vs. government in Portland, industry has notched another victory.

Last week the Oregon Court of Appeals sided with the , an industry group that represents water dependent businesses in the Portland Harbor, on its claim that the city needs a new buildable lands inventory. The ruling comes after the state Land Use Board of Appeals halted the city’s proposed in January, further diminishing the city’s chances of new environmental zoning on the Willamette River.

The North Reach of the River Plan, which covers land along the Willamette River north of the Broadway Bridge, was passed by the city last year. It was immediately appealed by the WWC to LUBA, and eventually was remanded back to the city with the request that the city determine how much industrial land will be lost with the new zoning and how that land will be replaced.

The WWC didn’t think that was enough, so it appealed the LUBA decision to the Court of Appeals saying the city failed to address Statewide Planning goal 15, which requires various activities to be protected along the Willamette River. The goal couldn’t be met, the WWC said, unless the city conducted a buildable lands inventory. The Court of Appeals sided with the group.

While there isn’t an end in sight to the remand for the city, a buildable lands inventory could be a stepping stone to moving forward with the River Plan.

As part of the city’s , a 25 year vision, city officials plan to conduct a buildable lands inventory. The issue will first be discussed by the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission, along with a public hearing, at the Tuesday, June 28 . The meeting is at 6 p.m. at 1900 S.W. Fourth Ave., room 2500.

– Nick Bjork

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As the city of Portland continues forecasting its future over the next 25 years through the , some really interesting and useful information is starting to emerge.

One of these interesting tidbits is a heat map the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability released this week.  It lays out in a color-coded fashion the best opportunities around the city to implement the city’s .

The 20-minute neighborhood is a neighborhood with convenient, safe and pedestrian-orientated access to the places people need to go. Basically, anything anyone could need is accessible within a 20-minute walk or bike ride from home.

The map shows the areas around Portland where this is accomplished, as well as the areas that need some work. The city’s objectives are to pinpoint where a future 20-minute neighborhood could be accomplished and layout specific zoning that can help.

The bureau got to its conclusions by taking into account accessibility, pedestrian orientation, proximity to housing and the amount and variety of services.

It goes without mentioning that downtown and a majority of the Central Eastside are already operating as 20-minute neighborhoods. I thought it was interesting, though, to see such a large portion of North Portland, as well as some outer eastside neighborhoods, be designated as having the best accessibility.

This map could come in handy for both developers and real estate agents when scouting or showing off properties. This is a pretty good bird’s eye view of what neighborhoods have been redeveloped.

It’s also worth mentioning that a significant portion of the yellow – the best accessibility – is in areas that have been designated urban renewal areas. I know that urban renewal tends to get a lot of flak, especially in a tight economy where every tax dollar is fought for, but maps like these show you how successful urban renewal can be.

The post Portland makes heat map for 20-minute neighborhoods appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

As the city of Portland continues forecasting its future over the next 25 years through the , some really interesting and useful information is starting to emerge.

One of these interesting tidbits is a heat map the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability released this week.  It lays out in a color-coded fashion the best opportunities around the city to implement the city’s .

The 20-minute neighborhood is a neighborhood with convenient, safe and pedestrian-orientated access to the places people need to go. Basically, anything anyone could need is accessible within a 20-minute walk or bike ride from home.

The map shows the areas around Portland where this is accomplished, as well as the areas that need some work. The city’s objectives are to pinpoint where a future 20-minute neighborhood could be accomplished and layout specific zoning that can help.

The bureau got to its conclusions by taking into account accessibility, pedestrian orientation, proximity to housing and the amount and variety of services.

It goes without mentioning that downtown and a majority of the Central Eastside are already operating as 20-minute neighborhoods. I thought it was interesting, though, to see such a large portion of North Portland, as well as some outer eastside neighborhoods, be designated as having the best accessibility.

This map could come in handy for both developers and real estate agents when scouting or showing off properties. This is a pretty good bird’s eye view of what neighborhoods have been redeveloped.

It’s also worth mentioning that a significant portion of the yellow – the best accessibility – is in areas that have been designated urban renewal areas. I know that urban renewal tends to get a lot of flak, especially in a tight economy where every tax dollar is fought for, but maps like these show you how successful urban renewal can be.

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