Growing cities don’t have to become seas of gleaming skyscrapers, according to Ed McMahon, the Urban Land Institute‘s senior resident fellow for sustainable development. He delivered that message last week at the White Stag Block in Portland as one of the speakers for an event that focused on housing density and affordability.

“Portland can grow without losing the things you love,” he said.

McMahon has consulted for cities across the nation. Height shouldn’t be the most important factor in new building projects, he said.

“Three things you need to think about when it comes to development are where you put it, how you arrange it and what does it look like,” he said.

Urban planners across the country have sought to avoid contributing to suburban sprawl. To increase density, the propensity has been to build taller, often at the expense of existing historic buildings.

“Increasing housing supplies does not ensure affordability if developers build oversized and overpriced luxury homes,” said Laurence Qamar, owner of Qamar Architecture + Town Planning and another speaker at the event.

New towers often come with higher prices and lower density, McMahon said. A study by the Preservation Green Lab in Seattle, he added, found that such buildings fall short in comparison to many smaller, refurbished buildings for housing people per unit. That same comparison held true for office buildings as well.

“Smaller, older buildings had more jobs per square foot,” he said. “They also had more locally owned businesses, more non-chain stores and more women- and minority-owned businesses. These are places that are worth preserving because they do outperform, on a square-foot basis, some of these larger, newer buildings.”

Nevertheless, across the country more affordable units are being torn down than built new. A National Housing Trust study, McMahon said, found that for every affordable housing unit built, two are lost due to abandonment, deterioration or conversion to more expensive housing.

“Preserving rather than building new has proven to be the most financially sustainable method of reversing the trend of one step forward and two steps back,” he said.

McMahon added that in his professional experience, well-designed duplexes and fourplexes often were welcomed into neighborhoods. He compared the compact multifamily layout of the Battery neighborhood in Charleston, S.C., to the circular sprawl of Sun City, Arizona, a census-designated place near Phoenix.

“The Battery in Charleston is double the density of Sun City, but who would even know that (by looking),” he said.

While Sun City relies on cul-de-sacs of houses, Charleston has duplexes and fourplexes that mimic single-family homes through strategic placement or elimination of garages.

“Good design makes you forget about the whole concept of density,” McMahon said. “You just like being in that place.”

Portland’s small, 200-foot blocks often make good design difficult. Qamar advocated limiting building heights to mitigate those challenges.

“Our tiny blocks increasingly yield massive buildings that rise straight up from sidewalks with little of subtlety and form,” he said.

Marshall Runkel, chief of staff for Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, encouraged event attendees to stay involved as proposals such as the 2035 Comprehensive Plan and the Residential Infill Project come before the City Council.

“Over the course of the next year, there should be dramatic regulatory changes that will have influences on all of the subjects discussed tonight,” he said.

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