Machineworks building, Portland (image courtesy Grubb & Ellis)
In Oregon we've been hard hit by the Great Recession. Unemployment in the state was at 10.6 percent as of July, higher than the national average of 9.5 percent. Here in Portland particularly, we do great at attracting new residents with the city's quality of life, but job creation for them has been lacking.
Even so, once again there are signs that the physical makeup of the Portland metropolitan area, particularly the Urban Growth Boundary, will help us survive and someday even prosper again when other sprawled out cities and regions continue to grapple.
In Monday's Oregonian, Jeff Manning reported that Microsoft has leased over 12,000 square feet of office space in the Pearl District, the ninth floor of the MachineWorks office building at Northwest 14th Avenue and Northrup Street.
Microsoft's lease comes six weeks after Vestas, the Danish wind turbine manufacturer, announced plans to build its North American headquarters in the old Meier & Frank delivery depot building at Northwest 14th Avenue and Everett Street. Also on 14th, WDC Properties is building its Overton office building, a $17.8 million project. And a $47 million affordable-housing apartment project on Northwest 14th Avenue between Northwest Quimby and Raleigh streets is also underway. Developed by Turtle Island Development, it will host the Pearl District's first public school.
"It was bad as recent as this summer," developer Mark Madden of WDC said of the Pearl District development picture in Manning's article. "Now, the private sector has come back and started leasing again."
It would be a mistake to view the construction itself as a key to Portland's economy; rather it should be viewed as a sign of the broader economy hopefully thawing. After all, when you base your economy solely on construction and tourism, and you allow the city to sprawl out endlessly, you have an unsustainable approach.
Take the Sunday story in The New York Times, reporting that Las Vegas is suffering its deepest economic slide since the 1940s. "Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state," Adam Nagourney writes.
CityCenter development, Las Vegas (photo by Robert Polidori for The New Yorker)
Las Vegas isn't alone in facing economic doldrums of the highest order. And it's not to say that only sprawled out cities are experiencing tough times. Yet it seems some of the first places to recover from the Great Recession may be compact central cities. Here in Portland, the real estate market's slide has perhaps leveled the playing field for leases in comparison to the outskirts of the suburbs. When you compare the Pearl District to, say, Tualatin or Hillsboro, if the rents are comparable for offices you get a lot healthier, happier workforce in a place that's pedestrian friendly and connected to culture. You don't have to rely on Applebee's and McDonald's for lunch, and you don't have to sit parked on the freeway.
Manning's Oregonian article reports that Microsoft "joins a growing cast of technology companies that have taken space in downtown or in the Pearl. Companies that in an earlier era wouldn't have thought twice about locating anywhere but the technology hotbeds of Washington County are increasingly open to locating in the Central City. Dozens of technology startups and larger outfits like Tripwire and Jive Software have chosen downtown. Google opened its first Portland office late this summer."
The question of economics and urban growth boundaries also reminds me of a lecture I attended last week by German architect and writer Ulf Meyer, who spoke as part of the Transformational Lecture Series hosted by the Cascadia Green Building Council and the University of Oregon.
Meyer was there to talk sustainability, and he showed a slideshow of projects his firm has designed around the world. But his real interest was urban planning. "In the last 60 years, the US population has doubled, and the urbanized population has tripled," he sais. "Yet urban density went down dramatically." Meyer offered a graphic of Detroit as example. Even as the city has all but emptied over recent decades, a crumbled shell of its once robust self, Detroit still in the 2000s continued to sprawl at its edges. How can there not be a connection?
Meyer is a big fan of Portland's urban growth boundary, but he believes we haven't been disciplined enough in fostering true density. "Portland is the laboratory nationwide but has to deal with the same problems," he said, noting expansion at the edges of our suburbs. "I actually think you should shrink it now. You could also disallow parking garages, disallow mono-functional single –use buildings. Why not prohibit one-story buildings altogether? We have restrictions to prohibit the height of tall buildings, but I think prohibiting low buildings should happen instead."
Some will take issue with the boldest of Meyer's suggestions. If we have nothing but tall buildings, it will change quality of life here. Part of feeling connected with the exquisite natural environment in Oregon, and part of what we enjoy in the United States, is the chance to have a sense of space, both personally and in terms of neighborhoods.
At the same time, Meyer is far more right than wrong. Even if the construction industry were to rebound - and one certainly hopes that it does - it would do as much harm as good for the region to build subdivisions and strip malls on the outskirts of the city. These speculative developments rob central cities of their vitality and prolong economic downturns like this one.
Partially completed subdivision near Fort Myers, Florida (courtesy Google Earth/Boston Globe)
Recently a reader sent me a hotlink to an extraordinary series of satellite images from The Boston Globe showing subdivisions in Florida. This state, too, has been hard hit by boom-and-bust cycle of building subdivisions. And for all the difficulty faced in the Portland area, with too many skilled workers and not enough jobs, it's key that we have maintained a sense of place, anchored by a healthy central city.
Back in Las Vegas, the big new development opened recently is called "CityCenter". It is the biggest construction project in the history of Las Vegas. It has three hotels, two condominium towers, a shopping mall, a convention center, a couple of dozen restaurants, a private monorail, and a casino. But rather than being an antidote to or a break from the kitschy themed casinos built over the past decades, made to ape Paris or Venice or New York like architectural zombies with escalators, fake lakes and slot machines, City Center is basically more of the same. Notice the missing space between the words - it seems like but doesn't actually say "city center".
"Whether or not the buildings themselves succeed in striking a blow against Vegas kitsch, CityCenter certainly fails to live up to the claim implicit in its name—the hope that it is going to give Las Vegas, the place of ultimate sprawl, a genuine urban focus," wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker. "As urban planning, it doesn’t go much farther than Caesars Palace. CityCenter is laid out not for pedestrians but as a machine for moving vast numbers of cars efficiently. There are wide ramps coming off the Las Vegas Strip, auto turnarounds, and porte cochères—all good for traffic flow but hardly what you would call urban open space. Its planners have crammed more square footage into a tighter space than anyone else has managed in Las Vegas, and that may make this place seem like an antidote to sprawl. But it still isn’t much of a center, or much of a city. Indeed, as you drive around the site, you suddenly wonder if CityCenter only appears to be different from the rest of the Strip."
Here in Portland, we don't have CityCenter, but we do have city center. We aren't going to break any records for the scale of a single project or the volume of them in total. But healthy economics isn't about breaking records. That's what America did in the 2000s. The only problem is, what goes up always comes down (no matter what Allen Greenspan tells you). Portland has, in effect, become the tortoise to Las Vegas's hare. Microsoft taking a floor in the MachineWorks building won't generate any national headlines, nor will the Overton office building. Even so, as development thaws here, it remains burnt to a crisp in our adult Disneyland in the desert.
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