Google Maps satellite view of downtown Portland
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Portland Architecture: You worked for the city of Portland for commissioner Mike Lindberg in the 80s, for Metro in the 80s and 90s on the 2040 Plan, and were on the Planning Commission in the 2000s. How would you rate some of the changes that have happened in various city and regional bureaus, such as the PDC transitioning from urban renewal to an economic development role?
Ethan Seltzer: I wouldn’t count on that. Actually, some of the things the mayor has said suggest that PDC is not going to be heading off into an undefined economic development role, but will actually be herded back towards the reason it was created in the first place, which is a place-making role.
PDC was created back in 1958 to do business in the city’s interest. The idea was it was really useful to have an arm’s length entity that was out there, able to do business in the city’s interest, without being caught up in the day to day politics of the city, that could work at the same speed, at the same magnitude and in the same way, with people who were basically making decisions about land and development. Put it this way: the city of Portland is about 30-35 percent right of way. It’s about 14 percent parks. Throw in airports, public institutions like schools, port properties, and pretty soon you’re at about 50 percent of the city in public ownership. The city has direct control over that.
They created PDC in essence for those occasions when it would become a partner in the development of the other 50 percent. But the only way it can work is if the city essentially establishes policy and PDC carries it out. Those relationships have gotten incredibly muddied in recent years.
Not only that, but for many years now Portland has funded all of its economic development activity through urban renewal funds. Which is ridiculous, because you can only spend those funds within urban renewal areas. And really economic development is a much more multi-faceted kind of enterprise than just what happens with land development in urban renewal areas.
So fundamentally, economic development ought to be funded by the general fund, because it really affects the entire city and the city’s relationships with all the jurisdictions around it. For PDC to say it’s an economic development agency leads you to wonder how that’s going to work, and where exactly they’re going to get the funding to behave in that way.
I really do think what Charlie Hales has done is reminded PDC that the reason it exists is to carry out these plans that enable the city to be a partner, so to speak, in what happens with that other 50 percent. What we use urban renewal for needs some careful discussion by the city so that PDC can be better instructed in what it is the city’s trying to achieve. Part of the problem is that the city has not been real articulate. I don’t think the Commission has been real articulate. There’s a real opportunity here with the new mayor to ask the City to be a lot clearer about what it’s trying to accomplish with urban renewal. And frankly if the city doesn’t want to do urban renewal, I think it ought to question whether it should have a PDC.
What are you working on now? Can you talk about the journey that the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning within the College of Urban and Public Affairs has been on?
This is one of the oldest graduate programs at Portland State. In the Toulan School we essentially have two kinds of graduate degrees: one is a professional planning degree, the master of urban and regional planning, and the other is a more traditional scholarly degree: master of urban studies and a Ph.D. in urban studies. The master of urban and regional planning program has become very selective. People want to come here and study. We get about 200 applications for about 35 positions. We’ve tried to develop, and I think successfully, a program that focuses heavily on practice. Our goal is to train people who envision themselves as practitioners and who will see themselves as not just getting a job but over the course of their career helping to lead the field. And our students win national awards. That’s a great record.
We’re also conscious of the fact that we’re here to both provide access to training and education but we’re also here to meet the needs of the community and the state beyond. What that means in part is that we could make this a bigger program but we’re careful not to make it too big. Frankly it doesn’t do us a lot of good or the community a lot of good if it’s filled with a lot of people who are unemployed and have little prospect of getting employed. We try to stay in touch with the practicing community to understand how our students are doing, how they’re getting absorbed, and whether we’re doing a good job of meeting the needs that public agencies, private consultants and nonprofit organizations have.
How has the profession changed given the booming and busting economy?
It’s getting better. For example, we require 400 hours of internship to graduate. We don’t give them credit for that. Up until 2008, I’d say almost all of those internships were paid. Not only that, they were in all different sectors. The recession and crash of 2008 basically brought that to a screaming halt: not just in paid internships but I’d say a halt in hiring, for graduates in 2010 in particular. I think since then it’s been recovering. We’re seeing the return of the paid internship. We’re seeing students getting jobs before they graduate. We’re seeing ups and downs in hiring; public agencies are not doing so well right now but private firms are doing much better. So it kind of goes up and down. I think if you look long-term, there will continue to be jobs there. I really do believe the Baby Boom is going to retire at some point and get out of the way, and you’ll begin to see positions open up like we haven’t seen for some time.
On the other hand, people really like to come to Portland. We have a lot of people coming here from all over the place without jobs. Which is kind of interesting. It’s counter to the logic of economists, who say if you’re not getting paid you’re not showing up. But you know, Oregon has never been a great place to get rich. It’s been a great place to live well. People tend to be able to kind of get enough, but if you want to get wealthy, go to LA or New York or Chicago or Houston. Seattle’s probably even an easier place to get rich. But fundamentally, people choose to live in Portland. And they tend to stick around when things get tough, because they want to be here.
I recently spent a few days in La Jolla, California and was reminded how special Portland is. La Jolla was the first place outside of Las Vegas where I encountered street corners where one couldn’t cross the street; instead pedestrians were directed to bridges over the street. And for all the beautiful beaches it was hard to find many that weren’t private.
There’s an industry in every city that wants to make you as a visitor really happy. As a consequence, it’s great visiting cities. Everywhere, there are people who want you to experience whatever they’ve got to offer at its peak. But unfortunately, most of us can’t live as visitors all the time. What’s it like to live in these places? If you choose to walk, if you choose to ride a bike, you’re being given the message that it’s either not necessary or not welcome. You’re being given some insights into what daily like is like.
It would be really interesting to use multiple listing service listings for a metro region, or sales reports, to find the zip codes where you have the most real estate activity around buying and selling the median priced home. Look for the median priced home, and look for the zip code with the most activity. And then go and live there for two weeks. Call it the median house tour of America. Compare cities based on that, not on the "36 Hours in Istanbul” in the New York Times travel section.
If you’re a recent college grad and you’re looking for a place to live in NYC, you can’t afford Brooklyn. So you’re going to Queens. What if you want to go from Queens to, say, MoMA on a free day? Well, it takes like an hour and a half to get there. And what if you had to do that every day? Then you realize we have nothing to complain about.
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