Portland Architecture

A neighborhood office: visiting the Radiator Building

Radiator Building (photos by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY 

Perhaps no other street in Portland has transformed over the past five to ten years like the North Williams-Vancouver Avenue corridor. Head north from Russell Street on Russell in particular and you’ll see an area that used to be home to a mix of vacant lots, old houses and light industrial enclaves is now teeming with new condos and apartments, restaurants and shops.

Even so, the new Radiator Building at North Vancouver Avenue and Fremont Street is something new. It’s not another mixed-use residential structure but a commercial office building. With its metal cladding and long, vertical sunshades, it looks the part.

If it seems surprising to have a commercial building amidst the residences and retail, the project’s developer, architect and general contractor, Ben Kaiser of PATH, believes an office is what this burgeoning district needs to become a true 20-minute neighborhood, where people can live, work and play within less than a half-hour’s walk.

The 36,000 square foot Radiator Building is not just uncommon for locating offices here. It also marks an emerging trend in construction: a return to wood framing. Kaiser wanted the building to be as sustainable as possible, and was attracted to the idea that while it takes a huge amount of carbon and energy to produce steel and concrete, “wood consumes and sequesters carbon,” he said on a recent building tour. “There’s a lot of momentum for this. Timber framing is so much more sustainable.” Kaiser says that though the building is only five stories, that makes it the tallest wood-framed building in Oregon. “I bet the next ten years will bring wood framing to all over Portland.”

Uncommon too is the triple duty Kaiser is playing here as designer, builder and developer. “I love it,” he says. “There’s no middle man and no one to blame. But you should see the email load.”

Kaiser is not alone in his belief of timber framing’s increasing attractiveness. Around the world, a number of projects have begun to push the envelope of what wood-framed architecture can be, with tall “plyscrapers” planned in cities like Stockholm, Vienna and Vancouver, British Columbia. According to a recent report in London’s Guardian newspaper, a 20-story wood-framed building can sequester about 3,100 tons of carbon, while an equivalently sized concrete-framed building would give off about 1,200 tons. That 4,300-ton difference is equivalent to removing 900 cars per year.

The Radiator Building is just one of three buildings under construction on this parcel. Kaiser had planned to develop all of them himself, but after the recession ended up selling the other two sites, which are now seeing a pair of Holst Architecture-designed buildings under construction. In between them is a 15,000 square foot courtyard that is being donated to the city as a park.

Walking through the Radiator offices, I almost did a double-take upon noticing the timber ceilings. They make the building look like one of those old warehouses that get renovated into offices, with exposed conduit but greater vertical spaciousness. But Kaiser’s design pairs the exposed ceilings with an access floor, keeping the ceilings free of ducts and electrical conduit. This will help the building to remain adaptable as new uses may come in the decades ahead.

The ground floor is comprised of two retail spaces as well as ground-floor parking—about 10 spots. Parking represents both the best and the worst of this building. There are far more spots needed than what is provided in those ground floor spots, but Kaiser’s team formed a partnership with the church next door to rent spaces for Radiator Building employees to use on non-Sundays, a win-win that may also help the church stay in its location with an additional revenue stream. But just the fact that the Radiator has parking on about a third of its ground floor really takes away from the atmosphere. Which Kaiser pragmatically understands. “This could be a sweet restaurant space,” he says as we stand amongst the parking spots. “But I couldn’t get financing without parking, even though I could have filled it with commercial tenants.” The banks made this building not everything it could have been.

Besides its framing, the Radiator Building is sustainable in numerous other ways. Rooftop photovoltaic panels provide enough energy for all of the building’s public areas. The aforementioned exterior vertical sun shades are programmed to tilt almost 180 degrees to help maximize interior daylight when it’s wanted and prevent glare when there’s too much. The Radiator and Holst’s One North building across the courtyard also share a stormwater management system. The building also has highly efficient windows and lots of insulation, so much so that a shared heating and cooling system utilizing excess heat from the New Seasons across the street was deemed unnecessary.

Working in the Radiator Building might also someday save its occupants’ lives. It’s equipped with an earthquake early detection system that will give about a one to two-minute heads up via text before the rumbling starts, and will shut off all gas and bring the elevator to the ground floor. Kaiser says the Radiator name was not just a reference to the appearance of the front façade with its exterior louvers, but was intended to express the idea of radiating information, be it about energy performance or the imminent arrival of a jolt to the Richter scale.

In Portland’s march to density, it can still be a little funny to be walking amidst the single-family homes and suddenly come upon buildings of this scale. But the Radiator Building, even if it looks a little easier to imagine downtown, and even if it's handsome but not necessarily gorgeous, is indeed a fitting representative not just of how close-in Portland is changing, but what our architecture can be: an enabler of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and leading edge sustainable thinking.

 

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Livable, sustainable density: visiting Ankeny Row

Ankeny Row (photos by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Over the past couple of years as the real estate economy has gathered steam, much attention has been devoted to the push-pull between large multifamily residential buildings (apartments, condos) and single-family homes. Whether it's the incongruity of a house next to a five-story building or the difficulties that plague neighborhoods when large buildings without parking spots are built, the growing pains seem somewhat inevitable.

The Ankeny Row housing project, designed and built by Green Hammer, is neither a massive multifamily building nor a one-off house. It's a co-housing project spearheaded by its owners, all of them approaching or at retirement age and looking for downsized homes in which they can age in place. "The four of us lived in big houses but we wanted to downsize, to do it environmentally friendly and to live with our friends,” explained Francie Royce, who now lives in one of the units with her husband Michael, on a recent tour of the project.

The development  includes a pair of two-story townhouses in front and three in back with a small courtyard in between, as well as an adjacent commons building with a two-bedroom apartment. Each of the townhouses include about 1400 square feet of interior space with two bedrooms and two and a half baths, with master bedrooms on the ground floor to allow easier aging in place.

Ankeny Row is also designed to achieve net-zero energy status. The project is also seeking LEED Platinum certification and was designed to Passive House standards (although that certification will not be pursued). In fact, the project is so efficient that it can achieve net-zero energy with only about 3,500 square feet of photovoltaic panels, whereas most homes need about 5,000 square feet to do so.

The project features extensive insulation, via a blown-in insulation system using reconstituted newspapers. The walls are actually 16 inches thick. Green Hammer's CEO, Stephen Aiguier, explained standing inside on a recent day and practically not being able to hear the stone being cut for landscaping outside. Under the floor is an 18-inch foam slab, not unlike what was done at the Karuna House by Holst Architecture and Hammer & Hand and certain other Passive House projects. Ankeny Row's designers and builders also oversaw a variety of house-tightening measures to keep plumbing and electrical penetrations from detracting from ambitious energy-efficiency goals. Triple-pane windows, for example, are 15 times the standard for air tightness. Heating and cooling come from ductless heat pumps. Water conservation comes from efficient shower heads, faucets and toilets. The metal roofs are made from recycled content, and the project utilizes all FSC-certified wood. Each unit in Ankeny Row took advantage of about $20,000 in green building and renewable energy incentives.

The group of owners considered about three different sites before choosing the land on Ankeny Street, which was culled together from two lots, one of which was a former warehouse, meaning the project is constructed on a grayfield. More importantly for the owners, it came with a robust walk score of 87.

The completed project is the final one to be designed by Green Hammer's in-house architect, Daryl Rantis, who unfortunately passed away last March from a heart attack. Rantis had an impressive background, too. Before joining Green Hammer he began his career in Chicago at the firm of internationally acclaimed architect Helmut Jahn, and later worked in Arkansas for the late AIA Gold Medal winner Fay Jones.

What I'd hope for Rantis to take pride in if he were still with us is just how pleasant a place to live Ankeny Row seems to be. Because of the insulation and materials, each unit remains comfortable year-round, with the temperature fluctuating very little even on an extremely cold or hot day. And the units aren't just efficient: they feel inviting. While designing to Passive House standards can mean not a lot of windows, inside Ankeny Row's units the glass seems well placed, so as to deliver an ideal diffuse natural illumination that avoids glare.

During the press tour, as many of the residents made themselves available to talk with assembled press, you could see the happiness on their faces. In a time when gentrification is driving poorer residents towards the suburbs or at least many miles from the city center, and when the affluent residents remaining seem inclined towards large multifamily buildings or large single-family homes, Ankeny Row is not just admirably sustainable but is of a medium density that seems congruent with the existing fabric of old houses as well as the taller buildings nearby. It feels like a kind of sweet spot in terms of scale.

Most every project is a blend of strengths and weaknesses, and while I overwhelmingly like Ankeny Row and the thinking behind it on the part of the owners, builders and designers, my lone criticism is that I  don't find the project's exterior to be very beautiful in a pure aesthetic sense. Next door to Ankeny Row, for example, the Colab-designed Ankeny Lofts project, which was featured in a recent post for our Portfolio series, is to my eyes substantially more handsome.  Ankeny Row feels to me a little bit visually clunky when viewed from outside. The durable but not so aesthetically pleasing fiber-cement siding contributes to this effect, and sometimes designing to Passive House standards can mean less glass than other buildings. Yet it's also about the overall flow of the architecture. But it could just be a matter of taste. Others might see it differently.

Besides, maybe that superlative functionality is worth it and then some. I know I'd be pretty happy living at Ankeny Row, and maybe ultimately that's what matters most, along with the project's exemplary environmental credentials. I absolutely admire the design contribution Rantis made, and I feel pretty  confident that the owners who spearheaded this final project are very happy with the design and construction job they got. I could see it on their faces. 

 

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Design calendar: April 16-30

Landscape architect Bas Smets (image courtesy University of Oregon)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Bas Smets: Landscape is Fiction
This conversation between Randy Gragg and landscape architect Bas Smets is part of the University of Oregon John Yeon Center's 2015 spring lecture series, A New City Beautiful: Landscape + Infrastructure = Public Space. One of the world’s rising-star landscape architects, Bas Smets hails from what he describes as “a land without landscape”—Belgium. Smets, who has a background in civil engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture, will offer insights into his design philosophy, from its conceptual roots in Dutch and Flemish early Renaissance painting to his contention that landscape design is a form of “hacking reality.” Since starting his firm, Bureau Bas Smets, in 2007, he has developed public-space gardens for places as diverse as Ingelmunster in Flanders, the PMQ Center for Design in Hong Kong, and the Estonian National Museum in Tartu. He has designed projects as large as regional visions for Brussels 2040 and a 100,000-plus acre reserve in Bordeaux, and as small as a garden of black plants in Portugal for the artist Phillippe Parreno’s film “Continuously Habitable Zones.” Since 2009, he has been collaborating with Frank Gehry on the Parc des Ateliers in Arles. Jimmy Mak's 221 NW 10th Avenue. 6PM Thursday, April 16. Free with minimum one-drink purchase. 

Tiny House Conference
The second annual Tiny House Conference will connect experts and veterans of this burgeoning movement with those new to the endeavor. Speakers will include Boise architect Macy Miller, whose tiny house was recently featured in Dwell magazine, and writer/filmmaker Logan Blair Smith, who owns a tiny house in Montague, California. Holiday Inn, 8439 NE Columbia Boulevard. 8AM Saturday-Sunday, April 18-19. (Registration closed.)

Portland 101: Crooked Grids, Tiny Blocks, and the Building of the City
How did Portland get this way, with its little square blocks and weird intersections, the funny pronunciations and the bridge ramps to nowhere? Why is it even located where it is? This Architectural Heritage Center lecture by Robert Jordan will look at the Portland street grid, the naming and re-naming of  streets, and the eras of commercial architecture that have marked our compact and vibrant downtown, as well as the near blitzkrieg effect of the Great Demolition which left us with parking lots where the temples of finance and industry once stood. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, April 18. $20 ($12 for AHC members).

David Rubin: The City Is A Landscape
This lecture is the first annual Douglas Macy Lecture on Landscape Architecture (presented in conjunction with the American Society of Landscape Architects Oregon Chapter Symposium) and is additionally a part of the University of Oregon John Yeon Center's 2015 spring lecture series, A New City Beautiful: Landscape + Infrastructure = Public Space. The 21st century is a century of landscape architecture while the 20th century was about buildings, says landscape architect David Rubin. A 2012 Rome Prize winner and formerly a partner at Olin and now with his own, two-year-old firm, Land Collective, Rubin is designing a growing body of work based on socially purposeful design strategies. Landscape architects are building spaces for society and shaping human interaction, he says. Key to their success—and the public spaces and the cities they are helping to shape—is the notion of empathy. Portland State University, Shattuck Hall, corner of Broadway and Hall Streets. 3PM Saturday, April 18. $10 ($5 for students).

Scott Kelsey: The New American Medical School
Kelsey is the managing principal of CO Architects in Los Angeles, and joined the practice in 1987 as one of its early members. He has over 30 years of experience in institutional building types that include academic, research, clinical, civic and justice facilities, including the Collaborative Life Sciences Building in South Waterfront. Kelsey will discuss how pioneering principles for the design of our nation’s future hospitals and related healthcare facilities are being established today by game-changing developments in the curriculum and facility design of many new medical schools and allied healthcare educational institutions.  The “New American Medical School” concept, which he has championed, transforms the built educational environment in ways that radically impacts the conduct of the disciplines taught through inter-professional learning and technology, and creates a new model for medical and health education facilities that is driven by an emphasis on technology-rich, problem-based, and hands-on learning modalities. University of Oregon, White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch Street. 5:30PM Wednesday, April 22. Free.

Architects Without Borders: Project Forum
At this monthly meeting of the Oregon chapter of Architects Without Borders, updates will be provided from teams working on two pro bono design efforts: the Red Sweater Project, a master plan for a school in Tanzania; and Portland Day Storage, which creates storage facilities designed to serve our city's homeless population. AIA Center for Architecture, 403 NW 11th Avenue. 6PM Wednesday, April 22. Free.

Story Hour: Design Fail
Design is often used to tell a story. Design Museum Portland’s Story Hour offers the opportunity to share tales of creativity and exploration. In this inaugural Story Hour, Design Fail, speakers will outline how in the trials of design glory, we’ve all had our moments. But failure is often the path to breakthrough and success. Speakers will include Fredrik Averin of Razorfish, artist Scott Erickson, Eric Corey Freed of the International Living Future Institute, Mark Shapiro of Laika, and Kjell van Zoen of Plywerk. Village Ballroom, 700 NE Dekum Street. 6:30PM Wednesday, April 22. Free.

Esquire Theater, Portland (image courtesy Vianne Patterson)

Revival Styles In American Architecture
All through the 19th and well into the 20th century, architecture was dominated by eclecticism. Gothic and Italianate Revival dominated for decades but were later supplanted by Greek, Federal, and Colonial revivals. The popularity of all of these architectural styles can still be seen throughout the Portland area. In this Architectural Heritage Center lecture, John Doyle discusses the variety of revival architectural styles we see every day in Portland, including not just the familiar styles but Jacobean, Byzantine, and Egyptian. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 7PM Wednesday, April 22. $20 ($12 for AHC members). 

COTE Tour: Orchards at Orenco
The AIA/Portland chapter's Committee on the Environment (COTE) will head to suburban Hillsboro for a tour of this multi-family housing projects designed to meet Passive House guidelines. Developed in Germany and used widely in both single-family and multi-family homes in Europe, Passive House design reduces building energy use by roughly 80 percent. Orchards at Orenco, NE Cherry Drive & NW 231st Avenue, Hillsboro. 10AM Thursday, April 23. $15 ($10 for AIA members) if seeking AIA learning units, free if not.

Historic Theaters Of Northwest And Southwest Portland
This lecture is the final installment in the Architectural Heritage Center's series on Portland area neighborhood movie theaters. Historians Steve Stone and Mike Mathews will discuss cinemas in Linnton, Nob Hill, Thurman, and other parts of Northwest Portland. They’ll also talk about the smaller theaters of Southwest Portland and Multnomah and maybe some very early downtown nickelodeons. Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Avenue. 10AM Saturday, April 25. $20 ($12 for AHC members). 

Portland Modern Home Tour
Curated by yours truly, the fourth annual Portland Modern Home Tour includes a wide variety of midcentury and contemporary houses and apartments, including a floating home by architect Phil Sydnor, a striking contemporary house in the West Hills by architect Christopher Gelber, a pair of town homes in the Humbolt neighborhood by architect Lee Winn, and the Burnside 26 apartments on East Burnside by Sera Architects. 11AM Saturday, April 25. $30 ($40 day of tour).

 

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Reviewing design review

Pearl District and Fremont Bridge (photo by Brian Libby)

BY NATHAN DAY

Last week, the City of Portland’s Design Commission gave its annual State of the City Design Report to City Council, a relatively overlooked event that is usually seen as more of a formality than one of great public interest. This go around it seemed different, more important than in years past, as the city is undergoing a massive construction boom which has brought a record number of cases in front of the Design Review panel.

The intended limitations of the Commission has caused delays in the review process, and has resulted in a general slowing in the development pipeline as individual cases all vie to be seen as quickly as possible in this time of economic upswing. Over the last year, the Design Commission has made improvements, mostly relating to maintaining an effective schedule (e.g. getting a proper timer) that has reduced delays and overruns. But the task force still sees room for improvement. The Commission and the local American Institute of Architects chapter as well as numerous others in the design profession and the public at large would like to see more review, not less, as the city continues to develop at its perceived rapid pace.

As noted during the report, the Comprehensive Plan Update will address many of the issues that are currently challenging the city's built environment, but that plan will not fully take effect for years as the details are still being hashed out in a willingly arduous, all-inclusive manner.

The Design Commission was created with the goal of improving architecture and urban design in the central city. It aimed at reducing the vast number of blank walls and lifeless streets that the automobile age had unintentionally and haphazardly created. In the past, the State of the City Design Report has been focused on the importance of design review, design appropriateness, long-term planning, and inequality issues regarding new development in the city's downtown core and immediate surrounding neighborhoods.

Now, however, the Design Commission is seeing more proposals than ever before, and the city is receiving pressure from neighborhood activists and associations to include the "d" design overlay (designating areas where projects fall under Design Commission review, mostly in the central city) across the entire city as a means to rein in what is perceived as the uncontrolled and inappropriate growth. The review process is something that is unfamiliar and commonly misunderstood by many, but it is generally regarded as valuable and increasingly important as the city grows.

Portland is not alone in this influx of new developments, as many American cities are currently experiencing similar construction booms, created by a combination of repressed supply and the fear of the impending increase in Federal Reserve interest rates. As an example, our neighbor to the north, Seattle, has the equivalent of one quarter of Portland's downtown office space (6 million square feet) currently under construction, with even more proposed to start in the coming years.

Portland's boom is primarily residential in nature, with a sharp increase in apartment building and an unprecedented number of new hotel units, over 2000, currently proposed or under construction. The city's growing pains are exacerbated by the wholesale condominium conversions that took place during the last housing boom that greatly reduced the city's inventory of existing rental apartments. Additionally, Portland's strict zoning code unintentionally prices most residents out of their own homes by limiting the housing supply in the guise of preserving neighborhood character, a duality that inadvertently pits the preservation of forest and farmland against existing neighborhood aesthetics and density.

Ross Island and South Waterfront (photo by Brian Libby)

In the State of the City Design Report, the Design Commission recommend five changes: (1) make design review mandatory throughout the city based on the scope of new development projects; (2) create an additional design review team to oversee this inclusion; (3) update the Community Design Standards as an alternative to design review; (4) rethink the housing bonus to include affordable and low-income units; and (5) remove residential as an acceptable ground floor use along commercial corridors. As with the nature of recommendations, none of these action items were immediately accepted, but the first three changes were welcomed by the City Council and the event's commentators.

Generally, expanding design review was seen as a potential means of addressing the current neighborhood and design community's concerns without encroaching on the ongoing revision process of the Comprehensive Plan. But updating the Community Design Standards would be an onerous process in itself and probably implausible at this time. What the new design overlay would look like, what initiates a review, and how it would be orchestrated are currently unknown, but the mayor, Charlie Hales, was keen on the idea, which means these changes could be explored sooner rather than later. The recommendation to change the language of the automatic housing bonus is an interesting idea, especially since the original intent was to increase the housing supply in the city's core, a goal that no longer needs incentive due to market conditions. Rewriting that particular bonus would be premature however, as any new housing policy would be reliant on the outcome of the Comprehensive Plan Update.

The most interesting change to be recommended, and one that could be implemented immediately, is a moratorium on residential ground uses for commercial corridors. The Design Commission ran through numerous examples on Burnside Street, Hawthorne Boulevard, and Martin Luther King Boulevard where such 'active' uses have actually broken up contiguous retail storefronts with dead space. The original intent was to create a mix of ground floor spaces, dynamic and interactive, but instead of the porches and stoops dreamed up by city planners, reality tends to repetitiously repeat closed doors painted the same color as the walls flush around them accompanied by a permanent set of adjacent window blinds. As currently written, code allows for residential uses in any commercial zone, regardless if it’s a high rise or a main street storefront, which means that the review team cannot object even if they deem it inappropriate for the location. That does not mean that the reviewers have been silent on this issue, as many times their advice has led to ground floor changes that were ultimately beneficial to the developer. In cases where ground floor commercial uses are unfeasible due to market conditions, the Design Commission recommends having the discretion to allow residential uses with the caveat that it could be adaptable to future retail uses with higher ceilings, open layouts, and ADA accessibility. Live/work units, such as those in the Pearl District or on upper Hawthorne, are a good example of how to accomplish successful adaptable ground floor spaces. The end goal is not to have commercial on every street, the goal is to maintain active uses along specific corridors where they are already thriving.

Regardless of whether any of these proposed changes actually come to fruition or not, the Design Commission is proving to be incredibly successful in positively impacting our built environment. There was ample testimony that reiterated the importance and benefits of the commission, and what their efforts have meant to the city.

With the current polarization of neighborhood associations, which is directly related to the prevalent anti-density groundswell, it is more important than ever to have a team of professionals who understand all sides of development to help bridge the emotionally-charged divide between growth and preservation. The coming Comprehensive Plan Update will hopefully address many of the issues currently in debate across the city, but the grand narrative of a sustainable Portland, the one with 20-minute neighborhoods and easy access to healthy foods and healthy places, must be heeded by developers and neighbors alike.

 

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Pressure cooker: can Portland grow the right way?

Downtown Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

The history of cities has always been fluid. Metropolises continuously rise and fall in population, in affordability, and in economic activity—and not just the obvious examples like Detroit’s decline or Dubai’s dizzying rise.

Portland too has continuously transformed, even before the boom and bust cycle of the past decade. A 19th century pioneer town gave way to the timber-industry capitol of the 20th century, for example. In more recent years, as timber has given way to an economic mix of high tech, athletic apparel and food & drink, the city’s industrial enclaves have become high-density neighborhoods like the Pearl District and South Waterfront, and once downtrodden neighborhoods have gentrified as middle-class home buyers have returned to the central city after a generation of suburban flight. And with our progressive land-use laws, the metro area has densified more than it has sprawled (at least compared to other cities), which makes for a better sense of place but drives up the cost of living.

Yet while both physical and economic change is inevitable, these days it feels like some kind of tipping point has been reached in the city, or at least a period of particular transformation. More than the past decade’s economic boom, this one has seemed to affect existing, close-in Portland neighborhoods.

It is happening in almost every corner of the city, or at least those within a few miles’ drive of downtown. Historic homes being replaced by bigger ones, or by duplexes and triplexes. On major arterials, thriving buildings are being demolished to make way for bigger ones. This increasing density is better than the alternative that existed five or six years ago, when foreclosures were mounting amidst the Great Recession. It’s not exactly the same problem as the housing boom that existed in the 2000s before the bust, when speculation was driving up prices. Yet high prices remain, as well as the worry that our sense of place, or the kind of sweet spot the city has enjoyed between affordability and amenities, may be in jeopardy.

One can see the tension play out in a number of ways.

On the affordable housing front, the city has fallen behind its goals. In the Pearl District, for instance, a 1997 agreement between the city and Hoyt Street Properties (the private developer contracted to build out former rail yards) to have 35 percent of all housing units be affordable has fallen short. In South Waterfront too, a 2003 pledge to make 582 out of the first 3,000 units constructed affordable has also failed to happen.

An apartment building in Southeast Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

It’s not just a question of the total number of affordable housing units but also where we’re building them. Healthy cities have a variety of different income levels living more or less in a mix, not in segregation. Despite the strictures of the 46-year-old Fair Housing Act, which is intended to sprinkle affordable housing across neighborhoods, an overwhelming majority of subsidized housing over the past decade-plus has existed in the poorest portions of the metro area. There is also very  little affordable housing in affluent communities. A 2012 Oregonian report by Brad Schmidt found that Lake Oswego and West Linn, for example, contributed just 0.1 percent of the 34,000 affordable units in the three-country metro area. Instead, poor residents have been clustered in areas like Gresham and east of 82nd in Portland.

There are small bits of good news. As Schmidt reported last week, Portland’s City Council, perhaps prompted by the failure to build enough affordable units in the Pearl and SoWa, has recently approved an alteration of its urban renewal areas led by Mayor Charlie Hales that will raise another $3.5 million for affordable housing. A resolution from Commissioner Nick Fish will commit $47 million for 270 more units in South Waterfront. The close-in Zidell Yards development is said to be earmarking acreage for an affordable-housing project, and there is new affordable housing coming to the Pearl, even if too much of it is clustered together.

Even so, affordable housing—even if we went on a huge building spree—will not solve the broader crisis of affordability in Portland proper, where even the middle class is increasingly feeling squeezed out. Portland has recently been ranked as the most quickly gentrifying city in America. When this kind of high-end development and construction reaches fever pitch, as it has done in other big, popular American cities like San Francisco, Austin and Washington, DC, there is an increasing question of how the middle class can remain in the game, as well as whether we might lose something larger along the way: a sense of what it means to be Portland.

And affordability is not the only aspect of this emerging crisis. The city may be even more up in arms over what it is doing to our fabric of historic homes. All over Portland’s neighborhoods, developers and builders are tearing down old houses to make way for duplexes and other multi-family buildings. There is so much destruction happening so fast that entire publications like the Portland Chronicle have been created to document this grim continuing story. The latest? A 100-year-old house in Elliott went bye-bye to make way for a five-story apartment complex. A 130-year-old home in Hosford-Abernethy is about to meet the wrecking ball. And the church at 801 NE Failing street that dates to 1904 is being demolished by developer Peter Kusyk, the same person who previously had planned to tear down the historic Marquam Home in Laurelhurst (which was saved at the 11th hour when neighbors agreed to buy the home).

The economics have changed compared to the last decade's boom: developers like Kusyk who back then were more likely to work in the suburbs are now turning their attention to Portland's close-in neighborhoods as they've become more popular and suburban land has become scarcer. And even if Kusyk had never been born, another developer would do the same thing he's doing: eying the church's site with only a profit motive in mind. The church has sat vacant for years and no one came along who was both willing and financially able to preserve the building, either as another house of worship or converted into some other type of facility. Yet the system could have been better equipped to make preservation an attractive option.

It isn’t just that these houses and other neighborhood buildings are being torn down. Some of this is inevitable for any city: the passage of time and changing needs necessitate continual transformation of the housing stock. But what’s particularly troubling has been the lack of reasonable brakes on the process. 

With the church on NE Failing, for example, there was supposed to have been a 120-day waiting period before the building could be razed because it was part of the city’s official Historic Resources Inventory. That would have been the case a few decades ago. But now it’s possible to remove one’s property from the list, allowing demolition to happen quickly.

This question of whether or how much owners should have the right to remove their properties from historic building lists is also about to go before the Oregon Supreme Court, in the case of Lake Oswego Preservation Society v. City of Lake Oswego. The case centers on the state’s 1995 “owner consent” law, which allows for owner removal of a house from historic designations. It began from a dispute over the circa-1855 Carman House in Lake Oswego, which a new owner wants to raze in the name of fattening the wallet. But the case will have huge precedent. 

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t welcome most new development, be it in close-in Portland or the suburbs. It’s the engine that drives much of our economy and a matter of continuously reconfiguring the collective built environment for today’s needs. And with many thousands moving here every month, we’ve got to plan for a more highly populated and high-density future. Although there is arguably a real crisis going on with respect to the loss of our stock of old single-family homes, we need high-density apartments and condos to keep being built on our major streets. Yet there seems to be little question that the city and the metro area are falling behind with respect to fine-tuning just how that balanced growth happens. 

It’s easier said than done, for not everyone agrees on what steps to take. Last month when Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who oversees the Bureau of Development Services, instructed staff there to “raise the bar” and show more willingness to reject discretionary land-use appeals of the zoning code, it seemed to some like a chance to bring a more balanced approach to the many neighborhoods where big apartment and condo projects rub up against single-family homes. Yet the first feedback I received was from a prominent award-winning local architect, who warned this created a dangerous precedent: more uncertainty for developers, and an antiquated standard for what constitutes compatibility. “The idea that she is placing ‘compatibility’ and the definition of what compatibility is in the hands of neighbors and staff will likely result in a stifled and homogenous building fabric,” the architect wrote by email.

Yet there are still some worthwhile steps that can be taken. On the Bike Portland blog as well as on his own site, developer Eli Spevak of Orange Splot offered a series of moves that could be taken to create what he called a “more affordable urban infill policy.” We should allow or expand allowance of internal conversions of older homes to two or more units in single dwelling zones, Spevak wrote, so long as their exterior is minimally altered and they retain their single dwelling appearance. We could make it easier for a second home to be built on the same lot as an older home, capping out the combined square footage as equivalent to a large new home, and waving some of the remaining restrictions on accessory dwelling units. We might try removing the “household” definition from the zoning code to open up spare rooms for occupancy in larger homes. 

And perhaps most of all, we could implement inclusionary zoning, something that is banned in only Oregon and Texas but would do a lot to ensure developers include affordable housing in new multi-family building projects.

Even if we were to do everything possible and make all these moves—the rejection of owner consent laws, the implementation of inclusionary zoning, the enforcement of Fair Housing Act strictures for distributing affordable housing across neighborhoods and suburbs of all income levels—the Portland metro area will still transform. Certain neighborhoods will still be too expensive for the overwhelming majority to live in. State laws and local codes will always be playing catch-up to contemporary realities. And we don’t even know what the next crisis will bring. We very well may be headed for another economic bust in a few years, and if so, that will bring another round of foreclosures and cash-strapped government budgets.

What’s more, we can’t ever fully separate the dangers of massive growth from the benefits. After all, perhaps never before in Portland’s history has the nation been more focused on our city as not only a destination, but a way of life: one that’s a little quirky but refreshingly less corporate; one that favors pedestrians and transit over the automobile; one where architecture is rooted in good values like collaboration and sustainability more than ego. We have a hell of a lot going for us. It’s just that now is the time to make sure that it’s more blessing than curse, and that ours is a city that everyone has a chance to embrace.

 

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