Height considered in the Pearl and Old Town

Rendering of proposed Hyatt Place (Otak via City of Portland/Next Portland)

 

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In any big city, planners have a puzzle to put together: an ongoing challenge to accommodate the future city into the existing one. It's not an easy task, but with Portland projected to add hundreds of thousands of new residents in the coming decades, we've got to increase density. Yet how we do so is really the question.

With Old Town and the Pearl District adjacent to downtown and part of the central city, it's natural to add density to both neighborhoods. Which is precisely what the Central City 2035 plan does. But two different recent appeals cases, one in the Pearl and one involving Old Town, make for an interesting referendum.

First there is the case of Hyatt Place, a proposed 23-story tower that would be located on a quarter-block site at NW 12th Avenue and Flanders Street. The lower 11 floors would be occupied by a 170-room hotel, and the upper 12 floors would be apartments, with the project subject to the city's inclusionary zoning laws calling for a portion of the residential units to be affordable.

A group of citizens called Pearl Neighbors for Integrity in Design opposed the project based mostly on height, although they also cite a lack of parking and congestion that would plague a soon-to-be busy bike crossing.

Recently I spoke with one of the leaders of the group, Patricia Cliff, who expressed opposition to the greater heights now allowed in the southern Pearl District after passage of Central City 2035.

"The question I ask is how can you pass a law like this? The Pearl is mostly a residential area," Cliff said. "To just raise the height of anything everywhere, and to allow the FAR [transfer] from another building, that issue I find challengeable.” 

“There was this whole idea the city has to be denser and higher,” she added. “A lot of people don’t want this to look like Vancouver: that anybody can buy the air rights of some garage and sandwich it onto a high-rent district."

Cliff says she sympathizes with the need to address a shortage of affordable housing, and that increasing supply benefits the market overall. But she says some of CC2035's logic is faulty…for starters.  "Central City 2035 is over 700 pages. It is very contradictory," she added. "It argues you have to have density and height, but you can have density without height. Look at all these surface parking lots. There’s no shortage of buildable land here. It doesn’t mean you need hotels with 280 units on a quarter block to solve the housing problem."

Actually, the fact that this 23-story building would be built on just a quarter block is part of what makes the project intriguing and possibly even a positive contribution to our skyline, such as it is. Designed by Otak, the renderings show a metal and glass building that appears fairly unremarkable: a contemporary structure built up to the property line to maximize profits and a more welcoming ground plane to compensate. But it's a slender building compared to so many in Portland's downtown core, and that makes it somewhat aesthetically appealing.

 

Rendering of proposed Hyatt Place (Otak via Next Portland/City of Portland)

 

Last week I took a short business trip to Seattle, which had me mostly downtown and in the burgeoning South Lake Union district as well as the Fremont neighborhood just across the water to the north. It got me thinking.

In many ways Seattle and Portland are different cities with different personalities: one an ambitious ocean port of nearly four million, the other a river city of just under two and a half million. Seattle has always had taller buildings than Portland because Seattle unabashedly wants to show the world how big and important it is. Portland has long had height limits for fear of overwhelming views of Mt. Hood and our beautiful landscape. But those Seattle towers look better, as a whole, because they’re slenderer.

Besides, Portland is also, like its neighbor to the north, growing fairly rapidly. If we want to avoid urban growth boundary expansion and allow more sprawl, we have to grow denser. But Cliff is right that density does not equal height. So what's the right density/height balance in the Pearl, Old Town and downtown?

The Hyatt Place location at 12th and Flanders is an interesting one because it's close to downtown yet also close to a historic district. Looking at the location on a map, it's easy to see why planners and developers would imagine 23 stories here. Just a few blocks south at 12th and Washington is the Twelve West building, completed in 2009, and a block away there are plans to build the Eleven West building (both designed by ZGF on former Goodman family-owned surface parking lots). Both are over 20 stories and comparable to the height of Hyatt Place as proposed. And Cliff’s claim that the Pearl is mostly residential doesn’t completely hold water. In fact, Pearl offices are somewhat of a trend.

Over the past few years the northern Pearl District has been a place for somewhat taller towers because it was built on the site of former rail yards with not much of an existing context: no fabric of smaller existing buildings. The southern Pearl, on the other hand, was redeveloped from a former industrial district of low-rise warehouses. In fact, for several blocks beginning right across the street from the proposed Hyatt Place and heading north is a strip of blocks called the 13th Avenue Historic District.

Does a building site outside but adjacent to a historic district have a responsibility to stay substantially lower than 20-plus stories out of a need for compatibility? I don't think so. It's true we don't want a situation like the movie Up, where a single-family home is bookended by towers. Yet often it's precisely the juxtaposition of buildings of different eras, styles and even heights that makes a city interesting. I'm glad those old warehouses of the 13th Avenue Historic District are protected. But that doesn't mean a building between them or just down the street needs to look like the old warehouses more than it needs to look like downtown. What we need is for those old warehouses to be protected from demolition at all costs. If that happens, they can hold their own.

What I do find an interestingly ambiguous question is where exactly the threshold for new-building height compatibility with old low-rise buildings is. For example, Cliff mentioned living in the nearby Casey Condominiums, which are 16 stories. She mentioned hating how the Yard building across the river, at 21 stories, had spoiled her view, and that's a height similar to the 23-story proposed Hyatt Place. Is it that the threshold lies somewhere between 16 and 21 stories?

A cynic might suggest it's the location: Hyatt would partially block views east from the Casey. But I'm not interested in just painting Cliff and Pearl Neighbors for Integrity in Design as only about NIMBY-ism. They do make a good larger point: that while it may be easy to imagine the southern Pearl coming to resemble downtown, ultimately it's not downtown, and because there are still existing surface lots across the central city, it’s hard to argue that substantially increasing building heights from 16 to 20-plus towers is necessary strictly from a density-minded point of view.

The other factor here that lends an element of credence to Cliff and the PNID's argument is the influence of developers on the system: not in an illegal way, but perhaps in a way that makes one slightly uncomfortable about campaign-donation-oriented political influence.

This is where we cross Broadway and head from the Pearl into Old Town, which is a larger historic district and has an existing fabric of late 29th and early 20th century buildings—the few not torn down by the post-World War II generation in the '50s and '60s—that comprise some of the most unique and priceless architectural fabric in the city.

Earlier this month the Land Use Board of Appeals sided with plaintiffs Restore Oregon, the Bosco-Milligan Foundation, the Oregon Nikkei Endowment and other petitioners in their case against the City of Portland, Guardian Real Estate Services and others.

After two years of public process during the creation of Central City 2035, City of Portland staff had recommended a maximum height of 125 feet (about 12 stories). But in April 2018, City Council voted to spot-zone one specific vacant lot in Old Town known as Block 33 (bounded by NW Couch, Davis, Fourth and Fifth) to a maximum height of 160 feet. The owner/developer of the property, Guardian, argued they could not make a profit with a building at 125 feet.

Perhaps that limit seemed even more egregious given that some adjacent blocks were zoned to allow 425 feet in height. Then in May of last year, a month after going from 125 to 160 at Block 33, City Council voted to decrease those additional four blocks from 450 to 200 feet. It’s as if they realized the height-offer wasn’t being accepted just down the street, so they gave it to Block 33 and made it all uniform. But they also raised height in other parts of Old Town from 125 to 200 feet.

One caveat from the LUBA decision was the judge concluded that while the city didn’t quite justify a 200-foot maximum height limit, nor did Restore Oregon et al. successfully argue that the 200-foot limit automatically violates the Portland Comprehensive Plan, which calls for continuity with established development patterns in a district.

“Remand is required for the city to adopt findings that are adequate to explain why the 200-foot height limit complies with PCP Policy 4.48,” the decision reads. “That decision must be supported by an adequate factual base. Accordingly, we do not address Restore Oregon's arguments that a  200-foot maximum height limit categorically fails to comply with PCP Policy 4.48.”

One doubts this is over. The deadline for the parties to file replies with the Oregon Court of Appeals is August 27: today.

Even so, I find myself continually struggling with the question of how a district of mostly low-rise buildings can grow while maintaining some hard-to-quantify balance where the buildings get taller, in keeping with population and density growth—but not too much taller. At the end of the day I’m inclined to side with the preservationists, because they’re not driven by profit. City planners may correctly argue that we need to add density if we’re going to avoid sprawl, but the most influential people on their side seem to be developers looking to make money.

In the case of Block 33, one could look at it on the map and make largely the same argument for height being made at the Hyatt Place site in the Pearl: that it’s a stone’s throw from downtown, where the buildings are taller. Why not graduate down in height as we across Burnside north?

Yet in the case of Old Town, not only is there the existing fabric of historic 19^th and early 20^th century buildings but also its presence along the river. Before the South Waterfront district, Portland had a fairly long tradition of stepping down in height to the river.

The argument in South Waterfront, that view corridors would still exist between the towers, turned out to be fallacy as all the gaps got filled in. But today it does seem that the principle of stepping down to the river is no longer believed to be sacrosanct.

What ultimately seems like a bigger disappointment in South Waterfront is not the somewhat tall towers at the riverfront but the lack of a larger public greenspace and public amenities there. It should be a continuation of Tom McCall Waterfront Park (or a public space equally valuable) and it’s not.

Ultimately the great old buildings of Old Town can hold their own against 125-foot-heigh buildings that may be more than twice their height. Can they hold their own beside 200-foot (approximately 20-story) buildings? There are excellent examples of buildings that can be contemporary yet compatible, and at a scale commensurate with the old cast-iron buildings, such as the upcoming ZGF-designed PAE Living Building. I can see how some might say 200 feet creates too great a disparity. But I would happily allow this in exchange for something these old buildings need more than for their neighborhood height to be limited: they need to be not only protected from demolition no matter the circumstance, but we need to give owners of these buildings the resources to seismically strengthen them.

 

Rendering of PAE Living Building (ZGF via City of Portland/Next Portland)

 

Today it’s arguably the threat of earthquake that is most endangering the buildings of Old Town, not the shadows cast by taller buildings. It never happens this way, but I wish we could trade more allowable height for two things: much more stringent historic-preservation laws at the city and state level, and increased subsidies for historic buildings made of unreinforced masonry.

Whether near the waterfront in Old Town or in the Pearl both in and out of the 13^th Avenue Historic District, it is the old warehouses and mixed-use structures that represent something Portland is lacking compared to older cities: layers of history, not just architectural but of the people who occupied them. We may differ about exactly how to design and build the buildings that sit beside them: their height, their materiality. But the important thing is to protect and preserve the buildings themselves.

Does that mean we should allow Hyatt Place at 23 stories? Not necessarily, because it’s true that density does not have to equal height, as Cliff argued. And we don’t want a whole neighborhood of 20-plus-story buildings, which in turn makes the old ones valuable not just for their history but for their relatively modest scale. Yet it also means the Wieden + Kennedy building a few blocks away, renovated from the early 20^th century Fuller Paint building, will be just fine even if it’s under more shadow, and that people living in towers are often destined to lose their views, because that’s what they sign up for.

Ultimately what we want is not just puzzle pieces that fit together but a variety of shapes and sizes and scales of puzzle pieces. What’s a puzzle if it’s not intricate?

And across Burnside I think it’s time to allow a new scale of height downtown. I’d love to see Portland’s first downtown tower to eclipse the Wells Fargo building and the US Bancorp Tower and go over 60 stories. But in return, let’s not let tragedies occur like the demolition of the historic Ancient Order of United Workmen Temple, which not only was a wonderful work of expensive-to-renovate unreinforced masonry and gorgeous Richardsonian Romanesque style but a needed foothill to the glass and steel mountains.

I say let’s allow the mountains and the foothills, as long as we better protect the foothills, and encourage developers to keep building both, with—to continue the analogy—plenty of valleys (parks) in between. The best cities and natural areas alike come with plenty of changes in elevation.

 

 

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Comments

[Sanju]

“Just a few blocks south at 12th and Washington is the Twelve West building, completed in 2009, and a block away is the under-construction Eleven West building (both designed by ZGF on former Goodman family-owned surface parking lots).“

You stated the Eleven West building was under construction.. Are you sure about that? I was reading recently they are still looking for financing and aren’t close to starting construction..

[Rob Nob]

So someone in a 16 story tall building directly adjacent to a historic district of 2 to 6 stories would limit the height of a building over 20 blocks away solely because it "spoiled her view"? This sounds like someone who should NOT be influencing public policy.