Heather Flint Chatto (Forage Design)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
About one year ago, the messages and press releases started coming. I didn't recognize the organization sending them, PDX Main Streets, but there seemed to be a sense of urgency. There were design awards for urban design and architecture at the neighborhood scale to be voted on by the public. There were new design guidelines for a succession of new neighborhoods, created not by the City of Portland but through grassroots citizen-led efforts. There was a Historic Resources Code Project draft to to vet.
Eventually, I got curious: who were these people? Turns out that PDX Main Streets was co-founded by Heather Flint Chatto (with Linda Nettekoven and others), the person behind the outreach. She's a planner and urban designer with more than 20 years of professional work in environmental design, civic and regional planning and environmental policy practice. Now the head of her own firm, Forage Design, Flint Chatto has designed homes, tiny-house villages, stormwater management plans, neighborhood master plans, zero-energy tool kits, historic-district planning documents, and much more. These days, for example, besides main street planning, she's keen to talk about how kiosks can help encourage activity in public spaces.
PDX Main Streets is all about finding common ground and urban design solutions that allow Portland to continue increasing density while also protecting the neighborhood main streets dotting our city neighborhoods. The organization has helped several different neighborhoods create design guidelines meant to protect old buildings while recommending how pattern language can help a variety of building scales and buildings of different eras go together. These guidelines are unofficial and non-binding, with no official recognition from the City of Portland. But Flint Chatto believes they nevertheless have value as a guide to private development, and as food for thought as we continue to fine-tune our zoning codes and plans.
Following is an abridged version of two conversations I had with Flint Chatto over the past few weeks.
Portland Architecture: how did you get started with PDX Main Streets?
Heather Flint Chatto: I’m an urban planner and environmental designer and have been leading this initiative in partnership with many others for seven years. It was begun around the major redevelopment of Division Street. I’m an inner-Southeast resident and live near Division. We were concerned not about infill or density but about major redevelopment without community process. I was a redevelopment planner for local government years ago and feel the problem is the lack of public process and design tools to help new development fit our older narrow main streets with a bit more compatibility.
What has been your approach?
Our approach has been to keep it proactive and positive, focusing on developing tools any community can use. We led massive public engagement work over the first five years including public inter-neighborhood design committee meetings with elected representatives, hosting walking tours, many outreach events, two PSU design studios, surveys, and even hired a former planning commissioner to help us create design guidelines.
Our Division Design Initiative became the PDX Main Streets Design Initiative last spring, scaling up to a citywide effort as many other communities started adopting our design guidelines and more and more communities started asking for our help. Our Division Design Guidelines began for one street but really can work for any many street and are a tool to make better density with sensitivity.
These design guidelines have now been formally adopted by eight neighborhood and business associations for 12 streets in Southeast Portland, and we’ve been talking with [North/Northeast neighborhoods] Alberta, Humboldt and Boise about them as well. We’ve also been acting as a policy watchdog group.
Collage of Hawthorne Boulevard contributing historic buildings (Michael Molinaro)
Could you talk a little bit about what makes good compatible info? It’s more than style, right?
We’re doing the work typically done by cities and working to turn people on to density through design literacy. Our work is style-neutral and pro-pattern-language. When you talk about design, people think you are talking about style, which isn’t the case. We certainly love old buildings but our approach is style-neutral and focused on the design issues of building form, massing, durable materials, energy efficiency, connection to context, sustainable design, adaptive reuse, etc. Sadly, when you talk about design or any critique of a project, you get instantly labeled as anti-density which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our work is about ensuring people have a voice and helping them advocate for what they want instead of what they don’t. When we teach the pattern language of main streets they stop fighting the issues they can’t control and start engaging more effectively with designers and developers.
How did you get interested in neighborhood planning the first place, and what brought you to Portland?
My background is as a 20-year urban planner and government planner and long-range planner. I grew up in Santa Barbara, when it was a hippie surfer town. My parents were hippies after living on a commune in southern Oregon. I was very interested in community from an early age, and wanting to help people see each other and connect with each other. Santa Barbara was influential in its walkability, the attention to details, the ways to be diverse and consistent. Then I worked as a planner for Santa Barbara County on Old town in Goleta. I think the opportunity to work in my hometown was kind of a dream: to be able to come back and work on shaping community planning and doing revitalization planning down there. There’s a lot of debate around design: should we be like Santa Barbara or be our own entity? Then I went to graduate school at the University of Washington. As we came to Portland, in 2008, the bottom dropped out of the economy. I got lucky and wound up working at the New Buildings Institute on zero-energy buildings: educating architects and engineers and local governments.
Flint Chatto and her new business card (Forage Design)
So the perspective you bring comes from a planning and sustainability background, but it seems like public involvement is just as important to you.
I really look at how you foster design that connects people. How do you foster architecture that is contextually appropriate but also artful and inspiring, whether modern or vintage? My undergrad [degree] was in environmental studies for teachers, so I’m really passionate about education, and giving communities a voice. How do you make that accessible to people who don’t necessarily have the language to express what they want, and to be able to inspire a community to not just say what they don’t want but ask for what they do want?
What about starting PDX Main Streets?
As I have done all this work on zero-energy buildings, and before founding Forage Design, for a time I wasn’t really working here in Portland, and I was hungry to do more design work that I’m passionate about. When our neighborhood started developing, it was a chance. There were several projects in the planning stages. Some more had been greenlighted for development. We were doing major redevelopments at the same time without a public process. We needed some tools to deal with that.
There was an opportunity with the Division Green Street/ Main Street Plan. It required a public meeting. We had that requirement because there were some design standards that got moved into a Division planning district in the code. We were lucky enough to get a required meeting with developers, but it was like two weeks before they submitted for development. Nothing could really happen. They were just checking a box on meeting with us. We needed to guide development to fit the place. It felt like there was a lot of contrast. And how did we connect with the community in a way to identify goals and design priorities, and what was Division for the future? We didn’t have any tools, any design guidelines.
I’d just had a baby but decided I’d get involved with the neighborhood association, and then we brought together a coalition of seven different neighborhood associations. We formed a design committee and went two years of monthly public meetings, and we ended up deciding we wanted to do design guidelines. We put out an RFP [request for proposals] and treated this as a professional planning project.
Cover of PDX Main Streets design guidelines (PDX Main Streets)
What’s been your approach to getting people involved?
We’ve done every kind of public engagement we could. I think planning a policy can be so difficult to engage community members on. We wanted to find a lot of ways to engage. We even did Mad Libs cards about what people liked on Division, how often they came, what their favorite buildings were: ‘I wish there was more of this and less of that.’ We turned those findings over to students at PSU. We had 300 people take that survey. People poured their heart out. The biggest thing I think besides parking issues—which was not our issue and we stayed away from completely—was the architecture. 450 people did these vision cards. There is so much data there to mine. We did a process that was equivalent to [what the City of Portland did for] Old Town Chinatown: we came up with a long draft and a short draft. We took it to everyone for community comments.
And then the Division guidelines started getting adopted by other neighborhood organizations.
With Division, we took that work and said, ‘This could be a living document. Let’s build on that and implement it more.’ Our design guidelines are pretty dense. We felt like there was so much need there. It’s a resources guide. Hollywood, Moreland and Woodstock adopted the guidelines. Hosford Abernethy just adopted them. And then we developed a separate one, a supplement to the Main Street guidelines. It’s the short version. I think that supplement is a great way to go. There are so many buildings that aren’t on the historic resources inventory.
What have you learned along the way, or what might be some of the misconceptions out there?
It’s not just about preserving things in amber. It’s not about old buildings or new buildings. We’re trying to show that there’s a pattern language. We’re trying to teach people that the language of buildings can happen in a newer building or a historic building but it’s completely style neutral.
When you’re evaluating a development—and this is the environmental technical researcher in me—we’ve also got these competing goals at the city. We’re not looking at the tradeoff. We’re looking at short-term outcomes and not the long-term impacts of our decisions, whether it’s environmental or social. Those little main streets aren’t just special in a nostalgic way. They’re the downtowns of each neighborhood. Development is an opportunity to leverage that development: to fill in the gaps.
What might you say to the criticism that such guidelines are limiting creativity?
It’s not that everything has to be like this. Kevin Cavanaugh and Guerrilla Development do incredible main street buildings, but they often break a mold. Or the Solterra building at Southeast Ninth and Division: it’s a striking building with a great mural, but it also has a base, middle and top—the common main street pattern. There’s a common language to all of these main streets in Portland. There’s a common storefront pattern of bulkhead, regular rhythm of recessed entries, clerestory windows: teaching people that language. You can have a small building next to a tall building when they speak the same language. It’s about the pattern. That’s what we’re trying to communicate, but I think we’re having a hard time. There’s a translation problem.
This is not some kind of hidden NIMBY effort. This is a way to turn people on to density. They’ll be supportive of taller buildings when they’re context-appropriate. It’s not just relating to what’s there. It’s keeping in mind where we want to go in the future, and what the desired patterns are of the people in that place. I think that’s been negated. We want to help people develop a vision and shape the tools they need. We’re having some difficulty translating that to decision makers. There really isn’t a pathway for community work to be recognized.
ARTfarm Conceptual Design Plan (Forage Design)
How would you assess the code and how the City of Portland is handling these neighborhood main streets and the question of preservation versus density?
A study called the Low Rise Commercial Building Study from 2006 by the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability mapped all these vintage main street centers that are not historic districts. They’re recommending a 65-foot threshold for design review. How do we get bigger buildings on Powell and fill in the gaps, where more and more people need access to jobs and services so they can walk? We’re not leveraging development for filing in those gaps. And what we do in the next 10 years will be the most significant. Building materials are 90 percent of the impact. Definitely do infill, but you shouldn’t be demolishing good buildings. I constantly hear people concerned about how we’re growing as a city. When you dig down, it’s not about the density. It’s about being context-appropriate. You can be compatible with contrast or incompatible with contrast. There are many examples. I’d like to put together a larger leadership summit to really talk about this centers and corridors approach. It’s really the small main street corridors that are one of our greatest civic assets, that we’re kind of trashing by over-building, and under building on the big wide corridors. We’re not suggesting down-zoning. But there may be a different treatment needed for this collection of streetcar main streets that formed the core of our neighborhoods in the city. Those centers deserve that kind of respect.
What about how neighborhood design guidelines have or haven’t been incorporated by the City of Portland?
When you look at the [Design Overlay Zone Amendments] and the historic resources code, there’s no mention of our work, the guidelines that neighborhoods have adopted. We [as a city] don’t recognize community-based planning, and that makes people feel disenfranchised.
What about how your own firm, Forage Design, dovetails with your volunteer work with PDX Main Streets?
Forage is my business name because it’s about using what you have. My bathroom sink sits on a sewing machine table. I try to think about that with land use too. How do we use the old buildings we have?
How does your ARTfarm project figure in?
One of my clients is a really innovative developer. We have a site, where there’s an existing single-family house with an opportunity to add 10 tiny houses on wheels. We’re trying to make this a replicable model. It’s a really sensitive way to adapt these sites: to leverage more actors and sites, help more inter-generational wealth, help more property owners develop their own housing on their property.
Flint Chatto's kiosk proposal (Patrick Hilton for Forage Design)
Could you talk a bit about your interest in introducing more kiosks to Portland?
We started looking for how could we take on a place-making entity as part of PDX Main Streets that could address houseless services. Prosper Portland wanted to fund but it had to be brick and mortar stuff. We ended up coming up with a kiosk with solar batteries to go with the train station. We worked with an Italian kiosk fabricator. It’s this placemaking through urban street furniture. It’s an opportunity for outdoor dining with Covid, and safer outdoor spaces. It’s a strategy you could use all over the city. They could be small wayfinding gateposts or coffee stands, or places for houseless services or other applications. They could really support a diversity of community placemaking.
In Lisbon they talked about this kiosk strategy to enliven dead spaces and reactivate places that are unsafe. What I’m seeing is this is a trend, that this longstanding urban street amenity, as urban furniture: there’s a variety of different applications, whether flower stands or newsstands or wayfinding posts or food vendors. It’s coming back.
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This is exciting work. Thank you Heather for all of your efforts and for being willing to embrace and add new models of workable structures. Europe has also taught us so much about walkable communities as well and it's great to see you incorporating the best of other countries, farmers markets with music transforming parking lots, and include that in your work, as well as latest technologies such as solar with kiosks. Community involvement helps enliven community and making the place part of themselves. Thank you for making this possible by engaging the community wishes. Truly healthy communities.
Posted by: Cynthia Unmani Groves | February 20, 2021 at 02:29 AM