Suburban streets get complete

Two large-scale construction projects have delivered impressive "complete streets" transformations along parts of Route 1 in South Portland and Falmouth this summer.

To the south, a sewer upgrade project along Main Street in Thornton Heights slimmed down a four-lane road into a two-lane city street in the neighborhood's center, widened sidewalks, and added landscaped curb extensions that will also help filter stormwater before it flows into storm drains. Construction's not quite done, but some of the new sidewalks and curbing have been installed, along with some of the basic stormwater filtration gardens:

Thornton Heights is a classic streetcar suburb, but the neighborhood has had a hard half-century since it became the dumping ground for traffic from a nearby Maine Turnpike spur road.

Unfortunately, the new Main Street is still only an island of walkability – it remains cut off from surrounding neighborhoods, thanks to that previously-mentioned Turnpike stump at the neighborhood's southern edge and the inhospitable stretch of Route 1 that leads through the ugly Cash Corner intersection.

Also discouragingly, South Portland city councilors last year rejected a proposal to allow more walkable and transit-oriented zoning in the neighborhood. So, even with a more urban, walkable street, it's questionable whether neighborhood-oriented small businesses will follow, given that the status quo zoning favors auto-oriented strip mall development.

On the other end of Route 1, in Falmouth, they've just finished a very similar street project for that town's main drag. This one also includes new, wide sidewalks, lots of new street trees, lighting, bike lanes and several landscaped medians for safer crosswalks:

Unlike Thornton Heights, Route 1 in Falmouth is mostly surrounded by strip malls and parking lots – it's hard to tell there whether you're in Maine or in suburban Texas, so the town's nice new street feels pretty lonely.

But Falmouth is one step ahead of South Portland in one important respect: it's enacted some progressive zoning to encourage new walkable development along their new main street. That's been slow to come so far, but the new sidewalks and street trees should help encourage the hoped-for investment.

"Keep Portland Livable" is making Portland's gentrification problem worse

A couple weeks ago, we learned that Peter Monro and Tim Paradis, the two men behind “Keep Portland Livable,” had been working closely with the developers of the proposed Midtown development in Bayside, and will now support a revised proposal with a large reduction in housing.

I'd been reserving judgement on this turn of events until I'd had a chance to see the revised plans. Now that those have been posted on the city's website, I'm pretty disappointed. The new project is, however, entirely consistent with the privileged mindset of the well-to-do homeowners who bankrolled "Keep Portland Livable." Here are some of its problems:

They subtracted lots of the housing, but kept most of the parking.

The most credible complaints from “Keep Portland Livable” concerned the massive parking garage being proposed. But, in the updated version that bears the Paradis/Monro seal of approval, the massive garage is still there, and it actually grew an additional level.

In fact, it now would stand as the tallest, most prominent edifice in the revised proposal (pictured at right). How's that for symbolism?

The new Paradis/Monro project dedicates a much higher proportion of real estate to car storage than to people. The original plan was to have about 1.3 parking spaces per apartment. But under the new plan, each apartment will have 1.8 parking spots. That’ll help “keep it livable” for wealthier residents who want to bring multiple cars with them into the heart of the city, but it's going to make the city's streets less livable for everyone else.

It won't be more affordable; in fact, it will likely be more expensive.
The revised proposal makes no provisions for more-affordable housing — indeed, with hundreds of fewer apartments available in this new proposal, the developers will need to charge substantially higher rents for each unit in order to satisfy their investors and break even on construction costs. And speaking of rent inflation...

The truncated apartment buildings in the revised proposal (bottom, above) will have fewer apartments, and therefore they'll only be "livable" to half as many families.

It's a lost opportunity to address Portland's housing shortage.
The original proposal would have had up to 850 apartments. The revised project, with only 440 apartments, gives 410 fewer households the opportunity to live within short walking distance of three supermarkets, a dozen bus routes, downtown retail services and thousands of jobs.

Hundreds of new families are moving to Portland each year. Many are moving from places like Los Angeles or Brooklyn out of a desire to live in an attractive city near the ocean; many others are moving from rural areas out of necessity to live near health care and social services.

How the city makes room for these newcomers is a largely unresolved question.

Now that the "midtown" proposal has been scaled back with 410 fewer homes, it’s not as though 410 apartment-seekers who would have lived in the high rises will simply evaporate into thin air. Instead of occupying a long-vacant lot in Bayside, many of those newcomers will instead take over apartments and homes in established neighborhoods like Parkside, Munjoy Hill, or the West End (where Monro himself settled a few years ago when he arrived here from Massachusetts).

Or, if they don’t take over housing in Portland, perhaps they’ll join the thousands of migrants taking up residence in suburbs like Scarborough and Windham instead, where running even the most basic errands require burnt offerings of fossil fuels.

It's a terrible precedent for civic planning
The original 'midtown' proposal was faithful to the city's "New Vision for Bayside," a 1999 neighborhood plan that explicitly called for high-rise buildings and hundreds of new apartments to be built on this site to make Bayside feel like an extension of downtown and to help reduce suburban sprawl in rural communities outside of Portland. It was a good plan, and these developers collaborated closely with city planners and neighborhood leaders as their plans coalesced over a period of several years.

The opinions of two wealthy dudes aren't supposed to trump the city's long-standing economic development and housing policies. But the "Keep Portland Livable" guys have shown us a new, unwelcome truth for our income-stratified city: that those with the privilege to buy their own lawyers, public relations flacks, and lots of Facebook advertising can assert a de facto veto over the city's progressive housing goals and neighborhood-based planning process.

No urban plan will ever satisfy everyone, but the city's planning process is intended to balance and prioritize countervailing concerns (for instance, the overwhelming need for new housing, versus a few residents' aesthetic preferences for horizontally-oriented groundscrapers).

If the city's wealthy citizens are going to veto any new housing proposal that they don't like, then the city will quickly become inhospitable to everyone but the wealthy.

Urban design needs to be less elitist
I've heard from several people in the past few weeks who have seen the new plan, observed its weaknesses and wryly concluded that Paradis and Monro have "sold out" their values by agreeing to this compromise.

Saying that they've “sold out” misjudges the men’s intentions, though. Peter Monro and Tim Paradis are wealthy homeowners (Monro would really like to tell you about his recent two-month Spanish vacation), whose West End and Old Port property puts them in Portland’s top stratum of real estate wealth.

The city's housing shortage simply isn't a problem for these guys. And so, in the absence of real problems, it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd get so wrapped up in a first-world problem like a moderately tall apartment complex being built in the middle of the city.

Still, struggling to maintain some degree of egalitarianism in our cities against the desires of an increasingly powerful and wealthy 1% will be the defining challenge of urban planning in the next few decades. These guys are on the wrong side of that struggle. As Victor Gruen was to freeways, so Keep Portland Livable is to gentrification.

The challenge for the next generation – my generation – is to make sure that our revitalized cities will still make room for the diversity of people who would like to live in them. Keep Portland Livable's midtown intervention – like the destructive urban renewal of the last century – is an instructive example of what not to do.

Pavement polluters would pay for more sustainable infrastructure under proposed "stormwater charge"

During a 2-inch rainstorm, the parking lots and big-box rooftops of the "Pine Tree Shopping Center" and Quirk car dealership (pictured at right) dump about 1,500,000 gallons of oil-slicked runoff pollution into Portland's sewers, which proceed to overflow into the headwaters of the Fore River.

In a city that prizes its working waterfront and its locally-caught fish and lobster, this particular form of parking pollution is a big problem. The good news is that the city has committed to a $170 million upgrade of its infrastructure to handle this pollution. Even better: for the first time ever, parking lot owners, who are responsible for a substantial amount of the pollution, might actually foot a fair share of the bill.


Right now, sewers get paid for through our water bills; parking lot owners don't pay anything, even though their asphalt sends hundreds of millions of gallons of gasoline-slicked sewage into Casco Bay each year.

But for over a year now, the city's been holding public hearings on its proposed new "stormwater charge," which is its preferred way of paying for federally-mandated sewer upgrades for Clean Water Act compliance. The city's proposal would ask property-owners to pay fees in proportion to the amount of "impermeable surface" – rooftops and pavement – that they own.

This could be a significant step towards reducing the city's environmentally-destructive subsidies for motorists. Right now, parking lot owners are getting a free pass on the pollution they cause, but with the proposed stormwater charge, parking lot owners would be forced to pay to clean up Casco Bay.

In the short term, the fee will provide more funding for "green infrastructure" projects, such as traffic-calming sidewalk extensions that incorporate stormwater filtration gardens (like the one pictured at left, which was installed on Commercial Street earlier this year). And over the longer term, the new tax on pavement will help encourage more property owners to convert low-value parking lots to more productive, more urban uses – and encourage more motorists to leave the car at home.

The idea's got a lot of momentum behind it, but he city's also hearing a lot of opposition to this idea.  Anyone who wants to weigh in with a voice of support would help.

To learn more:
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/1331/Stormwater-Service-Charge

And to thank a city councilor for supporting this concept:
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/132/City-Council

New St. Lawrence Theater offers to pay for better bus service

The new performance hall for the St. Lawrence Theater on the top of Munjoy Hill is going up for its planning board review this month, and the proposal includes a nice treat for Portland's bus riders: in order to entice more of its audience to ride transit to the facility (which, in an unusually progressive fashion, will be built without any on-site parking), the nonprofit is offering to pay to increase frequency and extend service hours on METRO's Route 1, which runs up and down Congress Street from one end of the peninsula to the other.

Currently, METRO's Route 1 runs roughly every half-hour from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with a couple of additional runs until 10 p.m.

If the new St. Lawrence Arts venue is approved, the bus would run every 20 minutes, until 11 p.m., six days a week. They're also proposing to rebrand Route 1 as the "Art Line," a reference to its route through the heart of downtown's arts district.

The funding required for the additional service – $70,000 a year – would come from a surcharge in ticket fees at the new venue.  They're also planning other goodies, like abundant bike parking at the front door and discounts for cyclists. You can read the full "transportation demand management plan" here. 

Obviously, the enhanced bus service wouldn't just benefit theater patrons at St. Lawrence Arts. It would also benefit late-night hospital workers at Mercy and Maine Medical Center, on the other end of the line, plus dozens of restaurants and other arts venues downtown.

But no good idea goes unpunished: a group of wealthy neighbors calling themselves "Concerned Citizens of Munjoy Hill" is working hard to sink the proposal, or at least force St. Lawrence Arts to build an exorbitantly expensive parking garage.

So, if you'd rather see more sustainable transportation on Munjoy Hill instead of yet more parking, let the planning board know: email your comments to Nell Donaldson, HCD@portlandmaine.gov.

Make middle-class housing legal

A lack of new housing in the walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods of the Portland peninsula is one of our biggest barriers to creating a more sustainable region. Thousands of households all over New England would love to live in a city like Portland where it's possible to live well without an automobile — and in spite of this demand, virtually no new middle-class housing has been built in the central city during the past decade.

Why should this be? I have a column in today's Portland Press Herald looking at some of the reasons our city's becoming increasingly unaffordable, and here's the short version: our current zoning laws make it mathematically impossible to build an affordable home in the city.

Go to any planning meeting and you’ll see that the people complaining about taller buildings and parking issues are almost always well-off. Unlike the working poor, they have the leisure time to attend long planning meetings and influence zoning policy. Our “public process” is inherently biased against progress and the people who need housing the most.

That’s why it’s so important for those of us who possess the privilege of being able to participate in these civic discussions (this means you, opinion page readers) to maintain some perspective about how our bourgeois desires in urban design weigh against the greater needs of our most vulnerable neighbors.

Shadows from taller buildings, or finding free storage for your four-wheeled private property – those are First World problems. Dozens of your neighbors living in the shelters for want of stable housing: That’s a real-world problem, and we need to work harder to solve it.

Projects in Planning

Next Tuesday's planning board hearing will discuss some interesting upcoming building projects:

• Portland Yacht Services is proposing to build and relocate to a new boatyard on the western waterfront, under the Casco Bay Bridge. This could potentially represent one of the biggest private-sector investments in the working waterfront in many years. As Carol McCracken reported on Munjoy Hill News, the new yard might include a dry dock and berthing facilities plus large warehouses for indoor boat maintenance. The move would also open up the current Portland Yacht Services space (on the waterfront near the Eastern Prom) for redevelopment. 

• In the Old Port, East Brown Cow Management is workshopping a 7-story, 124-room hotel to replace a surface parking lot on the corner of Fore and Union Streets,  catty-corner from the Portland Harbor Hotel. They're only providing massing sketches so far, but even these early plans make it clear that the developers care about providing an active street-level facade along Fore Street, and a dynamic, high-visibility corner that resembles folded glass.
  
  It's nice to see a progressive developer proposing high-value economic development without sandbagging it with low-value parking to ruin our streets for a change. A well-designed, attractive streetscape is in these developers' strong financial best interests, as they also own the adjoining retail spaces in the Canal Plaza garage, where tenants will benefit tremendously from more foot traffic along Fore Street.
  
  
  
  
  
  This development would fill in a big gap in the Old Port's streetscape and help draw more foot traffic westward, across Union Street, and perhaps help spark more redevelopment on the massive surface parking lots that surround Gorham's Corner.
• Unfortunately, the "Newbury Street Lofts," that ugly parking garage with condos on top, seems headed towards final approval on Tuesday as well. I happened to meet that project's architect in the neighborhood a couple weeks ago; he was pretty upset with my critique, but tellingly couldn't find any faults with my arguments (it was my tone that upset him). Maybe the final design will hold some improvements — it would be a very pleasant surprise, but the architect and developer seem unwilling to budge on their assumption that new buildings need on-site parking (contrary to the evidence immediately above this bullet point), so I have low expectations.

Portland's Smart-Growth Housing Plan: 10 Year Progress Report

Ten years ago, the City of Portland drafted a new Housing Plan. Recognizing that housing prices were rising out of control and that it was becoming increasingly hard to find a place to live here, the city set out to find ways to increase the number of homes and apartments available here.

The city's housing plan is a crucial smart growth strategy for the entire Greater Portland region. Sprawl isn't merely the fault of outlying rural communities. If people are going to be able to live near the places where they work, drive less, and promote local small businesses in walkable neighborhoods, then the City of Portland absolutely needs to provide more housing opportunities in town. Otherwise, households will be forced by basic financial necessity to find affordable housing elsewhere.

So, after ten years, how are we doing? Not so well, as I outline in my column this week in the Portland Daily Sun. In spite of some minor regulatory improvements, the vast majority of the county's new housing is still being built outside of the city limits, in outlying communities. That means more traffic on local streets, more money being spent on foreign oil, fewer customers for local small businesses, and more regional vulnerability to volatile housing markets.

In this blog post, I'll go into some more detail, looking at three specific Housing Plan goals and how we've so far failed to meet them.

Goal: Encourage growth in Portland; target Portland to achieve and maintain a 25% share of Cumberland County's population.

Reality: In 1960, before urban renewal laid waste to our downtown, 40% of Cumberland County residents lived in the City of Portland. In the 2000 Census, 24.2% of the County's population lived in Portland. By the 2010 Census, it was evident that sprawl had continued unabated for the past decade: Portland's population had grown somewhat, but not as fast as the rest of the county. The city now possesses only 23.5% of the county's population, and only 24.4% of the County's housing units:

	Cumberland County population	Portland City population	% of County population living in Portland	Cumberland County Housing Units	Portland Housing Units	% of County housing in Portland
2000	265,612	64,249	24.19%	122,600	31,862	25.99%
2010	281,674	66,194	23.50%	138,657	33,836	24.40%

This goal drives many of the plan's other objectives: if more and more County residents are living farther away, that creates sprawl, and hollows out the city's local economy. Therefore, the City of Portland needs to add new housing within the city's limits, at an equal or greater pace as the rest of the County's municipalities.

The Census Bureau also tracks building permit data for each year, and from those statistics, it's clear that the City isn't even close to keeping pace with sprawl:

Here's the source data, and a link to the Census site.

In this chart, the red line indicates county-wide housing construction for each year since 2000. The orange line is 50% of the height of the red line: that's where the City's housing construction would need to be in order for Portland's population growth to keep pace with the rest of the county's, in line with the housing plan's goals. The blue line, nowhere near the orange line, shows how much housing actually got built each year.

Instead of providing 50% of the County's new homes, the City of Portland has actually built a pathetic 11% of the county's homes. In other words: in the decade since the city's new housing plan got written, roughly 9 out of 10 new homes in Cumberland County have contributed to sprawl. Ugh.

Outlook: You might suppose, as I did, that the City might have had a rebound relative to the rest of the county after 2008, when spiking gas prices and the foreclosure crisis put the big hurt on sprawl development in the suburbs.

Unfortunately, you'd be mistaken: in the past 3 years, the City's proportion of housing construction relative to the rest of the County has fallen even more, to around 6%. The fundamental issue seems to be that new housing construction in Portland is a lot more expensive than it is in the 'burbs, thanks to more expensive real estate and zoning mandates. The main expense that's under the city's control - its outrageously expensive and outdated parking mandates - was loosened somewhat in 2008, when planners reduced off-street parking requirements somewhat. In hindsight, unfortunately, it hasn't had much of an effect, and planners ought to be asking whether they should be doing more.


Goal: Create 300 new units of housing in Bayside within 5 years [by 2007] and 500 additional units within 25 years, a significant portion of which will be owner-occupied units.

Reality: Cumberland County's Census Tract 6 is roughly contiguous with the Bayside neighborhood. Census data indicates that there were 1,421 housing units in the neighborhood in 2000. By the 2010 Census, there were 1,618 housing units: a net gain of 197 homes.

Census Tract 6 extends only as far south as Cumberland Avenue, which means that these numbers don't include the Chestnut St. Lofts project near Portland High School, completed in 2007. Adding that project in bring brings the neighborhood's total to 234 new homes. So five years past the original deadline, the City still hasn't met the plan's short-term goal.

Outlook: Still, two large apartment complexes from Avesta Housing are currently under construction in Bayside, and will add 91 new subsidized apartments within the next year or so. And the Federated Companies, new owners of the Somerset Street blocks along the Bayside Trail, are tentatively planning 540 additional market-rate apartments in high rises on their land. Along with infill projects happening elsewhere in the neighborhood (including, hopefully, along the new Franklin Street), it seems like the city should be able to meet its 25-year housing goal for Bayside, even if it missed the shorter-term goal by a wide margin.


Goal: Encourage and support the Portland Housing Authority to become more active in development of more housing.

Reality: The Portland Housing Authority hasn't developed a single new home on any of its properties since the Reagan administration. But at least there's plenty of free parking in East Bayside!

Outlook: The PHA owns acres of empty and under-utilized real estate on the Portland peninsula and in close-in neighborhoods like East Deering. In the past decade, the value of that land has increased dramatically, and the PHA also possesses the ability to raise capital through bonds. It's in an ideal position, in other words, to de-stigmatize its run-down public housing complexes, improve its financial standing, and help address the city's housing shortages with new, mixed-income housing complexes.

Unfortunately, the PHA is run by bureaucrats whose timidity and lack of creativity and courage are extreme even by bureaucratic standards. I worked with the agency's director, Mark Adelson, during the Peninsula Transit Study, and he insisted that empty parking lots were more important than building new homes for the homeless.

To be fair, the man isn't so much callous as he is afraid that he might hear a complaint from someone who loses their parking lot. 'Tis better for hundreds of people to sleep on the streets than for a single car in East Bayside to park on the street (somebody translate that into Latin so it can be the Agency's new motto).

As a quasi-independent agency, the PHA doesn't have much oversight from the City Council, which is part of the problem. Still, my guess is that the new Mayor and city manager could find creative ways into getting the PHA to be more involved in addressing the city's housing shortages – putting more conditions on the PHA's Community Development Block Grant applications would be a good first step.