Our Collective Nightmare

The scene: Tthe entire East End Town Center, euphamistically referred to as a "Village", teeming with 4-5 story mixed-use buildings.  The code is 3 stories, but if I understood the Lake Oswego planner correctly last night at the Evergreen Neighborhood Meeting, a  developer may qualify for a 4th floor without going through any review if the 4th story is residential and it is tucked within the roof line.  A fifth story can be added as an approved exception.  Do you get the picture?

So here we are, sometime in the future - certainly before I am ready and willing to move on, and all of The EAST END AND LAKE GROVE TOWN CENTERS are wall to wall with the cookie-cutter, soul-sucking, parking-challanged, human warehouses like the ones going up in Portland as fast as developers can run to the building dept. to get permits.  A new urban ghetto.  If LORA is still in existence and solvent, or still has enough credit to borrow the big bucks it will need to pull this off, the drain on the city's general fund and city services will be horrendous.

Simply put, Lake Oswego will cease to be Lake Oswego except in name only.  It will still have a lake in the middle as I doubt that is going anywhere.  I'm just using my imagination, but the above scenario is real.  Perhaps not likely very soon in the numbers I have described, but real.  Next up are the North Anchor Blocks and the Safeway Block.  I believe the Safeway block sold recently, so land speculation downtown has begun.  That walkable city all of the existing neighborhoods and the newcomers count on?  They can advocate for a new grocery that fits the size codes for the Town Center and see if anyone bites and at what price.

It's the community development codes (CDC) stupid.  It's the codes that allow monster buildings like the Wizer Block to be built.  Who created and who approved these codes?  And why didn't we notice?  That is another story for another day.  Following the codes, it is the Urban Redevlopment Districts or Areas that help grease the skids for this nightmare.  Without this public largess (public debt courtesy of the citizens of Lake Oswego), many of these projects would not happen.  An example is the Foothills Development.  This council voted to dissolve the district, but another council might bring it back.  Given the right council, the URA will be re-approved and the project will be back, all 9 stories of it, and another city park will be trounced.

I realize some people in town want this extreme development to happen.  (Development is fine, but at a scale that fits what is already here.)  I know that the majority of Lake Oswegans agree.  I know that the people who initiated these plans and funded them with public money did so without a public vote.  The Lake Oswego Redevelopment Agency (LORA) can do this - just vote to create URAs and fund them with city debt with no say from the public, and usually without the public being aware of the extent of the plans.  To save us from blight.

If you want to see what can happen to a nice small town, see the City of Mercer Island.  Actually, you can see this happening all over the USA and all over the globe.  The plans all look the same and the planners are all following the same drummer.  The developers have their eye set on LO for now because of our demographics, but at some point they will have saturated the market, then leave to  find the next best place to ruin.  It's all about the money.  No matter how much someone tells you it's to save the planet, it's not and and we are being used.  High density developepment is not green - but that too is another story.

This is about the ruin of a town that evolved into a desirable place to live for over 100 years, but the citizens took for granted that it would stay nice without their involvement in political affairs.  They niavely thought that, like in the past, everyone felt the same way about their small town.  Therein lies the seeds of our collective nightmare.  It's a pretty black world out there where central planners and wanna-be developer politicians play with our landscapes and depend on our unconscious compliance to do so.   Can we save our town?   Time to wake up,  drink some coffee and email:  mailto:saveRvillage@aol.com  to help.  The developers and citizen supporters who wanted the monster developments in the first place are well-funded and working hard to keep it going.

Only we can help ourselves!