A new housing trend in Portland?

Could this spell hope the future of Lake Oswego, it's town centers and its neighborhoods?   


City ponders an about-face on density 
Portland Tribune, August 19, 2014, By Steve Law

Planners mull 'down-zoning' to relieve pressure on some areas

Photo Credit: TRIBUNE PHOTO: JONATHAN HOUSE - A new mixed-use apartment complex is nearing completion on Southeast Division Street and 33rd Avenue.

The city of Portland — often incurring the wrath of residents and neighborhood associations — has scrambled for two decades to increase density via infill developments, row houses, apartments and condos.

Now city planners are plotting something unthinkable in the 1990s and 2000s — reducing density.

In the proposed comprehensive land use plan designed to guide Portland’s growth through the year 2035, planners are proposing lower densities on 2,100 acres of land throughout the city. It’s known as down-zoning.

“It’s been a half-century since we’ve had this much down-zoning,” says principal planner Eric Engstrom of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. The last time the city undertook so much down-zoning was 1959, he says, when many close-in neighborhoods were rezoned to bar apartments and only permit single-family homes.

None of the proposals are written in stone, as the city has just started taking public testimony on the long-awaited update of the 1980 comprehensive land-use plan. And to be fair, that “comp plan” also calls for increasing densities in many parts of town, especially on commercial corridors and intersections such as Southeast Division Street and 122nd Avenue, Barbur Boulevard and Capitol Highway, Killingsworth near Portland Community College, and several inner-eastside corridors.

But the changing tide on density is notable. Ever since the mid-1990s, when Metro released its Region 2040 Plan to chart growth for the next 45 years, Portland and every other city in the metro area has been under pressure to increase densities and do their share to accommodate expected population growth.

At the time, he says, Portland couldn’t demonstrate to Metro and state land use regulators that it could spur large new residential communities in existing inner-city neighborhoods such as the Pearl District or South Waterfront.

But residents have since flocked to those and other close-in neighborhoods. So now planners are saying they can accommodate growth in hot spots such as the Lloyd District, downtown, and four-story apartments on inner-eastside corridors such as Division, Hawthorne, Belmont and Burnside.

“Under the current zoning rules, Eastmoreland as we know it could easily be gone in five years,” says Robert McCulloch, president of the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association. “Basically, a vast majority of the homes will be eligible for demolition.”

Will planners and politicians save the suburbs and not try to urbanize already built-out cities like Lake Oswego?