Saving the soul of a city

Activists want bigger, faster effort by city to save neighborhoods
Portland Tribune, February 17, 2014  By Jim Redden

Council passes demolition reforms, promises more action
Portland Tribune, February 18, 2015  By Jim Redden

"We all know the Joni Mitchell song that says you don't know what you've got until it's gone, and we have neighborhoods we don't want to lose," said Mayor Charlie Hales, who is working with the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability on projects to consider such issues in next year's budget.

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Neighborhoods are under assault with tear-downs and lot divisions that destroy the very things that drew builders and buyers to a particular neighborhood in the first place.  Ruin a neighborhood and move on.  To where?  Can Portland, the queen of infill density, find a way to keep its neighborhoods intact?  Can Lake Oswego?  Will it buck developers' pressures to transform the city into an unaffordable, newer and unidentifiable place?

As you have seen documented in this blog, the tear-down and re-build with out-of-scale and out-of-character homes and apartments is angering people all over the world.  Government-manufactured scarcity of buildable land is the main cause for this malady.  Another causality of this destruction of the fabric of our towns and our "sense of place" is the loss of older homes that may or not be of historical or architectural significance, but together create a place that has its roots set firmly in time and our collective memory.  There is also the loss of true affordable housing, not the kind the government builds at exorbitant (public) cost to make up for what they allow to be destroyed.

I sat in on a "pre-app" meeting about 2 weeks ago where a builder is planning to divide yet another lot into two to create a flag lot. The plan is to tear down the original home and build two on the same lot.  When the topic of the Comprehensive Plan's goal to preserve neighborhood character came up, both the builder and the city planner remarked that people keep bringing up the comp plan in meetings, but it doesn't mean anything - it was only the codes that mattered.  The joke was on me. Do flag lots and the orientation of homes affect the character of a neighborhood?  Of course, but the  character issue was not up for discussion.  The codes can be ambiguous and illogical, so one has to  depend on the good will and good taste of the builder.

This demonstrates that regardless of whether or not the public has extensive involvement in creating a comp plan (or other land use plan), it really is just a volume of futility that can be ignored at will.  Of course, new codes or code changes must comply with the comp plan, but that gets into the slippery slope of code interpretation.  The comp plan and development codes mean whatever someone says they mean, but the one with the power of the state to approve or deny construction permits gets the final say.  In my opinion, when citizens and builders clash, the builder's interests are supported most of the time.

Development codes are still under review to see which ones are compatible with the comp plan, but unless citizens get out ahead of the game and insist that their code preferences are in place and interpretations upheld, well, good luck about what we will have to live with.  Once codes are approved, for all intents and purposes, they ARE set in stone.

In Lake Oswego we have all of the problems you can find in Canada, Australia, Beverly Hills, Marinwood, Portland, and all over the U.S.  What makes our towns and cities livable is being torn apart because of planning theories that we never got to vote on and may not work.  Smart Growth planning has been disappointing to disastrous, and its success has yet to be defined.  If it's the codes that set the stage for development, then YOU must be involved in their creation AND subsequent revisions. Plans and codes approved today, can and do get changed tomorrow. Vigilance is the price of saving your city.

  SAVE OUR NEIGHBORHOODS!  

 KEEP LAKE OSWEGO LIVABLE!