(Yet) another Portland story and making the transition from dumb development to smart growth

It is very frustrating doing what I am doing these days, because it reiterates how important visionary thinking and action is to making change happen, and the forces of inertia are so entrenched--especially amongst political leaders. Some of the entrenched forces are what we might call "conventional wisdom" and doing the same thing over and over again.

(Image abovet: The Crossings at Gresham brought transit-oriented development to Portland's suburbs, opening the door for financing to flow to similar projects. Image: Myhre Group Architects.)

I am really struck by how difficult it is to make "smart growth" happen, because to have real "smart growth" as opposed to a mixed use development (many mixed use developments
are to smart growth what graphics were to "multimedia" and interactivity at the start of the graphically-based world wide web--graphics didn't make something interactive), it is absolutely dependent on quality transit.

And most places lack quality transit.

But making the transition from unsmart growth to smart growth is very difficult. People don't accept that are ultimately shaped by automobile-centric frames of reference for development, and changing the paradigm (which they don't recognize and accept) is hard even in the best of circumstances.

We see that in the discussions and difficulties over intensification attempts in White Flint in Montgomery County (see "With development plan approved, the future of White Flint begins to take shape" from the Post) and in Tysons Corner in Fairfax County ("Planners may scale back design for urban Tysons" from the Post).

Where you really see it is in the Baltimore region, which doesn't have a robust network of fixed rail transit, although it does have a couple transit lines, plus the railroad commuter service, which for the most part is focused on getting workers to Washington, rather than on making Maryland great.

In the Baltimore region it is very difficult to get transit oriented development to happen because for the most part transit is middling. So being adjacent to transit services there provides little in the way of extra locational value. Without increases in location (and therefore land) value, it doesn't make economic sense to build more intense projects. Without more intense projects you can't drive intensification forward. Instead things remain somewhat hollow and deconcentrated.

Now I wouldn't claim that DC proper had a transit oriented development strategy. It supported the development of the subway system because it was understood that it needed to maintain the relevance of the central business district to the regional economy, and making it easy for suburbanites to get to work in the central business district via transit would keep the federal government entrenched there.

I don't think there was a whole lot of concern on the part of the planners to make the system an element of neighborhood renewal and revitalization. That happened, although it has taken and is taking decades, because many neighborhoods relatively close to the core were somewhat dense, had the bones of commercial districts still extant, and some opportunities for infill development, not to mention the right spatial conditions of grid-based block and street network perfect for transit.

Portland and Arlington County have had to work it harder than DC. (Portland does have the block and street grid, especially downtown.) But they have a lot to show for their hard work and visionary decisionmaking, and continuous extension of the vision through additional and complementary actions.

(In the DC region, besides maintaining the relevance of Downtown DC within the regional economy, the best examples of transit and transit oriented development as a driver for maintaining and improving communities are probably Bethesda and Silver Spring in Montgomery County, Columbia Heights in DC, which shows how intensification strategies can work, plus of course the Arlington County example along Wilson Boulevard).

Columbia Heights Civic Plaza on Easter Sunday, photo by William Jordan. The plaza is framed by two new multiunit housing buildings with ground floor retail, the rehabilitated Tivoli Plaza mixed use development, and the DC/USA shopping center. While I think there were issues with some of these projects, and they haven't planned for the next stage of retail development there, for the most part, things are working out pretty well there.


Streetsblog has an amazing entry about suburban smart growth in Gresham, Oregon, and how the Metro Government there had to be gutsy and lead by example. See "How Portland Sold Its Banks on Walkable Development."

They built the light rail line and wanted to see more intense development around the Gresham station. One developer didn't see the opportunity and intended to build a one story parking fronted retail business. Metro ended up buying the site and building the "product," in this case a five story mixed use building, that they needed to have, to demonstrate the power of transit-led land use intensification.

In DC, we haven't done this kind of development very much at Metro stations, with the exception of Columbia Heights and to some extent Petworth. Otherwise, most projects at Metro Stations heretofore, i.e., Fort Totten and Minnesota Avenue and Rhode Island especially--the Home Depot shopping center, while U Street and Takoma have half good and half bad projects, etc.) have been pretty piss poor in my opinion.

That's because they couldn't get developers to build for the future, but instead for the most part the developers built according to what they were familiar with. And the city economic development people weren't all that willing to push the envelope anyway.

I just think of the same kind of example at 8th and H Street NE with the H Street Community Development Corp., which demolished two and three story historic buildings to build a one story piece of crap. While some forces in government did try to get them to do better, at the end of the day, their primary funder, the DC Department of Housing and Community Development and local banks, didn't give a damn and the piece of crap was built. (I used the word "product" above because that is how a DHCD official referred to the H Street project in an article in the Washington Post.)

What the city needed to do was step up and lead the process, and put money in. For all my past complaints about entities like the National Capital Revitalization Corporation, I would argue in the end they probably did a better job than the Deputy's Mayor office can do. The relative independence is important (although that brought them down in the end, Mayor Fenty wanted to divvy up the spoils, I mean "opportunities") because if you have the right people you can do work, whereas most people in government end up being satisfied with the mediocre.

Also see The Need for Alternatives to the Nineteen Standard Real Estate Product Types, Places magazine, June, 2005 by Christopher Leinberger if you want to understand the process, and why improving the city through real estate development is a very difficult and long term process.

The Home Depot shopping center adjacent to Rhode Island Metro Station is very much suburban in its development paradigm. This project happened under Mayor Williams also, just as the Columbia Heights set of projects were planned and realized as well under his term of office.