Sten’s vision clears hurdle

Proposed PDC budget locks in homeless, housing, other projects

By Chris Lydgate

The Portland Tribune, Feb 26, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (10 Reader comments)

If you blinked, you missed it.

With barely a squeak of dissent, a City Hall budget advisory committee earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars of urban redevelopment funds Friday morning.

If approved by the City Council, the recommendations will set in motion a series of ambitious projects to reshape the face of Old Town, the neighborhood that spreads northwest from the intersection of West Burnside Street and the Willamette River.

It includes significant allocations for homeless services and affordable housing, two cherished goals of Commissioner Erik Sten, who is anxious to get the projects on track before he leaves office April 4.

“This will be by far the most important package I’ve ever worked on,” Sten said before the meeting. “But it’s exciting. If we can pull this off, we have a chance to take care of a lot of things that have been stalled for a long time.”

Not everyone is thrilled with the move. The Portland Business Alliance worries the plan is so expensive it will require the city to extend the life of two downtown urban renewal areas until 2024, starving the retail core of new public investment for another 16 years.

The PBA, which represents downtown property owners, supports ending the useful life of the areas in 2018, clearing the way for the creation of a new downtown area that would address long-term redevelopment needs.

“We are concerned,” said Megan Doern, a spokeswoman for the PBA. “We don’t want to max out the credit card.”

But that was not the feeling of the committee, officially known as the Portland Development Commission-City Council Budget Work Group, co-chaired by Sten and PDC board member Charles Wilhoite.

The committee reached consensus on $261 million worth of downtown development over the next seven years. In doing so, it bestowed its blessing on dozens of specific projects, including:

• $31 million to purchase the six-block post office at Northwest Broadway and Hoyt Street from the U.S. Postal Service.

• $27 million for a homeless access center, topped by several floors of housing, most likely on Block U, a PDC-owned parcel on Broadway near Union Station.

• $10 million to support a 30,000-square-foot Uwajimaya supermarket, topped by 120 to 160 mixed-income units of housing, in Old Town’s Block 33, between Couch and Davis streets and Fourth and Fifth avenues.

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