Undoing of a vision

BACK STORY • Con-way has bold plans but ‘dialogue’ could doom them

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Apr 29, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (16 Reader comments)

Courtesy of Con-way INC.

Con-way Inc. has a bold plan for redeveloping some of the land its headquarters sits on in Northwest Portland. However, the heavy density of the proposed plan has neighbors worried.

On a drizzly evening in January, about 25 people, many unfamiliar with one another, sit around a long conference table in an upstairs office at Con-way Inc. headquarters in Northwest Portland.

Most in the room live or work close to the trucking company’s property. Some are members of the neighborhood association, others represent various local businesses and nonprofits.

Craig Boretz, Con-way vice president of corporate development, has just finished a private presentation of a slide show of what he calls “an early stage master plan” for a development on Con-way’s parking lot-dominated property in Northwest Portland.

And early stage it is, with few of the architectural or planning details that will, in the end, determine the project’s success or failure.

But the vision that Boretz and project designer John Spencer have created is bold enough that even without detail, it begs reaction.

Northwest Raleigh Street has become a canal, modeled after similar thoroughfares in Amsterdam. Streetcar lines pass through the development. A public plaza leads into a series of tall buildings at the development’s center. The artist’s renderings appear to show an entire neighborhood built from the ground up.

The Con-way plan is bold and ambitious. It also, many in the city believe, represents a litmus test for the city’s commitment to urban density. It includes residential towers taller than any building in the Pearl District, along with parks and a community center.

Boretz and Spencer talk about affordable family housing and open spaces, greenway corridors for pedestrians and bicyclists, possibly even a neighborhoodwide heating and cooling system that could be more efficient than individual building systems.

But there is a trade-off, Boretz explains, and that is density.

Low-density housing – such as a collection of townhouses – is not financially feasible, he says. It won’t bring in enough revenue to cover what may be as much as $50 million just to put in below-ground parking, much of it for the 1,000 Con-way employees who work in the company’s two office buildings.

It won’t pay the bills for the public spaces and the community center that won’t yield any revenue at all for Con-way.

What would help pay for all that is what Con-way is proposing: thousands of housing units, many of them in large condominium and apartment buildings, possibly adding between 4,000 and 5,000 new residents to Northwest Portland’s current population of 12,000.

The lights in the room brighten and no more than a few seconds pass before Greg Theisen, vice chairman of the planning committee for the neighborhood association, offers the first reaction.

“I’m a little shocked,” Theisen says. “This is much more than I ever thought I’d see here.”

Kim Carlson, chairwoman of the neighborhood association transportation committee, warns Boretz that he should expect some “pushback” from neighborhood residents concerned about increased traffic.

At meeting’s end Boretz is asked when the public will be shown this master plan, and he says February or March. That public presentation has not been held yet, and it has not been scheduled yet. In fact, the renderings of the plan that were shown in January are no longer available for viewing.

Instead, the Con-way team has been making presentations to a number of neighborhood groups and governmental agencies, but without the slides.

Portland has seen a number of large-scale developments in recent years. But the Con-way project, on the largest undeveloped piece of property left in the central city, presents a crucible for the city’s commitment to density in a way the other developments could not.

South Waterfront is a neighborhood created from scratch. Its primary impact on the nearby Lair Hill area is the way it blocks views of Mount Hood.

The Pearl District rose from an abandoned rail yard. There was no backyard from which people there could shout that they didn’t want the development in theirs.

But the Con-way property, all 20 acres, is a bridge between the single-family homes off Northwest 23rd Avenue and the Pearl District. There are plenty of backyards from which people have started to say, “Not in mine.”

Board members of the Northwest District Association, probably the most vocal and mobilized neighborhood association in the city, already have begun to raise doubts about the Con-way vision.

And the initial protests over the Con-way plan have raised questions of another sort.

Planning, most experts agree, is what Portland does well. But big, bold designs? Not so much – possibly because they die in the planning process.

“The cautionary principle is very much alive in the DNA of Portland,” says Gil Kelley, director of the Portland Planning Bureau.

He lists bold project ideas that haven’t happened: Making underground Tanner Creek a free-flowing surface stream through the central city again, a Frank Gehry building proposed for the Pearl District that died for lack of funding, capping Interstate 405 and moving Interstate 5 away from the river on the east bank of the Willamette River – both plans abandoned for lack of money and civic will.

Kelley says Portland’s city government is open to big visions, but that the process of putting them into action has to involve dialogue with the public and city agencies. And he thinks those deliberations, in the end, benefit the city.

“There’s no reason boldness can’t occur here,” he says. “It just isn’t going to be the result of one developer walking in with a drawing and everybody bowing down. It might represent a little design by committee, but, generally, it has a truer fit.”

As for reaction to his initial talks with Con-way, Kelley says: “I had a mix of feelings. They’re at least pushing the envelope with some concepts.”

Vision lost in process

Peter Finley Fry, a planning consultant to developers, says the multiple layers of bureaucracy that have a say in how a proposed development looks makes bold visions nearly impossible in Portland. One reason, he says, is the process takes too much time.

“The trouble is our planning becomes a process of compromise,” Fry says. “You might start out with an exciting vision and people who had that vision will fade away and people afraid of that vision will stay put. And the planning bureau draft will dumb it down and the planning commission will make it further dumbed down.”

In Fry’s estimation, the biggest obstacles to bold, visionary design such as Con-way has proposed are Portland’s neighborhood associations.

“We artificially empower mediocrity,” he says. “There’s a certain proportion of people who have fear of change anywhere. In Portland, those people are empowered with authority through the neighborhood associations.”

Fry says that when he first saw a picture showing Con-way’s proposed canal street, “I loved it.” His second reaction, he says, was thinking that it is unlikely he’ll ever see it in the real world “because of the fundamental lack of leadership at the city level.”

Without strong leadership from the mayor’s office, Fry says, the fate of projects such as Con-way’s are left to the bureau of planning, which inevitably result in compromise.

John Spencer, a Portland urban designer who helped envision South Waterfront years before being hired to work on the Con-way project, disagrees with Fry. He calls South Waterfront bold, and says it was made possible because then-Mayor Vera Katz was willing to actively support it.

Spencer says his years as chairman of the city’s design commission convinced him that it isn’t the city that’s keeping more visionary design from occurring in Portland.

“I would hear from people that it was difficult, but I was on a committee that was encouraging architects and their development clients to act more boldly,” he says. “It was easier to design a building that played by the same rules as the last building that got approved, and that was the safest and most predictable way to go.”

But Fry argues that the city’s lengthy approval process encourages designers to take the safer route because they want their projects approved. “That’s just human nature,” he says.

Striking deals or going public

Homer Williams, the developer who helped create the Pearl District and South Waterfront, says that with enough will and political capital, developers can put bold designs into place in Portland. But it’s hard, he says. And Con-way has taken a wrong first step, he believes.

By showing its preliminary master plan to groups with a stake in the development, including the neighborhood association, Con-way opened itself up for criticism before it was ready to deal with it, Williams says.

He says he learned from his experiences with the Pearl District and South Waterfront that he had to have agreements in place on specific pieces of developments before his plans went public.

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