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People exaggerate. Portland's already been transformed by row houses, lots of apartment and condo structures, and dense building. Unsurprisingly, a lot of old-t
by Frondo 7y ago
People exaggerate. Portland's already been transformed by row houses, lots of apartment and condo structures, and dense building. Unsurprisingly, a lot of old-timers hate it, and their complaints all boil down to "it's different from when I was a child/raising a family here".
The dense building is already taking place, in every neighborhood in the city. Getting a permit is no problem; my little brother, an engineer with no background in building, got a permit to build a four-unit building on one of the sites where they were already allowed (before this law was passed) in 8 weeks; the normal time for any permit approval for construction, he says, and in his engineering work he did a lot of work with permitting for customer projects, too, so I'd guess he knows.
Portland's already been changing and it's made the city so much more pleasant to walk through. Neighborhood after neighborhood of single-family detached housing is boring, tiresome to drive or bike through, and an environmental disaster (as the ODOT study recently confirmed).
If the rest of Oregon can now follow suit, this is only a good thing.
The funny thing is, driving through old towns in Oregon or anywhere, where most of the building was done before these zoning laws made everything into the same boring city planning style, architecture and construction used to be a lot more interesting and visually pleasing. It's neat to drive through places with variety of structure. These laws are one of the most pointless things, that's done a great deal of damage, the US has done.
- DougN7 7y agoThis might be a good thing for the environment, but fixing “boring” is very questionable in my opinion. Now you’ll simply have driveways that are 2-4x wider than before (which also means more rain run-off) and less lawn. That sounds boring and ugly IMHO.
- bluGill 7y agoShort term yes. However duplexes start enable the next level. Public transit needs a certain level of density to become useful, so longer term people can think about getting rid of a car. Density also means that while there is more solid pavement on lots, there are less lots overall, and less roads between the lots, and less driving from place to place. So globally this is an environmental win even though locally it is worse.
- lonelappde 7y agoWhat actually happens is that the roads get clogged by all the people in cars, and then no one want to ride buses because if you are stuck in traffic anyway, why also add an extra 15-30min waiting for a bus to be stuck in traffic behind other people's cars?
- Frondo 7y agoThe rain runoff can flow into the bioswales the city is already building all over; it won't just run into the city sewers. As for needing to build wider driveways, and that making it boring, I realize there's a certain kind of subjectivity here but I don't think that what we're going to end up with is literally "duplexes with double-wide driveways replacing single-family dwellings on the same-sized lots." The front-runner for the 2020 mayoral race has an architectural background and has been talking about ideas like introducing an LA-style design review board to Portland, to ensure that new development has to pass aesthetic review in addition to environmental review. I guarantee you that six months after something like that were enacted, every architect in the city would know exactly what they needed to do to keep the city interesting as well as weird.
- clairity 7y agoi heartily support raising density limits, but i’d caution against adding a design review board like we have here in LA. imho, it doesn’t add any more harmony or interestingness, while adding cost and delay to projects. we have whole classes of buildings that can no longer be built here because they’re not in style any longer.
- Frondo 7y agoThat's fair, I've never lived in LA so I don't know what problems it caused; only that the architect I know who's running for mayor liked it and felt it improved the city. He said that one of the problems he sees with development in Portland now is that the developers are under no constraint to make their buildings visually interesting at all; as an example he's cited, lots of the new apartment/condo buildings go up with a nearly uniform front structure for the entire length of a city block, when varying materials or architectural features would add little cost but make the structures more pleasant to walk by, drive by, etc., a facet of city living that is hard to pin down quantitatively but makes a subjective difference. I haven't lived in Portland in a while so I can't speak first-hand to this alleged blandness of new construction but I do remember the last time I was there seeing a lot of new stuff that was essentially undecorated, and of course it's cheaper that way but compared to lots of the development that is designed with more variety, I know which I'd choose. Maybe there's a middle ground, I don't know, I just know this is a situation where the market will converge on construction that probably isn't ideal for very-long-term city construction, but there isn't really an adequate feedback mechanism to force people to make prettier buildings. The city's under such housing pressure that people would live in unpainted cement blocks if someone built those. (Okay, I love brutalist architecture, especially some of the Soviet monstrosities, and I'd live in one in a heartbeat, but that's definitely me and even those had some style.) Seems like a place where a regulatory authority could do well, but maybe not a cookie-cutter of what LA has. It's just, these buildings are going to be around for a long time; now's the time to make them look good.