Barbara Linseen is new to Beaumont-Wilshire after 2 decades in Grant Park neighborhood. She completed a Masters in Urban Planning at Portland State University in 1999. Given the contentious debate going on in our neighborhood over residential development, Barbara thought it might be helpful to provide some basic facts about zoning.
What is zoning and why do we have it? The story they tell you in planning school begins with pigs. A hog farm specifically. Suppose your neighbor decided to turn their property into a hog farm? Well, once upon a time in America they could have. There were no rules or restrictions governing what you could do on your land, you could do whatever you wanted. That might sound great, but keep in mind that means your neighbor could do whatever they wanted as well. Avoiding incompatible uses from butting up against each other is exactly why zoning was enacted, for safety and for preservation of property values. Zoning was first enacted in larger cities like Chicago and New York and gained further approval through a Supreme Court case in the 1920s (Euclid vs. Ambler).
Zoning aims to protect property values, provide predictability and safety to residents and create appropriate zones for each type of use. It prevents a single family neighborhood from becoming the location for a new high rise office building or an auto body shop…and the properties on the main street shopping district won’t be bought up for the next WalMart store.
Zoning regulates things like height, lot size, building size, amount of pavement allowed (permeability for storm water), allowed uses, requirements for each use, etc. Most of the B-W neighborhood is designated the R5 zone. The 5 refers to 5,000 square feet. That is the minimum lot size allowed. This is your typical 50’ by 100’ Portland lot. Properties can be bigger than that but they can’t get smaller such as a townhouse size (typically 25’ by 100’) or an attached row house size. Of course there can be exceptions. These are called variances and they require hearings, notices to neighbors and special approvals.
You can look up zoning on the wonderful Portlandmaps.org website. You will see that our B-W neighborhood R5 zone has a lower case “h” with it. This indicates an overlay zone for a height restriction in our area due to the approach of aircraft to the Portland airport. There is also a little bit of an “a” overlay north of Prescott which allows more flexibility towards adding density or “granny flats” to a property (read Zoning Code section 33.405 for all the details there). This kind of density would be applied close to a commercial area or along a well-served bus line.