To every season—blessings and scourges! An excerpt from Ecclesiastes? Perhaps a dramatic line from a Passover Seder? Plausible guesses…but the truth is, I made it up. Why? Primarily as a literary device to segue from harbingers of spring to seeds of controversy.
As the opening statement implies, each season has a unique set of “blessings” and “scourges” associated with it. Thus, during spring we delight in the blessings of brilliant blossoms and picture book rainbows, while also kvetching about the scourge of pesky weeds and allergies. But blessings and scourges aren’t always so easily defined (i.e., one’s positive can be another’s negative). And that’s exactly the dynamic at work during this spring’s surge in demolition/development construction: a blessing for big home developers, a scourge for viable home preservationists, a mixed bag for density-concerned planners. Turn, turn, turn.
The debate over tearing down viable, affordable homes and replacing them with expensive, out-of-scale-sized new ones has morphed into an impassioned controversy not only in the Portland area, but around the country. Emerging as an unlikely national poster child for cutting-edge preservationist urban reform is the sprawling megacity of Los Angeles, which a year ago enacted a two-year ban on the building of giant replacement homes in 20 neighborhoods across the city, including a demolition moratorium in five highly-affected areas, providing time for city planners to craft height and footprint regulations for single-family dwellings. Not surprisingly, L.A.’s ambitious reform package has been both lauded as a major benefit to the public good and vilified as an infringement on private ownership rights. (Sounds familiar.) And our own City Council’s stance? A work on hold, pending task force recommendations.
The Council’s decision to weigh in on demolition/development reform is largely a product of lobbying efforts by grass-roots advocate groups like Beaumont-Wilshire-inspired United Neighborhoods for Reform (UNR), its Demolition/Development Resolution Action Plan endorsed in principle by almost half of the city’s neighborhood associations. Leading the charge in Council—Mayor Charlie Hales, who has held fast to what he refers to as his “Hippocratic oath” to preserve homes worth keeping, reduce demolitions, and require newly-constructed homes to be “compatible” in scale vis-à-vis neighborhood context. But with only ten months left in office (due to Hales’ decision not to seek a second term), the Mayor has his work cut out for him to persuade at least two City Commissioners to join him in voting to enact building code reform by the end of the year, starting with limits on scale.
Yet despite the sense of urgency evinced by the mayor and thousands of like-minded Portlanders in mitigating collateral damage from the demolition/development onrush, the route to resolution is anything but unencumbered, as epitomized by the alphabet soup of bureaucratic travelers on the journey: BDS, DRAC, DAG, BPS, and believe it or not, RIPSAC.
Translations: BDS is the Bureau of Development Service, which deals with demolition permits, regulations, and delay appeals; DRAC—BDS’s Demolition Review Advisory Committee—is the body monitoring the effectiveness of newly-implemented notification and delay appeal procedures; DAG—the Deconstruction Advisory Group (coordinated by BDS) has focused on mandatory recycling of usable materials from demolition sites; and RIPSAC—the Residential Infill Project Stakeholder Advisory Committee (also coordinated by BDS) is a diverse 25-member task force selected by the Mayor from dozens of applicants representing neighborhood coalitions, preservation groups, and homebuilders, with the mission of evaluating development standards for single-family dwellings and recommending building code revisions to the council.
At every turn, UNR has had a front-row seat—on DRAC’s Demolition Subcommittee (me), on DAG (Barbara Kerr), on RIPSAC (Barb Strunk). Buckle up for a bumpy spring ride.