On a beautiful mid-May afternoon, the meeting room was packed. It was the second of two hearings held by the Planning and Sustainability Commission (PSC) for the purpose of receiving public testimony on a contentious infill development reform package from the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS). Anticipating the large turnout, a handful of activists arrived more than two hours early to ensure their place on the docket. Presentations were limited to two minutes, but it still took over three hours to accommodate all 91 of them. There would be three more weeks for additional testimony via e-mail in an input process that had generated more than 800 hundred oral and written testimonies ranging from total support to qualified acceptance to outright rejection. PSC would make recommendations to the BPS, BPS to City Council, then last-chance public testimony prior to Council’s vote by year’s end.
Given the complexity and import of the BPS proposal (think total transformation of residential neighborhoods), emotions ran high in the room, especially for some of the younger devotees of the density-expansion advocacy group Portland For Everyone, allied with Thousand Friends of Oregon, who passionately—often stridently—argued for en masse construction of “affordable” alternative housing like duplexes and triplexes to fill what they see as the “missing middle” of transit-accessible residential neighborhoods now densely populated with older homes and very few vacant lots. Repeatedly, single-family home residents were branded as a class of “privileged elitists” and self-serving “NIMBYs” (Not In My Back Yard reactionaries). Pushing back in rebuttal, neighborhood preservationists from organizations like Restore Oregon and Beaumont-Wilshire-inspired United Neighborhoods for Reform (UNR) emphasized the value of viable older homes for young entry-level families, the high demand for existing homes vs. the record-low supply in the marketplace, displacement and public health concerns associated with demolitions, and the sensibility of building alternative housing in areas with open lots, coupled with enhanced infrastructure investment for expanded basic services.
One prominent preservationist not in the room that day was former Portland mayor Charlie Hales, steadfast advocate during his term in office of what he often referred to as “front-end” infill-development reform (i.e., city government regulations and incentives designed to discourage demolitions of viable homes in the first place), as opposed to “back-end” reform (i.e., regulations dealing primarily with demolition notification and cleanup). But despite front-end initiatives advanced by the mayor and like-minded reformers, it’s largely back-end reforms that have been enacted, most recently on July 1: in accordance with recommendations by the Bureau of Development Services (BDS) Demolition Advisory Subcommittee (UNR at the table), demolition sites are now subject to mandatory BDS inspection before, during, and after to check for asbestos and lead remediation compliance, and dust suppression measures must be employed at major remodel sites where heavy equipment is used, although inspections are complaint-driven only. Still in effect on the front-end side is a 35-day demolition delay appeal period for a neighborhood association to save a house, sans fees.