Public hearing on Libbytown freeway ramp removals

Tomorrow, the Libbytown Traffic and Streetscape Study holds a public workshop at Portland City Hall, Room 24, from 5 - 8 pm (entrance is off Myrtle St. on the east side of City Hall). Displays illustrating the proposed changes will be available from 5-6:30 pm and 7-8:00 pm for comments, with staff available to answer questions. A presentation on the neighborhood conditions and the proposed changes will take place from 6:30 - 7 pm.

This study is a pretty big deal: it proposes to remove multiple freeway ramps that connect to Congress and Park at the western gateway to the city, immediately adjacent to our bus and train station (in fact, the cruddiness of this intersection was one of the first things I blogged about when I first moved to Portland years ago). 

All of the alternatives under consideration would sell off acres of empty space currently occupied by looping freeway ramps and make that real estate available for transit-oriented infill development, like housing or offices. All alternative would also install high-quality, separated bikeways to connect the bus and train station to downtown Portland, plus better sidewalks and calmer, smaller streets throughout the neighborhood.

Doing these things would be relatively cheap, and could be implemented in the next few years, but only if these ideas receive public support.

Here's my personal favorite option, alternative 1b (note the conversion of a freeway ramp into a bike path, which could extend all the way into Deering Oaks Park and ultimately connect to the Bayside Trail):

Click here for a more complete view of the alternatives being proposed.

Bayside development in perspective

Last week the Planning Board approved the rezoning plan for the Federated Companies' ambitious "Midtown" project.

Some neighbors complained about the size of the project. Its first phase will include 196 units of housing, 97,000 square feet of retail space, and 720 parking spots. Sure, I've said before that there's too much parking. But just for some perspective, here's what it would look like if the city cancelled this project and allowed developers to build all that stuff in the suburbs instead of in a central-city neighborhood.

Here's the Falmouth WalMart: it's 92,000 square feet and surrounded by about 600 parking spaces...

...and here are about 150 units of housing in the Pleasant Hill "neighborhood" of Scarborough (there's at least another 300 paved parking spaces scattered in there, but let's gloss over those for now).

The two aerial views above depict roughly a half square-mile of what used to be lovely Maine farmland. The proposed Midtown project proposes to fit a similar amount of human-habitable space inside one large city block, which ought to look something like this:

But hey, if you think that City Councilors should cancel this project and pave the way (quite literally) for more sprawl in the suburbs, by all means you should let them know before they vote on the rezoning proposal at their next meeting.

You Can't Build Speed Bumps to Slow Down Thuggery

[note: excerpts of this post originally appeared on my other blog, The Vigorous North.]

This is a blog about creating better public spaces and safer streets in Portland, Maine. Typically, that's meant that I write about better architecture, or streets where cars and their sedentary lifestyle don't threaten our health and safety, or creating more affordable and egalitarian transportation options.

But yesterday I was reminded that we live in relative luxury if these kinds of issues are really the biggest ones our city faces. In many parts of the world, after all, people aren't merely threatened by car traffic and lack of economic opportunity. In many parts of the world, people are also threatened by institutionalized thuggery, rampant crime, corruption, and civil war.

I write about comparatively benign local issues I do here not because I think that those international problems are trivial, but because I believe that working locally is the most practical way for me to have a positive impact on the world at large. Creating a more sustainable community here seems to me to be the best way I can make an impact on the seemingly intractable problem of global climate change, for instance. And my activism for affordable transport and affordable housing also aims for Portland to sustain its egalitarianism while it also provides more economic prosperity for more people - including the refugee populations that are seeking new homes in Maine after experiencing terror firsthand.

Still, my focus creating better public spaces and a more sustainable, prosperous economy might lead readers to believe that Portland - or any American city, for that matter - doesn't have to worry about thugs in the streets and institutionalized racism. And that's not true, unfortunately. And the fact that it isn't true is a far bigger threat to all of us than car exhaust and distracted drivers - as deadly as those things can be.

On my bike ride to work this on Monday, the morning after the news broke about Osama bin Laden's assassination, I passed by our neighborhood mosque, just a few blocks from my house, and I saw this.



And, in addition to this, more graffiti that said "Long live the west" and "Go home."

Somewhere in this city I love there is at least one cowardly neo-Nazi who has the disgusting gall to believe that religious persecution is somehow an American value.

Seeing this provided a visceral demonstration of how rage can beget more rage. I found myself wishing I'd had the presence of mind to head outside and check on our neighbors last night when I'd heard the news. With a baseball bat.

But what good would that really have done? This is just graffiti, and it's already been painted over. American Muslims, unfortunately, have suffered much worse. The real damage is the toxic, self-consuming hatred that still persists, not only in the bitter minds of those who did this, but even in the dim intellects of presumably "upstanding" members of our community. Let's not forget our daily newspaper's publisher, Richard Connor, the dimwit who apologized for running a front-page story about local Ramadan celebrations last September 11, and then humiliated himself and his city by broadcasting his racist cowardice on national radio.

Make no mistake: the fact that Americans among us could behave this way is much more of a threat to our public safety, and to the American republic itself, than Osama bin Laden ever was.

If Osama Bin Laden's death spurs cowardly, Klan-like hate crimes like this one, then there is nothing to celebrate. The terrorists are still among us.

Mandatory parking laws force a nonprofit affordable housing agency to waste money on crappy architecture that makes Portland's streets more dangerous

Tonight, Portland's planning board will consider Avesta Housing's application to build a new apartment building on the corner of Pearl and Lancaster Streets in Portland's Bayside neighborhood - catty-corner from the Whole Foods supermarket, and adjacent to the mixed-income "Pearl Place" apartment complex that Avesta built back in 2006-2007:

View Larger Map

Avesta has built lots of great housing for middle- and low-income Portlanders in the past decade, and what they're proposing for this lot is pretty great: two five-story buildings containing 54 apartments, within easy walking distance of two big grocery stores, all of Portland's bus lines, and thousands of downtown jobs. It sounds like a great development that should enrich the neighborhood and add some life to Bayside's streets - until you look at it from the perspective of someone who walks along Bayside's streets.

The walkable, liveable community being proposed only exists ten feet above the sidewalks, on the top four stories of the proposed buildings. The ground level is devoted entirely to a dark, unwelcoming garage, some mechanical rooms, and a few fire exits. Here's the ground floor plan:

According to the rule of thumb that each structured parking space costs roughly $20,000 to build, the extra floor of parking with 28 spots is going to add approximately half a million dollars to the project's price tag. That's $500,000 being sucked out of Maine's affordable housing budget in order to pay for more parking in a neighborhood that already has more than it can use. WTF?

The ground-floor parking also turns what could have been a decent-looking building into an ugly, unwelcoming fortress. Here's a detail of the corner entrance on Lancaster Street:

As you can see, pedestrians walking along Lancaster Street to Whole Foods will enjoy looking at a blank brick wall punctuated by a long, foreboding staircase. Who needs windows? Some ventilation grates add some visual interest - in real life they'll probably add a nice bouquet of exhaust fumes for passerby to enjoy. There's even a cute little "mugger's nook" behind the stairs. If you look carefully in this the rendering you can see someone in a red sweatshirt losing their wallet.

The image is courtesy of PDT Architects, although it's hard to believe they'd want their names on it. But even though I think PDT could have done better at mitigating the disaster of the ground-floor parking garage - some windows would have been a start - they don't deserve the brunt of blame for this.

The lousy design was driven by stupid zoning rules - and an attitude among city planners that affordable housing developers ought to set aside ridiculous amounts of scarce funds to subsidize the storage of automobiles.

The ground-level garage is also ridiculous in the context of the neighborhood around it. Parking is allowed on Lancaster Street, but you will never see a car parked there. Part of the reason for that is the Press Herald-owned parking garage right next door to this site. It's somewhat full during workdays, but begins emptying out around 4 pm - right around the time apartment-dwellers start heading home from work. If Pearl Place residents absolutely need a car to get to work, there are literally hundreds of places for them to park overnight on this very same city block. We don't need to spend half a million dollars for 28 more parking spaces.

Here's the good news: Portland's planning board has the ability to scale back the number of parking spaces required. Just taking out two parking spaces from the project could allow Avesta to move the "community room" down from the second floor to the ground floor, add some life to the building's street level, and free up space for one more affordable apartment above.

The neighborhood won't notice if two parking spaces come or go in this development. But it will notice the difference between a dark, unwelcoming parking garage and a building that actually engages the neighborhood and is designed for people. The planning board should demand the latter when it meets tonight.

Update: as noted in the comments, Patrick Venne also wrote about some of these same issues on his Mainely Urban blog yesterday. Here's his take on the matter.

Love Walking and Cycling? Come to Tonight's Bike/Ped Committee Meeting

It's a very romantic Bike/Pededestrian Advisory Committee Meeting tonight, starting at 5:30 pm in Room 209 (upstairs) of City Hall:

• An update on Portland's first proposed "Neighborhood Byway" - a traffic-calmed route that would prioritize bikes and walkers on neighborhood streets between Deering Center and Sagamore Village
  
  
• A call to action regarding grumpy drivers' efforts to remove a traffic calming median island on Woodford Street
  
  
• Ideas for a bike route along outer Congress Street, from Libbytown to the Airport
  
  
• Updates from Augusta (including the status of the Maine Alliance for Sustainable Transportation's ZOOM bus legislation)

We'll adjourn by 6:30 pm. See you there!

Infill

For the past few weeks, I've been walking past a new triple-decker under construction on Cumberland Avenue, on the western slope of Munjoy Hill, designed by Kaplan Thompson Architects.

Today I learned that it's aspiring towards "Passive House" energy efficiency standards: "no fossil fuels will be needed for electricity, a/c or heating," according to the developers' facebook page, and it's being built "at a cost comparable to a traditional building." [edit - I've since learned that, although the building is borrowing some "passive house" concepts, it won't be certified under the strict Passive House standards.]

There's a lot more to like about this building, though: it's being built in the heart of the city, within easy walking distance of neighborhood groceries, downtown offices, and bus lines. It takes advantage of the city's newly-reduced parking requirements for downtown housing (more on that below, though). It fits in well with its neighborhood, as a modern update to the familiar triple-decker style. And it will bring in three more households to the neighborhood - which means more customers for local businesses, more eyes on the street looking out for their neighbors, and three fewer ranch houses chomping up forest and farmland in the suburbs.

In the past few years, City Hall has loosened its regulations considerably to make this kind of development possible. In the 1990s, for instance, this building would have been illegal: Portland's zoning code actually required developers to build ranch-style houses with suburb-sized front lawns in neighborhoods like Munjoy Hill (there'a a bizarre relic of this era on Atlantic Street). In 2008, the City reduced its residential parking requirements so that new housing wouldn't be required to dedicate more space to cars than to humans. This building takes advantage of that revision - the old zoning code would have required 2 parking spots for each unit, which wouldn't have left any room on the small lot for an actual building.

This project still sets aside space for 3 cars - which is far more parking than Portland's historic triple-decker buildings provide. In such a centralized location, it's highly probable that some potential buyers won't need a parking spot at all. But because the builders were forced to provide them, two things will happen: first, the building as a whole will be more expensive to build, and less affordable for buyers. And second, the homebuyers who are interested are more likely to own cars (since parking is included), which means that the neighborhood will have more car traffic than it otherwise would.

The developers will also lose potential customers (the ones who don't own cars and aren't willing to pay extra for a parking space they don't need), which means that building this building, and others like it, will be more financially risky.

So while Portland's parking requirements are less stupid than they used to be, the fact that we still have them at all means that City Hall is still mandating less affordable housing, less development, fewer customers for local businesses, and more traffic - contrary to all of our city's stated goals.

Running for Bayside/Parkside

At the urging of some of my neighbors, I have undertaken a bid for Maine's State House, to represent District 119 (the Bayside and Parkside neighborhoods) when Rep. Herb Adams retires this year.

If you read this blog, you're probably familiar with where I stand on a lot of issues. Obviously, making the Maine Dept. of Transportation more considerate and proactive about sustainable modes of transportation is a big goal of mine. But I'm also interested in doing more to cultivaqte small businesses as an economic development strategy, promoting more walkable downtown development in Maine's smaller villages and Main Street areas, and doing more to support immigrant populations in our neighborhood and across the state.

In order to have a fighting chance, I need to collect 60 $5 contributions in one week, in order to qualify for the state's Clean Elections Funding. These contributions all have to come from the Bayside, Parkside, and East Bayside neighborhoods. So if you're my neighbor, PLEASE go to the state's secure website and make a contribution online:

https://www5.informe.org/cgi-bin/online/ethics/cleanelection/home.pl

Even more importantly (because I definitely need help with this), if you know anyone else who lives in Bayside or Parkside, please vouch for me and ask them to chip in five bucks as well.

Thanks, readers!

The Franklin Arterial-to-Boulevard project begins!

Planning for the transformation of Franklin Arterial to Franklin Boulevard will officially get underway next month with two public meetings at City Hall. The details:

Thursday, December 4th, 6:30-8:00 in Portland City Hall’s State of Maine Room (2nd floor, at the western end of the building).
This will be the initial organizing meeting for the Franklin Corridor Study, led by co-chairs Markos Miller of the Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Association and Boyd Marley, one of Portland's representatives to the 123rd Legislature.

Wednesday, December 17th, 6:30-8:00, also in the State of Maine Room

Find out more about the project at franklinstreet.us

When "open space" isn't the best choice for the environment

Tonight, Portland's Community Development Committee reviewed the one and only proposal the City received for the redevelopment of the Adams School site in the East End (about which I've written previously).

Given the state of the housing market in general, we should count ourselves lucky that the City received any housing proposals at all. And doubly lucky that the one we did receive, from Avesta Housing, looks quite strong on first impression. Avesta is proposing 40 units of housing, half of which would be 3-bedroom units suitable for families, in ten similar buildings arranged around a central "Marada Adams Park":







Looks good - the buildings face the street, mimic the neighborhood's triple-decker architecture, and, best of all, provide new, centrally-located, affordable, and walkable homes to forty households. In exchange for this benefit, Avesta is asking the city for a $1.66 million TIF loan, plus about half a million dollars in local and state affordable-housing grants, plus additional affordable housing funds from federal and other programs.

Still, as great as this all seems, I can't help but think about how it could be better. And what strikes me the most is the huge park in the middle of this proposal. I know that the neighborhood wants it there, but the neighborhood doesn't need it by any means. More housing would be better, not only for the city's finances and for the middle-class families who could live there, but for southern Maine's environment in general. Here's why:

For starters, this site already has remarkable access to two of the city's most celebrated open spaces: the Eastern Prom (two blocks down Moody Street) and Fort Allen Park (two blocks down Vesper Street). Besides, sacrificing a small corner of the proposed Marada Adams Park wouldn't by any means harm its intended purpose as a neighborhood playground: if anything, it could improve the space's function, by adding more activity from the additional housing and giving the park a more defined, quadrangle-style frame of buildings.



There are big environmental benefits associated with adding more housing here. Another building could give four more households the opportunity to live in town, within walking distance or a bus ride of thousands of jobs, as opposed to living in a comparably-priced, but much less energy-efficient home in the outskirts of Hollis or Gray. By burning less oil to heat their homes and drive around, families living here would save the local atmosphere from tens of thousands of pounds of pollution every year.

Plus, every four units of housing built here, on an already-developed site in Portland, will save four acres of forest or farmland from being developed into a new subdivision out in the suburbs. And that, in turn, will make a small contribution towards conserving wildlife habitat, keeping local farms viable, and preserving water quality in Maine's rivers and streams.

More housing would help keep the city budget healthy, too. Adding some more market-rate housing here will reduce the project's demand on scarce public funds, and leave more money available for other important affordable-housing projects. It would also increase the city's annual return of property taxes, by over $10,000 a year. That may not seem like much, but it would be enough to keep a city pool open for the summer - which was one savings proposal from the past year's budget cuts.

When you stop to think about it, there are clearly some serious trade-offs to consider here. Sacrificing this small corner of open space could save the city enough money to keep a pool open, or provide special education to four more students each year, or build more affordable housing elsewhere in the city. It would also provide a substantial relief to southern Maine's air and water quality, reduce traffic on our streets, and play a small role in preserving rural communities outside of Portland.

And my more subjective opinion: more housing, with buildings defining a clearer outdoor "room" along Moody Street, could also improve the park's proposed function as a playground and neighborhood gathering spot.

To make a long argument short, we need to ask ourselves this: in a neighborhood that already has so much access to parks and open space, should we really be making all of these financial and ecological sacrifices for yet another patch of grass? Please share your thoughts in the comments.


You can read more about Avesta Housing's "Beckett Green" proposal here.

Lost Sites: Interstate 295 at Deering Avenue

Continuing the "lost sites" discussion, here's are two views of the freeway corridor from the Deering Avenue overpass. Here's how it looks now, looking east towards the 20-acre, pedestrian-deadly Forest Avenue interchange:



And as it could be, without the freeway:



Note the dedicated bus lanes, a bus rapid transit station under Deering Street, the crosswalks, and the new acreage added on to Deering Oaks Park. New housing, offices, and university buildings rise in the distance, where a cloverleaf onramp currently wastes valuable urban real estate. New development like the brick building in the foreground could also take advantage of land freed up by a narrower roadway.

Also note that this idea doesn't actually reduce the number of lanes for cars - it just narrows the pavement and re-appropriates space on the shoulders for dedicated bus and bike lanes. In fact, because cars require more space at freeway speeds, a 25 mile-per-hour boulevard like this one can actually hold more vehicles than the existing freeway. But in this scheme, evenly-spaced traffic lights and pedestrian crossings would also allow pedestrians and bicycles to use the road - and those are uses that the existing freeway can't accommodate.

Lost Sites: Interstate 295

Last year, an "Architalx" series focused on Portland's "lost sites", those in-between and forgotten places that interrupt the urban fabric with a bit of desolate emptiness. One of the subjects - Franklin Arterial - attracted so much public attention that city leaders are now undertaking a complete redesign of that street.

But as interesting as "Lost Sites" was, it overlooked the elephant on the Peninsula, the congested freeway that cuts off downtown Portland from the University of Southern Maine, our train station, and the nearest Hannaford supermarket: Interstate 295.

But what if Portlanders had a say in how this massive, 60-acre moat were designed? Are cloverleaf ramps really the best use of such valuable real estate? Might we ask for sidewalks where we could be confident that we wouldn't be mugged or make the intimate acquaintance of some suburbanite's windshield?

Below are two satellite images of the existing Interstate 295 corridor in downtown Portland. Roll your mouse over them to see this citizen's vision of what these areas could become.

At Congress Street and Libbytown:



Forest Avenue cloverleaf and Bayside:



Click the above images for larger views.

The central premise of this idea is based on the fact that motorists traveling from the south towards Brunswick or Lewiston/Auburn should not be encouraged to drive through downtown Portland. By disconnecting the freeway, motorists will still be able to take freeways to the edge of downtown, where they'll then have better access to local streets, but through traffic will have to take the Turnpike, located further west.

By removing regional freeway traffic from downtown, this proposal would enhance vehicular access for downtown-bound drivers. The existing layout of I-295 dumps out huge volumes of freeway traffic onto just three streets: Congress, Forest, and Franklin. Re-establishing the street grid will give motorists more options and distribute traffic over a larger geographic area for less congestion on any one street.

This proposal includes a dedicated transitway (the yellow lines in the maps above) that would preserve the north-south connection through downtown for local and intercity bus services.


Most excitingly, though, the empty land that the existing freeway uses up could be re-used and re-developed as new, transit-oriented and walkable neighborhoods. If we replaced the on ramps and highway lanes between Congress Street and Franklin Arterial with new buildings 2-3 stories tall, we could add over 2,000 jobs, and over 800 units of housing downtown.

We could also create valuable new parklands, including a restoration of the historic marshes that once connected the pond in Deering Oaks to Back Cove, and a continuous bike and pedestrian connection between the Eastern Prom, Deering Oaks, and Dougherty Field.

I want this to get people talking about 295 the same way the Architalx presentations got people talking about Franklin Arterial. So far, planning for this highway and these valuable 60 acres of urban real estate has been confined to the Maine Dept. of Transportation headquarters in Augusta, where sadist traffic engineers dream up new and elaborate ways to injure Maine's pedestrians.

But what do actual Portlanders want to make of this corridor?

Walk Score

This new Google Maps mashup calculates the distance between your house and various businesses and services to rate your neighborhood's walkability. My house in the west end scored a 91 out of 100, although that's based on its misguided assumption that the Cumberland Farms is a "grocery store."

Link: Walk Score

Sane Ideas for the Adams School

A couple of weekends ago I climbed to the top of the Munj to attend a community charrette for the future of the Adams school and the two blocks of East End neighborhood it occupies.

Billed as a workshop for "crazy ideas," the event was intended to guide the neighborhood association towards a set of goals and guidelines for a forthcoming Request for Proposals for the future development of the site. The ideas turned out to be not so crazy, for the most part - at least, no one proposed a space port or anything like that. More often, people struggled with the tradeoffs of more quotidian desires for a neighborhood with scarce land: Would the neighborhood like to see more housing or more parking? More retail space or more grassy lawns?

We split up into three groups, each of which was guided by some Muskie School planning students and an architect or two to put our ideas on paper. We began by ranking our priorities for the neighborhood: family housing came up most strongly, but so did environmental sustainability and open space.

The conflict between these values struck me early on. Every additional quarter acre dedicated to "open space" means one to three families who won't be able to live in the East End (and they'll likely move to the hinterlands of Scarborough or Standish instead - certainly less than a "sustainable" outcome). Besides, the Eastern Prom, one of Portland's biggest open spaces, is just a short walk away from the school in two directions.

But we also discussed how the East End's plentiful open space is actually used. As it turns out, a lot of it isn't very functional: the majority of it is just a pretty frame for views of the ocean or (in the case of the park on North Street) of the White Mountains. A lot of East Enders use their grassy "open space" primarily as a toilet for their pets, if at all. Even if that is a valid priority, people generally agreed that it shouldn't outrank the need for in-town housing.

But the Adams School's existing playground isn't just a grassy lawn (although the site does have one, and again, it's a dog toilet). It's also an active playground and basketball court that's still well-used even two years after the school's closure. This, it turned out, was what the neighbors in my group really valued: not an empty field faking pastoralism in the middle of the city, but a busy, public square where kids could play and neighbors could meet.

So this is what we came up with:



Triple-decker rowhouses (purple) front Vesper and Munjoy and a new pedestrian court between Beckett and O'Brien Streets. A sun-facing playground and plaza (orange-ish, with green trees) open up along the southern end of the pedestrian connection along Wilson Street, and facing the plaza are storefronts for local non-profits (in blue), topped by additional housing. Two alleys (also orange) through the site access flexible storage space (pink) that can be used as parking or as studio space, at the owner's discretion.

Nan Cumming, who attended as a neighbor but also happens to be the executive director of Portland Trails, advocated early on for connecting O'Brien and Beckett Streets as a pedestrian thoroughfare. Also, our group considered reusing the school, but ultimately rejected the idea in order to make the most of the real estate, recycle the old building's materials, and build new, efficient buildings instead. A sub-group discussed possible ownership models for the housing and concluded that the project should sell affordable, deed-restricted condos built for and marketed to young families.

Then we went to present these ideas to the other groups and hear about their own "crazy" (but not really) ideas. As it turned out, the other groups seemed to hold similar values: housing was definitely the most prominent element of every plan, as was a small playground or garden on the southern end of the site. The other two plans proposed reusing the existing Adams School building for "community" uses or as business incubators, but they also suggested hollowing out the middle portion of the building to provide the same pedestrian connection our group had proposed. No one wanted big parking lots (speaking of which, I wonder if anyone from Ocean Properties is reading this blog yet).

This site plan came from the same group that created the lovely adaptive-reuse drawing above. They've got housing on the north side of the site, along Munjoy, and above commercial uses on Wilson, plus an urban square in the middle and a garden to the south. The school building is would be reused for "community" uses, although I'm not sure how "community" uses would fill all that space and I can't recall the details of their presentation. They proposed adding a sort of pedestrian arcade through the building (see drawing above).

The final group had the prettiest drawings (in my opinion) and the most urban site plan:



They proposed four-story townhouses (top left drawing) along Wilson, Munjoy, and Vesper Streets, and a rehabbed school building with new additions for retail and business incubator space. I thought that their drawing of the reused school was particularly awesome (at right): a sort of warehouse/treehouse perches on top of the old school building with wind turbines.

However, all of the good-looking density that comes with this plan comes at a price: they proposed underground parking, which costs a lot more than surface-level lots or garages. While underground parking looks better, it would probably make the housing here prohibitively expensive for most people.

Now that the conceptual designs are in, the School Reuse Committee will consider the options in its final report to City Council, which will probably put out a Request for Proposals or a Request for Qualifications sometime soon.