Over this past week, I started delving through the online presence of the 95 neighborhood associations in Portland, listing out the potentially analyzable resources (if any) for each. Such resources include meeting minutes, neighborhood newsletters/blogs, and letters addressed to city agencies concerning developments and plans. Even a brief perusal of these resources revealed stark differences in terms of both attitudes towards development and the presence/activity of neighborhood associations. East Portland and Southwest neighborhood associations tend have a limited online presence in comparison with the rest of the city, with most having only a stub subsite within their neighborhood coalition website. Moreover, neighborhood associations within the Inner Northeast (NECN), Central Northeast (CNN), and Inner Southeast (SEUL) district coalitions are by far the most engaged with the Residential Infill Project, though there were several mentions by active associations in Southwest (SWNI).
Among those associations engaged with the Residential Infill Project, there is a notable cleavage between those aligning with Portland for Everyone and those drawing on United Neighborhoods for Reform. Portland for Everyone is an urbanist coalition dedicated to addressing affordability with densification through the widespread creation of “missing middle” housing in single family zones. King and Cully are officially part of the coalition, Sunnyside and Woodlawn have endorsed them, and Concordia, Boise, Eliot, and Alameda appear generally sympathetic to their claims. Though enhanced affordability is the central claim, Portland for Everyone ties this model of urban growth to sustainability outcomes (reduced car usage) and to revitalization logic (expanded access to amenities).
United Neighborhoods for Reform, by contrast, emphasizes the environmental destructiveness of demolition, dismisses the notion that infill can address housing affordability, seeing it as merely destroying neighborhood character and worsening traffic and parking, conveying no benefits to anyone besides developers. Instead of densification, they propose further suburban expansion to accommodate a growing population. Besides the aforementioned associations, most other predominately single-family associations generally align rhetorically with this position. Beaumont-Wilshire, Irvington, and Multnomah stood out as particularly strident in their opposition to development in Portland. The meeting minutes of the CNN coalition over the decision on which elements of the Residential Infill Project to support or oppose are particularly illuminating of how these political divides between associations play out.
Additionally, I examined the extended public comments on the Residential Infill Project. I’ve yet to read through all 576 pages, but the overall tone is pretty astoundingly polarized and largely mirrors the attitudes of either Portland for Everyone or United Neighborhoods for Reform. Some example comments:
Infill development to this point has lacked character and degraded aesthetics of neighborhoods.
Infill has to happen, or I will never be able to buy a home in portland
Infill housing drives up prices, it doesn’t reduce them at all.
Infill is great.
Stop infilling!
Stop listening to NIMBYs
Stop lot-splitting and maintain character of neighborhoods.
Stop lying to residents and pushing anti-car agendas on us.
Now, it’s difficult to tell either the balance between these positions or to what extent this polarity is reflected in the general population—those who take the time to respond to a voluntary survey on urban planning are hardly a representative sample, as the city’s summary of public feedback makes clear, and those who write in answers are bound to be even less representative. The sample skews older, richer, and whiter than Portland as a whole, while over-representing Inner Southeast and Southwest Portland. The city’s summary notes the interesting demographic divides in priorities and fears regarding infill. While affordability and neighborhood character are, by far, the top two concerns cited in the overall sample, the ordering of the two by demographic cross-section is very revealing. Homeowners, those over 45, and those having lived in Portland for more than 20 years prioritized “maintain[ing] neighborhood character by addressing the size and shape of buildings, setbacks and height limits” over “provid[ing] housing options for all income levels.” Renters, those under 45, newcomers, and people of color had the opposite aggregate preference ordering. Indeed, for those under 45, the weighted score for “encourag[ing] more housing density to increase and improve access to transit, services, stores, parks, schools, etc.” was almost equal to that of preserving neighborhood character.
I’m still thinking through how to systematize this analysis, considering the very disparate quantity and quality of information available for analysis. Many neighborhood associations don’t have minutes or newsletters covering the last several months posted online and many have little content whatsoever.
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