Metro Portland 2040 Population Projections

[memph]

Originally Posted by urbanlife

Just a correction to your post, LES has a density of 72-73K, not 100-150K unless you are maybe looking at daytime hours because there is an influx of people in Manhattan during the work days, but the night times, the density is much lower....Though, 72-73K is still massive and you are basically stacking people on top of people.

Portland, and just about every city in this country will never get that big, which is why I do laugh when I hear fears of cities becoming "Manhattanized" because that just means someone doesn't know how much a place would have to change to get even close to what Manhattan is like.

Maybe closer to 100k ppsm, but keep in mind the LES has changed quite a bit in the last 100 years with urban renewal, so I'm not sure if built densities are as high as they used to be. Most neighbourhoods elsewhere in the Western World with 5-6 storey apartment buildings and high ground coverage have densities of 100k+, at least if those neighbourhoods have a balanced number of workers and residents.

[10023]

Originally Posted by memph

Maybe closer to 100k ppsm, but keep in mind the LES has changed quite a bit in the last 100 years with urban renewal, so I'm not sure if built densities are as high as they used to be. Most neighbourhoods elsewhere in the Western World with 5-6 storey apartment buildings and high ground coverage have densities of 100k+, at least if those neighbourhoods have a balanced number of workers and residents.

Is that really true? I would think that apartments have become larger in recent years, or at least the number of people sharing them has gone down, and so densities decline without any change in built environment.

Pretty much all of Paris is a consistent built environment of at least 5-6 stories and its overall residential density is half that. The 11th is the only arrondissement over 100k per square mile, and after that the 18th gets closest, with about 80k per square mile. That's partly because former has lots of young people sharing flats, and the latter lots of African immigrants.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by 10023

all of central London's boroughs have population density above San Francisco's

Comparing a city to a district of another city, or to cherry-picked portions of another city, is comparing apples to apple slices.

In fact all of Great London's 607 square miles, which includes lots of actual farmland, has a residential density of over 14k ppsm.

Now we're talking. All of the City and County of San Francisco, which includes lots of unpopulated land including an uninhabited island chain 30 miles offshore, has a residential density of over 18k ppsm.

Inner London, which includes 12 boroughs which are roughly coterminous with the old County of London, has an area of 123 square miles with a density of 26k ppsm.

San Francisco is simply not that dense.

Sure it is. Those 123 miles are the densest what? 20% of London's total? We could parse out the densest 20% of San Francisco in a similar fashion, and would easily meet or exceed a density of 26k ppsm.

What San Francisco is not: as extensive or populous as London. And nobody will argue otherwise. London is a bigger apple.

[10023]

fflint, you can't seriously be arguing that comparing 123 square miles of London to 47 square miles of San Francisco is unfair to SF.

London amalgamated a lot of suburban (and undeveloped) land on its periphery, and San Francisco didn't. But what you're arguing is akin to saying that Houston is 3x the size of SF, just because it annexed its suburbs. London's municipal population represents about 85% of the entire built-up urban area, of course it's going to be less dense overall. I noted that each of London's inner boroughs are denser than SF to make the point that no matter which way you slice it to get a comparable ~50 square mile area, London is going to be denser.

And that's nice that San Francisco is 20% open space. London is 47% "green space", and 60% "open space" (including things like waterways).

http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...k-9756470.html

[memph]

Originally Posted by 10023

Is that really true? I would think that apartments have become larger in recent years, or at least the number of people sharing them has gone down, and so densities decline without any change in built environment.

Pretty much all of Paris is a consistent built environment of at least 5-6 stories and its overall residential density is half that. The 11th is the only arrondissement over 100k per square mile, and after that the 18th gets closest, with about 80k per square mile. That's partly because former has lots of young people sharing flats, and the latter lots of African immigrants.

Hard to say exactly... but if you divide European urban areas into 1x1km squares, Barcelona has close to 25% of its population at 100k+. I'm not sure how much of the suburbs that includes though. Paris is more around 5%.

https://chartingtransport.com/2015/1...ropean-cities/

Or if you go by official neighbourhood boundaries
http://www.bcn.cat/estadistica/angle...err/sup415.htm

Density per hectare (386 = 100k ppsm)

Sants - Badal: 585
El Camp d'en Grassot i Gracia Nova: 522
Navas: 519
El Camp de l'Arpa del Clot: 515
Verdun: 515
La Sagrada Familia: 486
Sant Antoni: 475
el Baix Guinardo: 455
Vilapicina i la Torre Llobeta: 449
La Prosperitat: 437
El Turo de la Peira: 435
La Nova Esquerra de l'Eixample: 431
El Raval: 429
El Clot: 387


You could also add several neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs. There's a neighbourhood in Badalona with 2-6 storey buildings and a density of a little over 200k ppsm. That's over a small area of just a few city blocks, and it's probably relatively poor and crowded, but still.

AFAIK the LES had relatively few parks or institutions, it was mostly housing and workplaces and streets. Not that that's a good thing, but just something to take into account when comparing to Paris which has more of both and probably more of an employment focus in the central neighbourhoods.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by 10023

Is that really true? I would think that apartments have become larger in recent years, or at least the number of people sharing them has gone down, and so densities decline without any change in built environment.

100,000 is pretty aggressive for six-story buildings with other uses mixed in. A lot of buidings of that height with double-loaded hallways are 150-250 units per acre of site. More units often means smaller units, with lower household size. Let's say projects average 150/acre, allowing a percentage of actual families. Take away public space and let's say you can get 105 units per acre if the neighborhood is entirely new. You end up with 640 acres x 105 units per acre x 1.5 people per unit = 100,800 residents per square mile.

However you'll never rebuild everything, so maybe you'll get a mix of new and old. Maybe you're starting with a square mile at 15,000, replacing half of that (but only 1/3 of the housing), and ending up at 60,000. Or, realistically, scale all that down to smaller areas, and building out over a longer period.

As for average square footage, that went way up from old tenements, but it's been going down again in a lot of urban cores as they get more expensive. If every square foot costs a dollar more per month than it did a few years ago, one solution is smaller units. It's way more complicated than that, with issues like floor plate size related to zoning and setbacks, the need for each enclosed bedroom to have a window, etc., but the trend has been pretty clear at least in my area.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by 10023

fflint, you can't seriously be arguing that comparing 123 square miles of London to 47 square miles of San Francisco is unfair to SF.

London amalgamated a lot of suburban (and undeveloped) land on its periphery, and San Francisco didn't. But what you're arguing is akin to saying that Houston is 3x the size of SF, just because it annexed its suburbs. London's municipal population represents about 85% of the entire built-up urban area, of course it's going to be less dense overall. I noted that each of London's inner boroughs are denser than SF to make the point that no matter which way you slice it to get a comparable ~50 square mile area, London is going to be denser.

And that's nice that San Francisco is 20% open space. London is 47% "green space", and 60% "open space" (including things like waterways).

http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...k-9756470.html

True. London is basically twice San Francisco's size depending how you define metros. Like 8,000,000 to 16,000,000, or whatever the equivalents should be.

[memph]

Originally Posted by fflint

Comparing a city to a district of another city, or to cherry-picked portions of another city, is comparing apples to apple slices.


Now we're talking. All of the City and County of San Francisco, which includes lots of unpopulated land including an uninhabited island chain 30 miles offshore, has a residential density of over 18k ppsm.

Sure it is. Those 123 miles are the densest what? 20% of London's total? We could parse out the densest 20% of San Francisco in a similar fashion, and would easily meet or exceed a density of 26k ppsm.

What San Francisco is not: as extensive or populous as London. And nobody will argue otherwise. London is a bigger apple.

Comparing these two graphs, I think it's quite safe to say London is denser, unless you're comparing all of Greater London to just San Francisco city proper.
http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/show...&postcount=169
http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/show...9&postcount=82

Looks like London has about 2 million people at the 30k ppsm + mark compared to maybe 350,000 for the San Francisco-Oakland area.

[memph]

Originally Posted by mhays

100,000 is pretty aggressive for six-story buildings with other uses mixed in. A lot of buidings of that height with double-loaded hallways are 150-250 units per acre of site. More units often means smaller units, with lower household size. Let's say projects average 150/acre, allowing a percentage of actual families. Take away public space and let's say you can get 105 units per acre if the neighborhood is entirely new. You end up with 640 acres x 105 units per acre x 1.5 people per unit = 100,800 residents per square mile.

However you'll never rebuild everything, so maybe you'll get a mix of new and old. Maybe you're starting with a square mile at 15,000, replacing half of that (but only 1/3 of the housing), and ending up at 60,000. Or, realistically, scale all that down to smaller areas, and building out over a longer period.

As for average square footage, that went way up from old tenements, but it's been going down again in a lot of urban cores as they get more expensive. If every square foot costs a dollar more per month than it did a few years ago, one solution is smaller units. It's way more complicated than that, with issues like floor plate size related to zoning and setbacks, the need for each enclosed bedroom to have a window, etc., but the trend has been pretty clear at least in my area.

What's the average unit size for 1.5 people per unit?

This city block in Toronto has a density of 300 people per acre. Buildings are a bit taller than what we're talking about, but there's a fair bit of open space in the courtyard and setbacks, as well as the streets themselves.
https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Tor...!4d-79.3831843
It's residential with ground floor retail, but retail and office doesn't take up as much space as residential.

The city block* that contains Village on the Grange in Toronto has a range of building heights from lowrise to smaller highrises, buildings new and old, and a fair bit of private courtyards, office space, retail and residential (I think institutional too?). It comes in at 200 people per acre, again including the area extending halfway into the surrounding streets.

Neither of those city blocks are new. I think downtown Toronto averages out to about 2.2 rooms per person, including some downtown-adjacent neighbourhoods, with average household sizes of 1.85. That's including rooms in vacant units.

*Renfrew Place to Dundas, St Patrick street to McCaul.

[subterranean]

So cool to see that this has turned into a denser-than-you-are match-up once again for two cities that aren't even the topic of the thread. Carry on.

[10023]

Yeah, I didn't mean to turn it into a pissing match

To recap, it started with a critique of the "Manhattanization" argument one often sees, which is silly because no US city is anywhere near that density. I thought it was noteworthy that the densest West Coast city is much less dense than a part of London which most Americans would consider pleasant and green, and so there should be lots of room for SF, Portland or elsewhere to add density if it builds in the right way.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by 10023

fflint, you can't seriously be arguing that comparing 123 square miles of London to 47 square miles of San Francisco is unfair to SF.

I am not making an argument about fairness; I correctly noted your inapt comparison of apples to apple slices.

At this point we seem to have moved on to actually comparing a large apple with a small one, which is fine by me as both are the same thing. London is the bigger apple of the two. Bigness, however, is not the sole determinant of population density, which is why Wikipedia lists London's average density at 14,290 ppsm and San Francisco's average density at 18,451 ppsm. You now appear to argue against using such figures, despite being the very person who injected the latter figure into this thread in the first place.

London amalgamated a lot of suburban (and undeveloped) land on its periphery, and San Francisco didn't. But what you're arguing is akin to saying that Houston is 3x the size of SF, just because it annexed its suburbs.

Houston is more populous, and more extensive, than San Francisco. It is not more densely populated, however. On what basis would you contest any of that? The facts don't feel right?

Originally Posted by 10023

I thought it was noteworthy that the densest West Coast city is much less dense than a part of London which most Americans would consider pleasant and green, and so there should be lots of room for SF, Portland or elsewhere to add density if it builds in the right way.

How did you determine which West Coast city is the densest?

[memph]

Originally Posted by fflint

I am not making an argument about fairness; I correctly noted your inapt comparison of apples to apple slices.

At this point we seem to have moved on to actually comparing a large apple with a small one, which is fine by me as both are the same thing. London is the bigger apple of the two. Bigness, however, is not the sole determinant of population density, which is why Wikipedia lists London's average density at 14,290 ppsm and San Francisco's average density at 18,451 ppsm. You now appear to argue against using such figures, despite being the very person who injected the latter figure into this thread in the first place.

Houston is more populous, and more extensive, than San Francisco. It is not more densely populated, however. On what basis would you contest any of that? The facts don't feel right?

How did you determine which West Coast city is the densest?

Well the original reason for bringing up London is that American cities could become denser without Manhattanizing by building in the model of London, which is still very dense by American standards. In fact London's urban core is denser than San Francisco despite being mostly 2-4 storey buildings with a few bigger buildings in select areas. The style of development 10023 brought up which is found in Hammersmith and Fulham is not denser than the densest style of development found in San Francisco, but it does seem to be denser than most of the development in San Francisco.

[10023]

There are very few 2 story buildings in London's urban core... 4-6 stories is more like it.

But yes that's the point. You can achieve much bigger densities with a built environment that looks like this, rather than Manhattan:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.52...7i13312!8i6656

Originally Posted by fflint

I am not making an argument about fairness; I correctly noted your inapt comparison of apples to apple slices.

And you're comparing apples to cantaloupes.

I think there is general agreement here on SSP that municipal boundaries make for a poor basis of comparison, because some encompass much of their suburban areas (Houston, London) and others do not (SF, Boston). Metropolitan areas, or parts of cities that represent the same portion thereof, are a better comparison.

The 123 square miles of Inner London that I referred to is basically London before amalgamation in 1965, and includes the main commercial districts, government, cultural, educational and medical institutions, lots of parks, and about 3.5 million people.

You complain that this is only 20% of London's total, but what percentage of the Bay Area does the city of San Francisco's 47 square miles represent? If you want to compare Greater London to the Bay Area, you would need to include the whole 101/280 corridor down to San Jose (including some of the foothills) to have something even vaguely analogous.

[10023]

Anyway, this is veering off topic which wasn't my intention.

Portland - my dad moved there a couple of years ago, I've been a couple of times. It's reasonably urban downtown, but it could clearly become much denser even in central areas (like NW Portland or the other side of Burnside bridge) while remaining very "neighborhoody". Without multi-family housing, even... just develop surface parking lots and make the commercial buildings more than 1 story high.

If Portland has densities across its 133 square miles comparable to the historical County of London's across its 123 square miles, it would have almost 3.5 million people. If it was even half that dense it would still triple in population. So why is it spilling over its "urban growth boundaries"? Minimum lot sizes?

[ChargerCarl]

Originally Posted by The North One

This is a lie, geography plays a huge role in how large a city can get, after a certain point you might be able to squeeze room here and there but it becomes incredibly difficult. We're never going to build high density mid rises like in the 1800's even if laws permitted it, the standard of living in the U.S. is too high. The only option is "Manhattanization" and as you could have guessed cities like SF are fighting it tooth and nail and not even Manhattan with it's built up pre-war urban fabric and additions of newly built modern developments is nearly as dense as it used to be. To pretend that there will always be room for people is just plain arrogance and ignorance.

Hi Joel Kotkin!

Seriously though, if nobody wants to live in dense neighborhoods then why are their prices so high? And if nobody wanted to live in denser dwellings, why do NIMBY groups have to organize to fight them tooth and nail? Why would developers waste time building things that, according to you, nobody wants to live in?

[nito]

London isn’t going to be challenging in the super-density stakes, but it does have a consistent density over a pretty wide area, enabled by the vast heavy rail network. One discrepancy in comparisons however is that created by the Green Belt which covers a combined area greater than Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, or an area nearly equivalent to 3 San Francisco’s. Strip that out (but keep all the parkland, garden squares, private gardens, etc...) and the population density of London is higher than San Francisco. London’s density is also growing at a pretty hefty rate what with its population adding the equivalent of a San Francisco every 6 years.

[mhays]

Memph, I don't have a room count assumption for the 1.5 people average. It's just a rule of thumb for apartments. But it's also based on regions where families don't tend to live in multifamily.

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by 10023

Anyway, this is veering off topic which wasn't my intention.

Portland - my dad moved there a couple of years ago, I've been a couple of times. It's reasonably urban downtown, but it could clearly become much denser even in central areas (like NW Portland or the other side of Burnside bridge) while remaining very "neighborhoody". Without multi-family housing, even... just develop surface parking lots and make the commercial buildings more than 1 story high.

If Portland has densities across its 133 square miles comparable to the historical County of London's across its 123 square miles, it would have almost 3.5 million people. If it was even half that dense it would still triple in population. So why is it spilling over its "urban growth boundaries"? Minimum lot sizes?

I think most people who know what it is appreciate the purpose of the urban growth boundary. But I think the Metro Council not expanding the boundary last opportunity has caught a lot of flack given how high housing prices have jumped. The biggest issue I am seeing in my line of work is that people are getting priced out, supply is not keeping up with demand, and nonprofit developers can't compete on prices for land.

Washington County alone is short at least 14,000 affordable housing units, and probably more like 20,000 housing units as of the last estimate. And by affordable, I mean 30% of household income. A vast majority of low income folks are actually paying more than 50% of their income on housing. Wages have not kept pace.

I have not been here long, but so many of my friends that have been here awhile tell me it was not very long ago at all when they could rent an apartment downtown for $500/mo. Low-income folks could afford housing near transit to offset the costs. But now, minorities and low-income folks are being pushed far out to east county or to the burbs. The burbs are actually more diverse than Portland, which is nuts.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by 10023

But yes that's the point. You can achieve much bigger densities with a built environment that looks like this, rather than Manhattan

And on this point we agree. Portland has lots of room to densify, and it need not follow the Manhattan model in order to achieve substantial population growth.