A Bridgeport Village on N.E. Broadway?
by Kennedy Smith
01/22/2007
A six-acre site between the Hollywood and Lloyd districts will either become a cornerstone development or just another corner project. But its fate depends on the level of understanding among the city of Portland, Seattle-area architects and developers, and Vancouver-based Albina Fuel Co.
Albina Fuel owns the property at the corner of 33rd Avenue and Broadway, at the entrance of Interstate 84 and across the street from two gas stations.
The site is a dead area – a concrete- and dirt-filled, vacant expanse – between the Hollywood District, currently going through development changes of its own, and a strip of new, Pearl-style restaurants and shops on Broadway.
The project planned for the site would be erected in three phases. The first phase encompasses the block bound by Weidler and Broadway streets and 32nd and 33rd avenues, with 168 units of housing, some live/work units at street level and about 40,000 square feet of commercial space planned plus 90 commercial parking spaces and a 210-stall residential parking garage.
Phase II would see 151 housing units on the block bound by Weidler and Halsey streets and 32nd and 33rd, with live/work units on the ground level and underground residential parking. A third phase has not yet been designed.
But the development – now just a series of renderings – has some Portlanders concerned because it doesn’t necessarily conform to guidelines set by the city.
Central-city zoning doesn’t apply
“Neither the requirements of Title 33 for land divisions nor the Central City Fundamental Design Guidelines apply to this site,” said Joseph Readdy, an architect with the Portland office of Mahlum Architects and a member of the American Institute of Architects Downtown Urban Design Panel.
Title 33 is the city’s zoning code, adopted in 1991. It sets regulations for new developments, zone changes, land-use reviews and other administrative procedures.
“If (Albina site developers) were doing a land division or land-use action, they would be required to meet Title 33 in terms of conductivity, but they’re not concerned about that,” Readdy said. “The standards are explicit, but they don’t have to meet them.”
That’s because the site lies outside the central city, to which Title 33 applies.
Spokane-based SRM Development, site owner Albina Fuel and Seattle-based designer Runberg Architecture Group are performing all the changes that the city and neighborhood associations have requested, Readdy said.
“But they’re not going beyond that.”
The problems that Readdy and others have with the site’s design are threefold: the large-scale block structure doesn’t conform to Portland’s signature small-scale blocks like those found in the central city; the site “diminishes the quality of the public realm,” meaning it wouldn’t fit with its surroundings; and a pedestrian path allows for little directional choices for walkers.
The design panel found this last design element troubling, Readdy said.
“Because of the changes in grade (the site is on a slope leading toward the highway), what they’re doing is creating structured roof terraces over the parking garage and creating pedestrian access over the roof terrace and then going through the parking structure in order to get to the ground level,” he said.
But a representative of site owner KAL LLC, a corporation comprising developers and family members of Albina Fuel owners, said the development group is doing more than enough to answer the concerns of citizens.
Jeff Arntson, operations manager at Albina and a stakeholder with KAL, said he has responded to directions from the Portland Design Commission to consider refinements to the material palette, including using longer-lasting construction materials and replacing Hardie siding (a fiber cement material typically used on single-family homes) with a brick and stucco façade.
Brian Sweeney, an architect with Runberg Architecture Group, said the Albina Fuel site development would be the firm’s first project in Portland. However, Sweeney lives in Portland, and he said he knows enough about the site to be its project manager and designer.
“The design team has pretty good knowledge of Portland because it’s close-by,” he said. “The general environment is similar to Seattle in terms of weather, the ages of people in the towns and the cities’ general architecture.”
He said he and the development team spent more than a year researching the neighborhood before beginning the design process.
Retaliation
by relocation?
Albina Fuel moved from Portland to Vancouver in November 2005 because, Arntson said, “we were trying to get off that property to develop it. Parking trucks there was not the highest and best use of the property, and we had operations in Vancouver since 1968.”
Albina’s new headquarters is now within 12 blocks of one of its major operations.
But since the move, rumors have circulated that Albina’s decision to pack up and move to Washington was driven by more than a desire to increase efficiency; some say Albina grew frustrated with Portland’s regulations for developing the site and retaliated by moving across state lines.
“There are a lot of people who said things to advance their own agendas and, to be quite honest, we didn’t feel we needed to dispel any rumors,” Arntson said. “The word frustration comes into it when working with the city of Portland.”
Harrison Pettit, president and co-chairman of the Sullivan’s Gulch Neighborhood Association, said his group and other surrounding neighborhood associations are “generally supportive” of the development and have made some recommendations to which the developers have responded.
“We view this as a very significant development, as it’s almost a gateway development of the upper Broadway corridor,” he said. “We worked with developers and wanted to be supportive so that it would be developed in the right manner.”
But Readdy said the “gateway project” label is misleading.
“The auto-dominated character effectively places the character of the development into a more suburban model – maybe like Bridgeport (Village) or (The Streets of Tanasbourne),” he said. “The way the site is developed, and the inability of pedestrians to circulate around and through the site, make it much more of an urban cul-de-sac than a crossroads.”
He said a larger question to ask is whether projects like this one deserve a more comprehensive review, and if so, which criteria should apply.
“It’s a necessary (question) as our city reconsiders the boundaries that comprise the central city,” he said. “So, I’m disappointed for what could have been realized on this site with only a slightly different approach that considered a truly urban design solution. It is a shame that design review is not a tool sufficiently robust to effect good urban design.”
The project will be brought before the Design Commission on Feb. 1.
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