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Better Parking Policy For The City of Roses

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CC2035

23 Stories and zero parking stalls: Proposed Pearl District hotel/apartment project packs meeting

January 14, 2019 By TonyJ 2 Comments

A building that would likely be the city’s tallest to have no on-site parking went before the Portland Design Commission on January 3rd. The meeting was reported to be packed with residents, many of whom opposed the development’s height and impact on traffic. But others in the neighborhood, including the Pearl District Neighborhood Association (PDNA), were more supportive of the project with some reservations.

The 250 foot tall building would provide roughly 170 hotel rooms on 11 floors and another 110 apartments on 11 more floors as well as ground level retail, all parking would be provided by off-site valet services.

Rendering of proposed building containing 170 hotel rooms, 110 apartments, and no parking.

The location, on NW 12th and NW Flanders, has been owned since 2016 by Vibrant Cities, a Seattle-based development firm. In June, the Oregonian reported that the developer had initially planned to build an apartment tower on the site, but shifted the focus to a hotel use after the city of Portland passed inclusionary housing requirements. Additional height allowed by the 2035 Comprehensive Plan, seems to have enabled a reimagining of the project to provide both a hotel and apartments, including the required affordable homes.

In September, the PDNA submitted a letter to the design commission which was particularly forward-thinking regarding the developer’s choice to forgo building expensive on-site parking, recognizing that “parking garages are the most expensive part of new developments” and building less parking can “[increase] housing affordability and [provide] more options for renters that do not own vehicles.” 

This project will likely face further opposition from neighbors who will insist on lower heights and on-site parking. Ironically, on-site parking would cause additional traffic and conflicts with pedestrians and cyclists; the very issues opponents claim the current configuration will bring. Proponents of multi-modal transportation will be needed to point out what should be obvious, more parking brings more congestion.

While many smaller parking-free projects have been developed in the last decade, this is, hopefully, a sign that larger buildings with no parking will be able to secure funding in the future. As the PDNA points out, “the Pearl is an ideal location to live and work car-free, especially at this particular site where numerous amenities and tens of thousands of jobs are located in reasonable walking distance.”


Filed Under: CC2035, housing, Parking Garages

City Should Require Convertible Public Parking Garages, Not Just Encourage Them

January 6, 2018 By TonyJ 6 Comments

With climate action goals and tens of millions of public dollars in the balance, is saying “please” enough to convince Prosper Portland to avoid building soon-to-be obsolete parking structures?


Take action now! Email cc2035@portlandoregon.gov and let them know what you think about this amendment! Do you think it goes far enough? What methods of encouragement should be used in the implementation of this policy? A few sentences in your own words goes a LONG WAY!

Be sure to use subject: “CC2035 Testimony” and reference Flexible Building Design Policy, Volume 1, Amendment 1.


City Council won’t act on the requests of dozens of Portlanders to remove goals to build more commuter parking in the central city from the CC2035 plan. On December 6th, however,  Mayor Wheeler did propose an amendment to “encourage flexible building design and construction” of city funded buildings, including parking structures.  (View this, and other amendments, here)

Garage With Lights On It

For years, businesses in Old Town, Chinatown, and the Central Eastside have been promised more commuter parking and Prosper Portland has been working to make new garages, and a potential short-term revenue stream, a reality. But these promises were made in a much different time. Services like Lyft, Car2Go, ReachNow, and Biketown didn’t exist yet. Autonomous transit only existed in the minds of science fiction writers, and climate action wasn’t (but certainly should have been) the urgent issue it is today. New car parking garages are a 20th century solution to 21st century problems.

Convertible parking structures are a step in the right direction, but bigger steps are needed if transportation targets for commuters are going to be met. Repurposable designs should be required for any city built structures. City agencies must also prove that new facilities are self-sustaining, are fiscally responsible, and don’t negatively impact progress on climate action goals.

Tell Portland City Council that you support this amendment, but remind them that it doesn’t go far enough. New parking structures will drain city coffers and induce more frustrating traffic. Make sure they understand that more action is needed, and soon, to avoid a costly generational mistake. Prosper Portland can assist the continued development of Old Town, Chinatown, and the Central Eastside by financing affordable housing near these job centers and more innovative alternative transportation options for folks who choose to live elsewhere.

1. Add flexible building design policy Policy section: New Regional Center Policy 1.14 Sponsored by: Wheeler (12/6/17, Table O1) New Policy 1.14: Flexible building design. Encourage flexible building design and construction, including structured parking, that allows buildings to be repurposed and accommodate a variety of uses in the future. Explanation: The policy calls for flexible building designs that allow future repurposing of buildings, encouraging structured parking to be built to be convertible to a future nonparking use(s).
Text of the amendment.

How can you help?

Email cc2035@portlandoregon.gov and let them know what you think about this amendment! Do you think it goes far enough? What methods of encouragement should be used in the implementation of this policy? A few sentences in your own words goes a LONG WAY!

Be sure to use subject: “CC2035 Testimony” and reference Flexible Building Design Policy, Volume 1, Amendment 1.

Attend drop-in hours on Tuesday, January 9, 2018, in the City Hall Atrium from 5 – 7 p.m. Let staff know if you support this step, but make sure to express concerns if you think it doesn’t go far enough.

Testify at the City Council hearing on January 18th, 2017 at City Hall at 2PM in support of this amendment.


Parking Structure photo via https://www.flickr.com/photos/schluesselbein/4445085357

Filed Under: CC2035, Parking Garages

Worse Than Wasteful: New Parking Garages Undermine Climate Goals

September 20, 2017 By TonyJ Leave a Comment

TAKE ACTION: Testimony is accepted before September 22nd, 5PM on the CC2035 plan which includes goals to build new car parking structures with city backed bonds and parking meter revenue. Click this link for more information.


Portland City Council is considering a massive plan for the next 20 years of development in the central city. This plan is supposed to set the stage for a more sustainable, equitable, and livable city, but it contains plans to waste money on single-use commuter and visitor parking garages that will take decades to pay off, siphoning critical money we could use to transition to transit and other modes.

It is worse than wasteful to build publicly funded or financed parking garages in our central city. If the Convention Center Hotel Parking Garage is any indication, these hulking structures will be filled with car parking stalls costing more than $50,000 each. To pay back the loans required, those parking stalls will need to be filled with motor vehicles, parked at premium prices, nearly every day for the next 20-30 years.

This is a no-win situation for Portland. If those garages are profitable, it will mean that our goals to cut car traffic to downtown have failed. If we succeed at our critical and ambitious climate goals, then taxpayers will be on the hook for millions of dollars. It would be better to burn the money than build garages with it.

A 100 dollar bill burning.
It would be better to burn the money than spend it on a parking garage.

In the next two days, please take a minute and tell City Council that this is a very bad idea.

Let’s Use What We Have Already

The desire to build more parking is based on the belief of Prosper Portland and other groups that we don’t have enough car parking in the central city. This is debatable. There are many many thousands of parking stalls in the city, but at any given time they are empty due to regulations (residential parking in downtown can’t currently be leased to commuters) or they are parked up with cars that might not be there if we had higher prices for meters or if we had better transit. Let’s use smarter parking management tools to make better use of what we have. Let’s prioritize transit traffic on our streets so that taking the bus is a more viable option. We can make do with what we have now before future trends reduce parking demand.

Let Private Capital Take The Risk

If car parking was a good long-term fiscal bet, then private developers would be begging for the opportunity to build it, but it isn’t. Parking is expensive to build and a very risky investment in this time of extreme transportation disruption. Developers aren’t willing to build new parking garages unless the city is willing to take all the long-term risk. The city has far greater priorities than parking, like deeply-affordable housing.

Require That Parking Garages Pencil Out

If the city is still going to consider building (or buying) a parking garage, shouldn’t it be required to show the real risk of taxpayers footing the bill? Consultants for Prosper Portland can produce projections that show the garages can be self-sustaining in today’s market, but if you ask how much money the garage will make in 2030, they will say “no one knows the future.”

We need to demand better than that. Surely no one can know the future, but we can take into account the impact that ride-share, self-driving buses, and our own climate action goals will have on parking demand. If a car parking garage can’t pay for itself, Portland taxpayers should know about it. Require realistic projections for long-term viability and, better yet, require a vote of the public to green-light a garage.

Require 100% Convertibility To Active Uses

Prosper Portland and PBOT say that it’s ok to build garages that might be empty because we can convert them to homes or offices in the future. If this is true, then there should be no controversy in the city passing an ordinance requiring any city-involved parking structure be 100% convertible to active uses in the future, storage units don’t cut it. Without that guarantee, it’s very likely that new garages will be single-use facilities that will be an albatross around the neck of Portland residents for a generation.

Take Action In Three Minutes

30 Seconds – Start an email to cc2035@portlandoregon.gov with the subject: CC2035 Testimony

1 Minute – Ask council to require that any new parking built with city involvement be 100% convertible to active uses.

1 Minute – Ask council to remove incentives to build new parking garages from action plan items TR7, TR22, RC58, and RC4.

30 Seconds – Sign your name and address. Hit send.

Filed Under: CC2035, Parking Garages

Tell City Council: “Ted Wheeler” Parking Garages Are Bad For Portland

September 12, 2017 By TonyJ 3 Comments

Testimony for the Central City 2035 plan is accepted until Friday, September 22th at 5PM. A burst of testimony could keep Portland from making a BIG mistake by wasting millions on new parking structures.

Take five minutes today and make a difference!

2 Minutes – watch this testimony from September 7th:

30 Seconds – Start an email to cc2035@portlandoregon.gov with the subject: CC2035 Testimony

1 Minute – Ask council to require that any new parking built with city involvement be 100% convertible to active uses.

1 Minute – Ask council to remove incentives to build new parking garages from action plan items TR7, TR22, RC58, and RC4.

30 Seconds – Sign your name and address. Hit send.

Of course you can always take more time and write a longer letter.  Check out our previous coverage for more details.

There are lots of other important things in CC2035 to comment on, for example:

  • Many people asked council to reduce allowable heights in the west end of downtown, lowering these heights will make it harder to build much needed housing in the city core.
  • The proposal contains support for widening our urban freeway (Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter). Widening urban freeways has never solved traffic congestion.

Thank you for taking the time to make Portland a better and more sustainable city.

Filed Under: CC2035, Parking Garages

City Council To Consider Plan To Build More Parking In Central City

September 5, 2017 By TonyJ 1 Comment

On Thursday, September 7th, Portland City Council will consider adoption of the Central City 2035 plan, a document which will guide development in the city center for the next 20 years.

Portlanders should be able to look at this plan and envision the city in 2035. Let’s do an experiment:


Think for a second about the world as it is now and what you would like Portland to be in 20 years. Think about where you’d like to live in the city, pretend you work downtown, and then close your eyes and imagine a commute in 2035.

How did you get there? Did you ride a bike? Did you take a bus? Was a robot driving that bus or a human operator? Maybe you lived downtown? Maybe you took a jetpack? Maybe you took a Lyft or Uber or something we can’t imagine yet?

Did your vision for 2035 include driving your own car to the central city and parking in a parking garage?

Probably not.


Why then do so many of the Performance Targets and Action Plans for our city’s next 20 years seek to incentivize and build new expensive car parking for central city commuters and visitors?

While Mayor Ted Wheeler has publicly criticized the plans of Prosper Portland to bet its future on parking revenues, when he (most likely) votes to pass CC2035 they will be codified in a set of Action Plans.

Building Parking, For Your Health?

For an example, look at the bizarrely named “Transportation Health and Environment” Action TR7. This action calls for “Incentives to Create Off-Street Parking” in an area that was “built prior to the automobile age.” The supposed problem for the Central Eastside is that developers don’t want to pay the high cost to build parking that no one will be using in 20 years. The solution proposed in this plan is to retrofit the district to accommodate automobiles, at a time in our history when we not only are well aware of the damage car culture has caused, but when we can, for the first time, see the likely end of the automobile age as we know it.

Old Town and Chinatown Parking Garages

But that’s not all they have planned for the Central City. Old Town / Chinatown is another area of town where they would like to mortgage our future tax revenues to build more parking garages. Check out Action Plan item RC44.

There are some great ideas in the CC2035 plan, we should definitely make more efficient use of the parking we have as peak car passes us by.  It may even be the case that new parking garages will help spur development, but the public must be honestly informed about the true cost of these garages, the poor outlook for self-sustainability, and the negative impact they have on our transportation and climate action goals. Every dollar spent on a car parking garage is one less dollar we can spend improving transit, building affordable housing, and incentivizing non-car modes. We’ll lose the opportunity to spend many many millions of dollars on sustainable practices if we build more public parking garages and we will be paying the mortgage on them when they are, inevitably, empty.

Convertible Parking Garages? Not In The Plan

Proponents of new parking like to point to trendy articles about converting parking garages into housing or offices. This is probably less likely than we think. Underground parking will only be used as housing in dystopian scenarios and building parking to be convertible makes it even more expensive.

Public Portland Parking GarageBut there’s another reason we probably won’t see convertible Prosper Portland parking garages in the future, it’s not required in the plan. Developers won’t build much parking at all, unless we force them. Prosper Portland knows new parking garages won’t pay for themselves, so it’s trying to get PBOT to help pay with meter money. Any requirement to make new parking be “convertible” would only make those projects harder to pencil out.

City Council should require that any structured parking built with public subsidy be convertible to other active uses (not just storage). If PBOT and Prosper Portland claim these projects can be turned into housing or retail space, then there should be no resistance to this amendment.

Tell City Council To “Stop Building More Parking Garages”

There is a hearing on CC2035 on September 7th at 2PM at City Council and there will be another hearing on September 14th. If you plan to testify, please mention that the city should not build more parking garages. Let developers build parking if they require it. Demand that any new public parking be completely convertible to active uses.

Please write to city council today and tell them to commit to climate action goals, transportation goals, and affordability by removing Action Plans TR7, TR22, and RC58 and modifying RC44. Tell them that new parking will be a significant cost burden on the city and will tie up critical funds that could be better used subsidizing transit or housing.

Please send an email now and demand that any parking built with public money (or in agreement with Prosper Portland) be built such that it is convertible to an active use by design.

For more inspiration, check out our coverage of the CC2035 Discussion Draft and read over the testimony sent in by Portlanders for Parking Reform.

Building more parking now in 2017 is a mistake; it certainly shouldn’t be part of our long range plans for Portland.


How to Testify

To testify, please provide your full name and address. Testimony to City Council is considered public record. Testifiers’ names, addresses and any other information included in the testimony will be posted on the website. You may submit testimony to the Portland City Council on the Recommended Draft CC2035 Plan in any of the following ways:

By Email
Send an email to cc2035@portlandoregon.gov
Subject: CC2035 Testimony

In person at the public hearing
September 7, 2017 at 2 p.m. City Council Chambers: 1221 SW 4th Avenue, Portland
Additional hearing dates may be scheduled. Please confirm dates and times by checking the City Council calendar one week in advance.

Filed Under: CC2035, Parking Cash Out, Parking Garages, Parking Maximums, TDM, Unbundling

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