I already had the story written in my head. All I needed to do was make an early morning run over to OHSU for some more photos and I was good to go.
Another southwest development going in without a sidewalk—43 units this time! Area stakeholders not happy. I know this story like the back of my hand. And I have walked the road, SW Gibbs St, a million times, there was really no need for another visit.
But I sure am glad I went anyway. When I got there and was actually standing on Gibbs, the story I thought I was going to write melted away. In its place is a fuller tale about how the city’s largest employer, the surrounding neighborhood, and private developers have done their parts to make Portland a greener city. And how the city needs to keep up its end of the bargain.
The university
My new story begins with the Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU). OHSU is Portland’s largest employer, and the premier hospital and biomedical research facility in the state. It’s also on a steep hill and very constrained for space. In the face of the university’s rapid growth in the early 2000s, the city began capping and regulating on-campus parking.
With parking limited, and rapid growth underway, OHSU and the adjacent Homestead neighborhood became a test case for the city’s growth, transportation and parking policies. The results look very good, although the ride has been bumpy.
Michael Harrison, the director of local government and neighborhood relations for OHSU, told me the university has only one parking spot for every three employees. And the resulting mode-share is enviable: 30% of OHSU employees use public transit to get to work, 17% bike, and 6% walk (these are pre-covid numbers).
Moreover, they are in the process of planning 500 locked and covered bike stalls on the Marquam Hill campus to comply with the city’s new bike parking regulations.
The neighborhood
The restricted parking puts pressure on the surrounding neighborhood. It is difficult to find street parking, and in the past some neighbors have rented parking spots on their properties to OHSU employees (the city has since curtailed that). Although OHSU is well-served by public transportation on the approach from the east, areas to the west are poorly served in terms of both public and active transportation.
This brings us to SW Gibbs St.
The only access to the university from neighborhoods west of campus is along SW Fairmount Blvd and down Marquam Hill Rd to Gibbs St. Most streets in southwest Portland don’t have sidewalks or bike lanes, this route is no exception. (Gibbs has a sidewalk from the OHSU campus to 11th Ave, the boundary of the white background on map above.) Nevertheless, people bike and walk to OHSU along this route. A walk down Marquam Hill Rd requires the pedestrian to zig-zag across the street three times in search of a walkable shoulder.
About a decade ago, I lost my footing on the edge of the asphalt on Marquam Hill Rd, turned an ankle and fell. The ankle was so swollen I couldn’t walk on it for a week. This is not a safe route. Not to mention that these are narrow roads with a decent amount of car traffic, traveling at about 30 mph.
The development
Right across the street from where I twisted my ankle, a new 43-unit apartment building is being built.
Neighborhood associations take a keen interest in development, partly because it is the main avenue to getting active transportation improvements in southwest Portland. The Homestead Neighborhood Association is unhappy because the Development Review department within the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is not allowing the private developer to put in a sidewalk on Gibbs. You read it right, “not allowing.” This is a headscratcher, because all the stakeholders want a sidewalk—the developer, the NA, even OHSU has worked for years with neighbors and the city to improve active transportation infrastructure in the area.
Speaking generally, “It is critical that our employees and students have safe ways to bike and walk to our campus,” OHSU’s Michael Harrison told BikePortland.
Homestead NA President Ed Fischer said, “All I can figure is that they have blinders on, they are not looking at this as a system.”
The developer explained in a public meeting that,
PBOT has pushed back on us providing a sidewalk along our frontage on SW Gibbs. However, we are proposing a wide shoulder to accommodate pedestrian travel on our property… A safe sidewalk along Gibbs will help not only existing neighbors, but our future tenants as well.
I visited the site yesterday morning and spoke with a Senior Superintendent at Edge Development, Patrick Beaston. He told me that the new development was “bike-friendly” and that the building will have 1.2 bike racks per person, charging stations and storage, including for e-bikes and tandems.
The shoulder will be five feet wide and bikeable, he explained, and the shoulder at their other development down the hill on Gibbs (at 12th Ave), would be seven feet wide.
The street becomes very narrow in front of the site. For cycling, a wide shoulder might be the best improvement to navigate this steep hill. Pedestrians would probably be better off with a curbed sidewalk. Neither group will be well-served if drivers use the shoulder to illegally park their cars, although a five foot shoulder might be narrow enough to discourage car parking.
The city
Development Review can point to lack of stormwater facilities as a reason for not requiring developers to build sidewalks, but in this case stormwater doesn’t seem to be the issue. Allowing or requiring cement sidewalks along the frontage of these two new developments would be a significant addition toward extending the existing Gibbs sidewalk to 11th through 14th Avenues.
I reached out to PBOT’s Interim Director of Communications, Hannah Schafer, for clarification about the sidewalk decision, she replied:
We required a 6-foot shoulder widening on SW Gibbs for the frontage of this development. Unfortunately, due to significant storm water, soil, and topographical challenges on the hill we couldn’t require a standard curb and sidewalk improvement. Shoulder widening is a common requirement for projects in Southwest Portland that have similar constraints.
This is an unsatisfying response given the area of a sidewalk would be tiny relative to the large footprint of the building, and stormwater runoff from the building will be “appropriately managed via collection and discharge to a combined sewer main in SW Gibbs,” according to city staff analysis presented to the Hearings Officer.
But there you have it, another neighborhood association-Development Review skirmish in southwest Portland. These will probably grow in intensity as the city implements congestion pricing and raises the price of downtown street parking without providing or requiring adequate alternatives to driving in this quadrant of the city.
Insults upon injury: the developer volunteered to put in a sidewalk! VOLUNTEERED! Rather than work to find the best possible solution to protect bikes and peds considering constraints, PBOT simply said NO – just pave the shoulder. Not even a goddamn row of wands to indicate you really shouldn’t run over the poor bastard walking to work.
PBOT says “No other streets or pedestrian connections exist north or west of the subject site (there is the existing identified trail network adjacent to the subject site – this is not considered a pedestrian connection). It is not practical or appropriate to extend either a public street or pedestrian connection through the subject site in order to further the City’s connectivity goals given the issues identified above.
-Italics PBOT
(insert maniacal Joker laughter here)
PBOT has directly told SW Hills neighborhoods ‘you ain’t gettin no sidewalks, capice? You walk in the road or the shoulder. Maybe we’ll improve those some day. Here’s the unfunded SouthWestInMotion; have fun with that.’ So according to PBOT our pedestrian network “connection” IS THE ROAD. Then they turn around and say “well, there’s just a road, with no sidewalk to connect peds anywhere around here, so there’s no need to continue the existing ped network any further.”
“That some catch, that Catch-22” – Yossarian
They’ve simply been requiring developers to pave the odd shoulder, with no separation between people and traffic, even on busy roads, and EVEN if the additional impervious surface cover triggers stormwater diversion into pipes. That’s been one excuse for no sidewalks: price goes up after 500 sq ft impervious since runoff has to be dealt with – in SW that often means an inlet to sewers. But nowhere does it say that the impervious cover, less or more than 500 sq ft, can’t be a raised sidewalk. That’s a decision to cost costs to the developer, and it is made with no input from any potential users of that infrastructure. Another copout is that there “isn’t room” for proper facilities. A 3′ sidewalk is better than nothing; shoot, I’d be happy with an UNpaved shoulder if a GUARDRAIL stood between me and traffic. Nope. As I said, not even wands.
The number of times Development Review seemingly deliberately endangers pedestrians in SW Hills borders on the criminal.
It’s a universal theme in every city: Our city staff are incompetent, our transportation department/bureau is car-centric, blah blah blah.
And it is true – any staffer who happens to be imaginative has already quit and taken employment elsewhere; those who are competent have retired or now run their own consultancy; those who are loud like me got weeded out long ago; those who are left are all team players who have wisely learned to keep their mouths shut.
If you are waiting for your city to “do the right thing”, you are waiting in vain.
Any progress that your city has made in the past wasn’t because city staff were inspired – no, it was because community residents pushed for those improvements, and they pushed damn hard. They used a variety of means – protests, set up blogs like this one, sat through numerous boring meetings, attended open houses, sent in letters, campaigned, participated in blogs and discussions, signed petitions, cornered engineers in dark places (at open houses usually), participated in pointless stakeholder advisory committees, worked with their neighbors, joined groups, acted like idiots, got the annual neighborhood asshole of the year award, and so on. It’s not easy to get such improvements, in fact it’s nearly impossible.
And yet we try. And it is truly amazing when you achieve your community goals and good progressive change does happen – because we pushed for it, we did it.
Comment of the week
I missed this comment yesterday – amusing, because it seems to contradict your other posts somewhat, but on this we completely agree. There’d be far fewer comments if this had been your first reply, So Mr. Maus thanks you for the engagement 🙂
David is utterly correct here – I was part of a team that fought for 100 years – one. hundred. years. – to improve pedestrian safety on a local street. We finally found staffers who acknowledged parts of the problem, agreed our suggestion for a fix was sound, found the money somehow and got it done. Wasn’t the sidewalk the neighborhood had been asking for since 1930, but a vast improvement.
Lead staffer on that promptly left town.
We still have the other staffers who helped, but likely we now need to ‘teach’ the new person the lessons we spent 4 or 5 years delivering to their predecessor; frankly, it took that long for some lightbulbs to go off as our message went against their bureau’s mindset.
So yes, bureacracy plays the long game, and it takes a village etc etc etc. We DO need people who say “you know what would be great here? A woonerf!” Envision the future you want. But we also need people who realize realities make that difficult, and push for as much as is possible. Sadly, in progressive politics, the Utopian ‘perfect or nothing’ crowd often shout down the realists. They inadvertently become allies with the very structures they say need change. I’ve also encountered people in SW who have surrendered, and say since we’ll get nothing we shouldn’t bother to ask. I’m tempted to hurl a Sam Adams (no not that one) quote about chains at them, but it’s better to take their argument as a challenge and try to get them to see what might be possible.
It’s both.
This route should not be a woonerf. It should not be a stroad, either. We all need to push PBOT to stop thinking those are the only two options. We all need to push the larger narrative that PBOT has a problem with Development Review running roughshod over the other parts of the bureau. We all need to think harder about how we frame our arguments to each other.
Gah. Too much Positive Happy Talk for me this early in the day… off to deal with another recalcitrant Bureau to put me back in a bad mood! 🙂
Development review has had the same attitude towards city code-required bike parking in downtown commercial buildings for years. It is all very frustrating.
***portion of comment deleted by moderator*** The only logical explanation that I can take away from this is that PBOT actively wants SW Portland to remain car-centric and hostile.
I’m not going to mince my words, it’s clear that PBOT couldn’t care less about anyone who lives in this quadrant. And as I’ve said before, it’s why I and other people who live in southwest have precisely zero trust in PBOT as an agency these days.
Good reporting as always, thanks Lisa.
Might the next logical step be to make SW Gibbs one of those Dutch-style streets where cars are “guests” where drivers are limited to 14 mph, with lots of barriers and extremely limited on-street parking? Instead of parking along the edge, why not move it to the median – use parked cars to slow car traffic down to a crawl?
I really tried to work the phrase “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” into this post, but I couldn’t. So let’s just skip to the ugly, which is speed postings.
Zooming out a little, Fairmount Blvd is posted 20 mph, except for the segment between Talbot and Marquam Hill Rd, which is posted 25. In fact, the first signs posted in this area for the “20 is Plenty” campaign were 25 mph signs for Fairmount. That is the segment drivers use to get to OHSU if they exit Hwy 26 at Sylvan.
SW Marquam Hill Rd is posted 25, and so is much of Gibbs! Here is a photo of a 25 mph sign at 13th Ave, across from the new development.
Gibbs isn’t reduced to 20 mph until almost at OHSU, at 9th Ave. So we are a long way from woonerfs.
The next step is to re-read Scott Kocher’s speed article for BikePortland, see if these roads are under a “Speed Zone Order” and with that info in hand, lobby PBOT to reduce all the speed postings to 20 mph.
I dunno, the street looks pretty wide and in good shape compared to some that I’ve seen in urban West Virginia.
When I lived in East Portland, there were many city streets (for example SE 108th between Stark & Burnside) that had no curbs but did have storm sewer grates. Are there storm sewer grates on SW Gibbs and nearby streets? Or does the runoff generally go into peoples’ yards?
Given the situation there, I’d say the next step is actually to identify that particular neighborhood area as a hilltop village that acts as a bedroom community or residential neighborhood for your downtown of Pill Hill, and start to develop an urban master plan for the area. Clearly the area is already gentrified and is rapidly urbanizing. Portland has a vast surplus of urban planners to choose from, but you also need architects, civil engineers, traffic engineers, representatives from the hospitals, hospital employee unions, the TDM coordinator, the NAs, and so on. I’d aim to reduce through-traffic to zero, similar to Vancouver BC’s Stanley Park West Side area, and make the area as pedestrian-friendly and transit-friendly as possible, yet keeping urban densities and runoff manageable. As development goes in, you can realign your streets and traffic piecemeal, but according to an overall master plan. Eventually PBOT will rebuild or at least repave Gibbs and other nearby streets and you can implement long-term changes then.
You do understand that these are two huge hospitals, which draw patients from across the PNW? There is not a lot of through-traffic; it’s almost all going here as origin or destination. As for transit, it already has an overcapacity tram, buses (which use 2 of the 3 roads up to hill), and a tunnel/elevator was projected at what, 1 billion? Nor is there enough space to house every single dr, nurse, tech, staffer etcetcetc. even if they all wanted to live there. Traffic will not be eliminated by master planned Sky-pie Utopia. They are great to think about but can prevent things from actually getting done in the here-and-now that need doing, even if imperfect. I am all for the area being turned into mixed-use where possible -after all, Pill Hill may be the closest thing Portland has to a 15th-century European village – but some things just are not possible. Arguing for perfect derails the huge effort required to get PBOT to do JUST the minimum.
As for ‘master plans:’ PBOT’s own Revised Ped Guide studies found many other major cities master-plan their roads; when I mentioned it to a staffer a few years ago, he laughed. “Great idea; never happen.” And ask long-time infrastructure people how many of the plans Portland DOES make are simply ignored. Good for keeping land-use attorneys employed, though!
As you correctly point out, there is already a vast number of active pedestrians about, a very high density of intensive land uses, the hospitals are essentially expensive hotels/spas (with 24-hour service no less), any existing parking should be priced at a premium (and much of it is), and it already has some of the best transit connections the city has to offer short of a subway. So it really is the best location to turn into a high-density urban utopia that Portland has available, even more so than downtown.
I’m not saying you should rely on PBOT or any other bureau – instead, build a coalition that includes OHSU, the Vet Hospital, and the other facilities, and have them push PBOT, BPS, and the others – they got the tram and the waterfront developed, work with them on the next steps.
Really? PBOT has supposedly ‘master planned’ SE Hawthorne twice in the past 25 years, and it still sucks for cyclists and pedestrians.
As far as master planning – be careful what you wish for! This are has been master-planned at least once…
Really? I see poor pavement, drainage issues and room for sidewalks; but instead there is mud, ruts, parked cars and other obstructions in the portion of the ROW that should be dedicated to pedestrians.
Let me try to explain this without being too condescending.
SW Portland has major drainage issues, the soils have too much clay, so the usual storm sewers that might work on 136th or outer Powell won’t work on Gibbs – you need a lot of extra land for catchment ponds and bioswales. The long and short of it, this makes building streets in SW extremely expensive both in materials and right-of-way width – to put in sidewalks and curbs, you must also add catchment basins, which then takes out wide swaths of land on each side of the road, something the neighbors apparently don’t want. Aside from the land issue is the sheer cost of it and who’s going to pay for it. Unlike along 136th or outer Powell, this area of SW is relatively well-off, so the city will refuse to pay for your new sidewalks, new curbs, catchment ponds, large swaths of land bought for same, and a rebuilt roadway, at least $15 million per mile based on Capitol Highway – so you must pay for it by you and all your neighbors forming a Local Improvement District (LID). And none of your neighbors of course wants to pay for it – they prefer to have the rats and the parked cars.
If you had the LID, then the new development would be required to put in that section of sidewalk. But you don’t. So no new sidewalk.
If you aren’t going to do the LID but you still want to be able to walk and bike safely on Gibbs, then you need to find an alternative way to go about it.
If you wait long enough, the city will build it for you – sometime in April 3037.
Thanks but I’m not an idiot. Just because that’s the way it has always been doesn’t mean they can’t change their approach to this problem.
Always appreciate someone being the appropriate amount of condescending!
This area is not wealthy. Working class, students, old people. A few doctors, etc. Plums in the pudding at best. And city ‘refuses’ to pay for stuff in poor areas, too. Not to mention I seem to recall one function of government being paying for projects beneficial to the common weal unaffordable to individuals. TVA, highways (sic as to beneficial!), etc.
BES is requiring runoff mitigation here capable of handling this small amount extra.
The developer VOLUNTEERED to bear the cost. There’s no risk of Nollan/Dolan.
That 15M/mile figure? PBOT LOVES to toss it around as the excuse SW will Get Nothing And Like It. THAT was for a complete redevelopment of a major commuter road, and included work – mostly sewer – designed to support the expected density likely to occur along it, especially after it was transformed into a multi-use commuter route. No-one’s asking for that here.
PBOT is strapped, so I understand they can’t TVA all the hilly, curvy unsidewalked parts of Portland. But this is a lagniappe, and the city is refusing it because they don’t want to extend the pedestrian network, the excuse being there’s nothing to connect to. Except that road, which they elsewhere tell us IS the connection. I’d have no problem if their reasoning was “just do a paved shoulder w/ some sort of ped separation, since we have a plan to make Mrqm Hill Rd a woonerf or something.”
“It needs an unreasonable master plan” and “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” are not helpful arguments when trying to get PBOT to address a fundamental policy contradiction or change their attitude .
David,
If Gibbs is a street in a sleepy neighborhood where property owners should pay into a LID for sidewalks, then the speed limit should be 20 mph.
If Gibbs is a main route from the freeway to access Oregon’s most prestigious biomedical research center and hospital complex, which in 2021 brought in $400 million in federal grants to the region, and is of such vital interest to the local economy that area speed limits need to be kept at 25 mph, then the city should pay for infrastructure needed to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe–per numerous city policies.
Yet the City HAS–recently–put in new sidewalks and other expensive pedestrian and biking infrastructure in SW. In my own neighborhood, it tried to put in new sidewalks that people who lived here didn’t even want–in a flood zone with poor drainage.
And I can’t think of a more condescending way to start a comment than, “Let me try to explain this…”
qqq, do you actually mean ‘the City’ has put things in, or they required developers to put things in? it’s a big difference.
Don’t know where you are in SW (and am happy to keep it that way if you like), but most ‘City’ projects would be under SouthWest In Motion, and it largely consists of shoulder ‘improvements.’
If I have any criticism of this forum, it’s this: it’s unwise to second guess city planners. If you’re actually a real planner (like, with a degree in it), the city planners are going to be more familiar with, and have a better understanding of the project, than anybody else. Just sayin’.
Um.
-Lisa Caballero
That’s totally untrue. As proof, planners often change their plans drastically after input from non-planners. Planners’ knowledge of areas they plan falls far short of the knowledge people who live or otherwise spend time in those areas have. Plans carried out by planners who shy away from criticism by non-planners often fall short of what they would have achieved if planners had been more willing to listen to non-planners.
Competent planners welcome “second guessing”, but they call it “input”.
Yes, that the City put in: Several blocks of new sidewalks in the last few years on Vermont, Multnomah, Barbur Blvd. area, Spring Garden St….Plus the new multi-million dollar Red Electric bridge, bike and pedestrian improvements on B/H Highway, Greenway Trail improvements from the Sellwood Bridge to north end of Willamette Park (joint County plus City costs), new sidewalks and paths in Willamette Park, Miles St. improvements. Go back a few years and there’s the Gibbs St. Bridge (Fed, but with City partially paying)…
I’m not saying it’s enough, or that some of the projects I listed had non-PBOT funding, etc. I was responding to, “If you aren’t going to do the LID but you still want to be able to walk and bike safely on Gibbs, then you need to find an alternative way to go about it”, accompanied by the mocking “April 3037” date. The reality is that the City has spent millions in SW making bike and pedestrian improvements–including sidewalks–often enough that I think the comment I responded to was overly pessimistic.
The main issue I have with this story is how OHSU and the surrounding hospitals made huge historic strides in supporting and building a car-optional city on the hill, but the local neighborhood, the city, and various advocacy groups actually resisted taking the next steps forward – to create car-free streets where drivers are guests. Instead they all perpetuate the myth that automobiles are the dominant species, that we have to segregate transportation modes into “separate but equal” zones for pedestrians, bicyclists, and car drivers. You go to any medieval European city and you’ll find a full integration of all modes in the inner core. By building sidewalks, sewer-gutters, and similar infrastructure, are you not implying that you have given up and that you are surrendering the lion’s share of the street right-of-way to cars? Again?
PBOT is now giving you a unique opportunity to reclaim your street, to make the street usable by everyone, not just cars versus people. So what is your next step?
I don’t know whether or not converting Gibbs to a “woonerf” (shared street) makes sense, having rarely used it. But I agree that too many people jump to sidewalks and other mode separation as always being the best solution for safety.
My own SW neighborhood fought AGAINST PBOT’s forcing sidewalks/traffic mode separation on us. It would have destroyed the street, which does function now (and did before the proposed sidewalks) like a woonerf–very few cars going very slowly, dozens of people walking, running or biking for every car, etc. That can be a much better (and cheaper) solution for safety and livability.
There are many roads in SW where that makes great sense. There are many roads where the volume and/or speed of traffic, the topography, and PBOT’s refusal to statutorily lower speeds (let alone PHYSICALLY reduce them!) makes separation mandatory… or at least advisable. Unless PBOT changes culture, that shared-road Utopia ain’t happenin’ on Broadway, Dosch, Shattuck, Humphrey, Patton………..
I agree, good as the shared-street concept can be for low-vehicle-traffic streets, it wouldn’t make sense on busy main streets like the ones you mention, whereas sidewalks would.
Woonerfs might not work well for heavily-trafficked streets, or an emergency-vehicle route like this one (EV route is one reason PBOT won’t lower traffic speeds/install speed bumps on Fairmont/Mrqm Hill Rd I believe). The stretch in question is also a blind curve. If we rebuilt the street so that no car could physically travel more than 10 mph or so, that’d be great. But a situation where drivers can go 40 mph unimpeded around blind curves with little shoulder space (most of SW) and encounter a gaggle of pedestrians, I’m all for separation. I agree the rest of the OHSU-V/A neighborhod would be nice to have as a mixed environment, but not everywhere is Holland.
The shared street concept isn’t unique to the Netherlands, there are literally thousands of examples throughout Europe, typically in hilltop villages and small towns, and the design concept has been around for millennia (there are ample examples in Pompeii).
You don’t even live here anymore and this is the cross you are choosing to die on? Good luck with that!
Portland and the USA aren’t Europe and never will be. It’s great to look to Europe for inspiration but not so much for actual design ideas.
PS – there were no motor vehicles around when most European cities and towns were initially developed, so standards were vastly different then. I also get that older districts in many American cities were developed pre-automobile, and that SW PDX has some unique problems related to geology and topography, but that doesn’t mean the city should give up at attempting to remedy them. This is a major access route to OHSU from the west and not a sleepy residential street.
There is a lot of good, detailed discussion in this thread that I couldn’t possibly match. But this did jump out at me.
PBOT says “we couldn’t require a standard curb and sidewalk improvement”
but the developer says “PBOT has pushed back on us providing a sidewalk”
Maybe everyone is just speaking loosely, but it seems like the developer could just build it. Just because the City can’t “require” doesn’t mean it’s not allowed. Also, just because the City is “push[ing] back” doesn’t mean it’s not allowed.
Or am I missing something?
Charley, I can’t believe you read all these comments, hats off to you. The developer can’t build a sidewalk if the city doesn’t allow it.
There is a whole rabbit hole of stuff you are missing, and that I didn’t include in the article.
I have read the report that Development Review submits to the Bureau of Development Services as part of signing off on project approval, dated April 2020. You can become a storm water expert, delve into Transportation System Development Charges, check out the Capitol Improvement Project list where SDC monies are spent, be shocked to discover that the way the city prioritizes pedestrian projects is mathematically incorrect … but it would probably all just be a distraction.
Here’s the issue: OHSU is building a $650 million hospital expansion in the next few years, and the city can’t get a sidewalk built? There is a huge amount of economic activity up here, why can’t having a sidewalk be part of it? It’s really not more complicated than that.
Here’s an idea: Maybe OHSU should be paying for sidewalks and other similar or related improvements on the roads in adjacent neighborhoods as part of their expansion plan? B/c really, for a major medical facility, access from almost all directions is actually pretty crappy for everyone, including motorists.