What’s being called a “generational investment” that aims to build sidewalks in east and southwest Portland passed its first political test this morning when the five-member Portland City Council Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted unanimously to support a resolution that could create a new funding mechanism and serve as a model for other expenditures.
As I reported last week, the Sidewalk Improvement and Paving Program (SIPP) is the brain child of District 1 Councilor Loretta Smith and District 4 Councilor Mitch Green. The two have found an overlapping interest in restructuring how the City of Portland implements and funds sidewalk construction projects in the parts of the city that are most in need of them.
“Our streets and sidewalks are the feet of the city,” Councilor Smith, whose district encompasses all of Portland east of I-205, said while introducing the resolution. “And if our feet don’t work, then of course, we’re not working.” Smith then connected the health of our sidewalks and broader network of non-driving options to the revitalization of Portland: “We need a renaissance in our city and we need to make sure that renaissance includes active transportation.” The way Smith sees the world, we cannot ask Portlanders to get out and attend cultural events and local businesses if they can’t get their safely without a car.
Councilor Green represents all of Portland west of the river (and a small piece of Sellwood). He said the people who rely on sidewalks to get around District 4 are, “Often some of the poorest people and are members of the immigrant community and are exposed and vulnerable to traffic violence.” Other folks are, “Really simply trying to find an opportunity to leave their car behind.”
This resolution doesn’t commit any dollars yet, but it feels much more serious than simply a statement of values and intentions. Green and Smith have both said they are working on a new bonding mechanism that could unlock significant funding. Previously, the only stated funding estimate for the SIPP was $100 million, but in an unscripted remark at this morning’s committee meeting, Councilor Smith said, “We have a ceiling of $1.5 billion and we may be asking for $300 to $400 million.”
“This is generational,” said Oregon Walks Executive Director Zachary Lauritzen during public testimony. “We’ve been talking about doing this for decades. And finally, we have a couple leaders saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ And I am so moved by that, so excited about that. And just want to say, thank you for being willing to do that.” Lauritzen urged councilors to consider public/private partnerships to stretch any new funding even further.
There was no testimony in opposition to the resolution.
Once discussion among council members began, District 3 Councilor Angelita Morillo expressed concerns about the funding portions of the resolution language. Specifically, she is worried about all the talk she is overhearing about how this program would tap into revenue from Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF). “I want to ensure that if those dollars are going to be touched, that they are going to actually be used in a way that reduces carbon emissions and actually address the climate,” Morillo said. She then asked to see data to prove whether or not laying the concrete required for sidewalks would actually reduce carbon emissions.
When a discussion ensued about Morillo’s concerns, Green tried to assure her that PCEF wouldn’t be the main source of revenue and that the Finance Committee would ultimately take a deeper dive into where funding would come from. Green said he prefers that a bulk of the investment comes from a tax revenue bond. “That’s what cities do,” Green said. “They build infrastructure and issue debt to build that infrastructure.”
At one point Morillo tried to get language amended into the resolution that would require it to stop at the Climate, Resilience, and Land Use Committee. She saw that as a necessary step if the resolution’s intent was to use PCEF as a major funding source. But Smith didn’t like that idea and worried about losing control of the resolution if it went to a separate committee (beyond the Finance Committee). Ultimately the funding source-specific language was stricken from the resolution to keep the policy and finance conversations separate. Then, after a bit of back-and-forth, the resolution passed 5-0.
It will now move onto the full City Council and would likely make a stop at the Finance Committee once its funding plan becomes clearer.
For walking advocate Zachary Lauritzen, it’s a major step forward. “There will always be challenges about money,” he said at the end of his remarks today. “But until you take the policy move and start moving to go find those dollars, it just won’t happen. And our kids will wake up in 20, 30, 40, years and go, ‘Huh? Same problem. Why didn’t they do something about it back then?’ And I think you all are in a position to do something about it right now. So thank you.”
Thanks for reading.
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Really excited to see where this goes! Nice to see the new council taking a swing at making things better. I’ll be optimistic for as long as I can be about this one 🙂
This is awesome! I would love to hear Tigard City Council using this kind of language. Car culture is killing us with traffic violence, pollution and sedentary lifestyles. We have few sidewalks in our neighborhood. When there is a sidewalk, often drivers use it for car storage. Great work!
I am excited to see a new council (subcommittee) that is finding ways to solve problems…
Keep up the good work !!
I have an entire collection of photos of sidewalk stamps from multiple cities, it’s kind of a hobby.
Most of the sidewalks in my neighborhood are over a century old. Sidewalks have a long benefit cycle for a small amount of concrete. The benefit/cost analysts (BCA) is certainly better for sidewalks than driveways, but I don’t hear anyone questioning the need for driveways. Same for overpasses, they’re huge concrete monuments to cars that will need replacement long before most sidewalks will.
If they are clear-eyed about the tradeoffs and they want to spend limited city resources building sidewalks on local streets, I guess they hold the purse strings!
However, it does seem odd to be looking for a massive amount of money – borrowing against a future in which we have much more pressing problems – to build tons of new infrastructure when 1) you’re trying to entice businesses and higher income households to Portland to partially address 2) your current large structural funding problems for basic maintenance and operations to your transportation system, which this does nothing to address, only exacerbate.
Budgetary tradeoffs aside, I do really hope they are thinking about tradeoffs. There is nothing like broad agreement among community members that sidewalks on local streets are a boon. SO many folks don’t want the city to screw up their frontage, garden, or other community project with sidewalks and paving. These are not edge cases. Center-strip paved streets with better stormwater management seems to be a clear win across the board, but anything beyond that is fuzzy.
I’ve got to keep returning to the role narrative plays here because I think it’s important.
I mostly grew up on streets without sidewalks – first in a low-income, working-class streetcar suburb; then in a bit nicer mid-century second ring neighborhood populated by cube farmers; then in a 90s McMansion development full of doctors, lawyers, business owners, and stay-at-home moms. In all these cases, at least as a kid, living in neighborhoods with few sidewalks anywhere, life was easy and mostly a blast. We walked and biked and took the bus everywhere – to friends, parks, the woods, stores, school.
Having lived in almost every American urban pattern area and in neighborhoods at several points across the socioeconomic/demographic spectrum, the lack of sidewalks was never something anyone talked about or craved or agitated for. I lived in the same kinds of neighborhoods T&I is discussing here but those communities uniformly lacked the expectation (or desire) that this kind of infrastructure is what they were owed or would be beneficial. There was no thought or narrative that the neighborhood was somehow deficient or not working because it lacked sidewalks that other neighborhoods had – whether folks were walking down the street, riding the bus, riding a bike, or driving. I really struggle to balance east Portland’s supposed clamoring for sidewalks on every street whilst First Addition in Lake Oswego, of all places, is happily mostly sidewalk-free; if a neighborhood in the region wanted to and could afford to rectify this situation, that one might best be able.
I more than suspect this clamoring and clangor is actually the product of academics and high-flying (as in far above the actual fray) advocates who imagine they know best, who, like the non-profits and special interest groups who’ve misled the local and national Democratic Party for years, purport to represent the interests of racial/social/economic groups but mostly just have an in with those in government – because they went to the same schools together, live in the same neighborhoods together (not the ones sans-sidewalks), make use of the same information sources/media – in a word, they are more comfortable with one another because they speak the same language and occupy the same cultural spaces and milieu. And listening to small orgs that claim to speak for a large and diverse (in all ways) populace is much easier and tidier than the reality. Which is that sidewalks are at best a luxury and on average a liability – expensive to build, expensive to maintain, not addressing documented safety issues (on local streets – all main streets/stroads should (and usually do at this point) have sidewalks), increased impervious surface, disruptive to development patterns and ways of living that people appreciate, likely to result in property value increase and displacement and on.
Was it also Councilor Green who was talking about retiring infrastructure to address the maintenance backlog? Instead of building more infrastructure that is actually a luxury and liability out of some misguided idea about what is fair or effective (at keeping people safe, at addressing stormwater concerns, at reducing maintenance liability, at addressing the heat island effect – much more pronounced in east Portland already), lets remove a bunch of it – in the old inner neighborhoods, returning more of it to nature, to community, to calm and people-focused uses.
I appreciate this comment! I’ll add: the question should be less about building sidewalks (as you noted, that comes with adding lots more costly infrastructure in the form of road paving, curbs, stormwater, etc) and more about safe pedestrian connectivity. Sometimes that comes in the form of a sidewalk. It could also be a path, it could also be pedestrianizing a street so cars can have access but it’s really for people walking/biking/rolling (thinking woonerfs here), it could be dropping down physical separation between cars and everyone else, etc. This can’t become just about building sidewalks in the most heavy handed and expensive way possible. But if this becomes dollars that are stretched, used creatively, maximized, etc, then this is a real boon and beginning to attend to this decades-old problem that primarily harms the parts of the city that were annexed last.
Exactly. Focus on the goal (pedestrian connectivity) rather than the means (sidewalks).
This I mostly agree with. The problem is that a sidewalk separated by grade and distance from the cars is the safest infrastructure; it should be the standard, and other solutions used where prudent. A separated gravel path night seem fine – unless you are differently-abled.
Totally agree. I suppose the thrust of my point is: “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” and “whenever possible, be creative.”
Of course, in both of those, there is compromise, but those compromises still need to serve everyone, even if they aren’t perfect.
This is a wonderful discussion. I agree that sidewalks shouldn’t be built just to say you built a sidewalk. It should be strategic, with priorities of network connectivity and access to buses.
In the southwest, these priorities mean adding sidewalks to our collectors — streets like Shattuck, Dosch, Capitol Hill Road, Vermont, Hamilton, Taylors Ferry …
Currently, entire neighborhoods (Hayhurst, Bridlemile) cannot reach the bus service on Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy because Dosch and Shattuck are too dangerous to walk along — and importantly, there is no other way to reach BHH.
None of those streets have stormwater infrastructure, so those will be expensive sidewalks to build. But it badly needs to be done (and has needed to be done for about 75 years, SW was mostly annexed by the mid-20th century).
If it doesn’t happen, City of Portland should fess up that it’s policy is to deliberately promote car-dependency in a large swath of town.
Yes to all that. Also, one thing for people to remember is that being against sidewalks where they’re not needed (or where they even make things worse) is being PRO sidewalk, in that it frees up money to spend on sidewalks where they’re really needed.
After 75 years of relative inactivity, the stormwater issue looks suspiciously like a lame excuse by the city to throw up their hands and do nothing. So far as I can tell, it still rains in Oregon and water continues to run off into streams and roads, sidewalks or no sidewalks. Why not build sidewalks and paved paths, but without curbs and sewers? How much additional runoff will that actually generate?
Here in NC, most of the state population is in what is known as the Piedmont region of rolling hills and impermeable forest soils. Stormwater retention ponds here are hit or miss, depending on the community – some prioritize development over the environment, others retain large forests and wetlands as underdeveloped city parks, it really varies, but no city here desires to imitate Portland Oregon in retarding the growth of an entire city quadrant over runoff issues.
The 1992 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows for other materials than just poured cement (which isn’t good for the environment anyway) as long as the materials are firm and even – a lot of the rails-trails use pea gravel for example. No matter what is used has to follow ADA, including the ramps. I’ve seen too many US cities put in cement sidewalks and screw up on the ramps and driveways, make them too steep, lips too tall, plant telephone, sign, and signal poles in the middle of them.
I would think permeable pavers and removable curbs like they use in Europe would be ideal, especially when the sidewalk has to be ripped up to repair water and sewer lines and other utilities, as well as deal with tree roots over the next 200+ years.
Don’t get Lisa and I started on screwed-up ADA ramps! She’s writen about them here. I can take you for a tour of screwed-up ramps next time you visit. Bring a lunch.
So SW active transit folks have talked to PBOT about permeable pavers, porous surfaces etc, and the response has always been “they don’t work” or “too much maintenance” or some other reason to defauult to NO. Note that I am for whatever ADA-compliant solution there is that is NOT a sidewalk, as long as there is a solid barrier between cars and people. I also do not want ‘connectivity’ like the one over by Multnomah Village, where a streetside sidewalk which was shorter and nearly-level was replaced with requirements for a steep, much longer path that didn’t easily get people to other end of that street. Set a standard, and make deviations from it be hard (but not impossible) to argue for; don’t let ‘mediocre’ be the enemy of the good, either!
The ‘ripping up sidewalks’ is another red herring; most utilities are under the STREET – which in most cases is a few inches of asphalt over 8″ of concrete. Why is it a no-no to dig up a sidewalk when the street gets mauled all the time?
Spoiler alert: it’s because PBOT is the only bureau which can pour concrete; the others can only do asphalt repair (I assume they just fill the hole in the concrete bed w/ asphalt). They have to wait on PBOT to pour before they can close out the job and dislike the wait. Easily fixed by allowing other bureaus to pour concrete or expanding PBOT capacity to avoid delays.
Cement is to concrete as eggs are to cakes. It’s a dry powder that you mix with sand, gravel and water to make concrete, and if it “pours” you are doing it wrong.
Are you just bugging your engineer friends?
You’re right, concrete from virgin materials isn’t great for the environment. Baking rock to make cement powder liberates a lot of CO² both from the rock and from the fuel you heat it with. Sand and gravel are both mined materials, often from river beds.
A sidewalk made from pavers is permeable and you can do your own tree root repairs.
Telling people attempting to access what little public transit they have that not walking in the roadway full of cars going up to 40 mph is a luxury. Huh.
Many people here have waxed elegiac about their childhoods, biking carelessly everywhere and playing stickball right in Main Street… I can’t even get my own neighbors to slow down when my kids are riding their bikes in the block; you think anyone else gives a crap about doing so when not in their neighborhood? Drivers are protected from many of their driving terrible habits by auto safety improvements, but the thing they hit – bike, pet, kid – hasn’t changed much, and suffers.
I grew up in an inner-city area one block from the freeway, and later in a suburb. Both had sidewalks, even the sleepy bedroom community. Many streets had crosswalks in both places. People, in general, drove better because driver’s ed was mandatory in most states. If we had sidewalks then why is it now a luxury? One of my neighbors was home early today; he mentioned he’s never home during business hours and was amazed how busy his street was. At least it had a sidewalk; the road he walked home from work on did not. He had to run in a few places to avoid a car where there was no shoulder. Is it a luxury not to risk death to get home?
I agree some roads have so little traffic they may not need a sidewalk, or some spots it just won’t be practical. But everywhere ekse? Getting to school or work without a car, going shopping via accessible public transit, reducing vehicle trips (even electric ones prodce ecological damage somewhere) – those aren’t LUXURIES; they are NECESSITIES if we are to avoid being a baked potato of a planet.
Calling sidewalks a “luxury” is such a crazy take. Would you be saying the same thing if this was about space for cars instead of pedestrians?
My understanding from a staffer for one of the Councilors is that “sidewalk” is somewhat shorthand, and this is about related infrastructure that will allow for humans to move safely around Portland.
Definitely appreciate your comment.
The unfortunate reality is the building sidewalks in SW is crazy expensive. All of the stormwater currently goes into ditches. When curbs are built then a stormwater system needs to be installed. The 1/2 mile sidewalk project on Capitol Highway wound up costing $30 million largely because of this issue.
Sidewalks were along for the ride on that one; whether they were built or not, the curb (needed to stop stormwater issues the area had for a century) was the culprit. Well, that, and upgrading some pipes to serve the anticipated growth of the area and resist quakes.
Now you’ve hit on the nub of the problem. $400 million or a Billion might sound like a lot for sidewalks, but when you factor in sewers, water line upgrades, burying utilities, buying right-of-way, finding room for car parking and bus stop shelters, and that money gets eaten up pretty quickly. Outer Powell cost $32 million/mile for 1 travel lane in each direction, a center turn suicide lane, two protected bike lanes, and a pair of sidewalks all over a major water line, sewer upgrades, numerous driveways, and many signals, on generally boggy ground in outer SE.
Most of the relatively important high-density city streets with curbs and sewers already have sidewalks, usually at around $1 million/mile. There are many similar streets in low-density neighborhoods without sidewalks in all parts of the city, in neighborhoods likely to remain low-density for the foreseeable future, so I’m not sure what value the city would get in adding sidewalks to these streets.
It’s streets that lack sewers and curbs in soils with good drainage (east of the Willamette River) and streets with or without curbs and sewers on the west side in soils of poor drainage that get so expensive, about $3-$7 million/mile for sidewalks on residential streets and $15-$60 million/mile on even minor collector and arterial streets. There’s quite a lot of them, not just in SW and EP, but even in inner SE and NP, plus several others that need rebuilding.
And then there’s the whole issue of crossing streets and multi-lane stroads, safely, with drivers actually obeying the law, staying sober, and roadway designs that encourage slow speeds (rather than the usual 85 mph). If you take public transit anywhere, you must cross a street at some point.
Then there’s bicycling…
*Front-loading the footnote to head off any more hot takes: as I said in the original comment, sidewalks on busy streets are a completely different kettle of fish and should have been built (at least) 40 years ago as part of other infrastructure that came with annexation. There is a direct relationship between safety and sidewalks on such streets; this relationship doesn’t exist for local streets on account of low volumes (ped and car) and (usually) low speeds.
That the only challenges to the line of reasoning in the original comment are variations on “how dare you suggest they don’t need sidewalks*! Are you saying these people don’t deserve to be safe?” only sharpens my point: that the whole discussion is about lazy notions of safety, fairness, symbolism, and who is owed what by whom – not efficacy, not actual safety*, not multimodality, not the environment, not impact to the actual people living in these places. In these challenges, there are no attempts to contend with the ubiquitous and directly relevant scenarios in which completely analogous neighborhoods lack sidewalks* but are considered to be perfectly livable/safe/desirable by people across the race/class/income spectra. Nor to contend with the actual people in these neighborhoods, many of whom are extremely happy to see sidewalks completed on the busiest streets but are satisfied with the way the sidewalk-less street in front of their dwelling is working.
I’m not a fan of throwing large amounts of money at solutions that aren’t going to meaningfully improve system-level outcomes. And if the strategy is to throw money for ineffectual solutions at aggrieved people (while stoking that grievance (“There are sidewalks* in other parts of Portland. Aren’t you mad you don’t have sidewalks!? Don’t you want sidewalks? You should have sidewalks! Look, this person agrees with me! These people want sidewalks!” – not to remove agency from the people in the most peripheral parts of town, but there are a lot of people speaking on their behalf; when I speak with them, sidewalks on local streets aren’t on the menu: “solve crime, I hate those medians on Division, people drive too fast on Glisan, another grocery store would be nice, they’re gonna screw up 82nd too, these ‘improvements’ better not mess up our front yard, I wish people would stop going to the bathroom in our front yard”)) in the hopes they stop being aggrieved, they won’t. At this point resentment (actual and narrativized) of the rest of Portland by SW and east Portland are baked in.
Based on 174 years of Portland city government, if the funds raised for sidewalks can legally be used for things other than transportation such as police, fire, parks, housing, and pet projects, they ultimately will, sooner rather than later.
The Portland “doom loop” is accelerating with this new City Council. They seem to think money grows on trees: ….”Green and Smith have both said they are working on a .new bonding mechanism that could unlock significant funding.” To be clear this means a new TAX on city residents and/or businesses. Bonds aren’t paid off with “good intentions”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp7435GsMK8
Bonds are usually paid on property taxes, assuming this one would be too, to generate the $300M or so quoted in the article (with 5% interest over 20 years, paying back ~$600M), the total additional rate would be somewhere in the 10 cents per $1,000 of assessed value per year (based on about $150B in AV: https://www.oregon.gov/dor/programs/gov-research/Documents/FY%202023-24%20Oregon%20Property%20Tax%20Statistics%20Report%20150-303-405-Revised%20Secured.pdf).
That’s not a ton, I think it’s a worthy investment personally. If a doom loop is caused by a property tax hike of that magnitude, we are already screwed.
Property tax bond measures have to be approved by voters, and I have my doubts voters across the city will pay to raise their property taxes to pay for sidewalks in East Portland and SW Portland, with none of it going to repaving roads, filling potholes, and addressing all the other transportation issues. Maybe…but I’m pretty skeptical.
It’s hard to tell from the council discussions if it would actually be a property tax bond as such, the purpose of the calculation is more to show the relative amount it may cost. I think a sidewalk bond would have a good chance of passing – the Metro Zoo bond passed, and it’s not like everyone uses the zoo
The revenue from property taxes in Oregon are shared with local public school districts in a process known locally as “compression”. There are 9 public school districts that have areas partly in Portland (and none entirely in Portland.) The Multnomah County library system might also be partly funded this way as well as other jurisdictions.
Not quite. The school and general obligation amounts are compressed separately. So school property taxes wouldn’t impact this.
Schools actually end up with significantly more capital bonding capacity than local governments, since almost the full $5-per-$1000 can only be used for capital projects, vs general gov which spends the $10-per-$1000 on almost anything.
This is one reason on my campaign website (robgforpps.com) I suggest PPS should be much more creative, like buying Parks rec centers and pools for rehab (which would be a much bigger benefit than a lot of crap in the upcoming Bond). I am now wondering whether sidewalks could qualify as transportation improvements that would be allowed under a school capital projects bond…
That’s not how compression works. Compression happens on a property by property basis and relates to the 1.5% cap (relative to real market value). Local option levies are compressed first, then everything else. Since taxes are levied relative to assessed value, the total quoted rate can be a fair amount higher than 1.5% (if AV is half of RMV, the “rate” could be 3%, but the person is still actually paying 1.5% relative to the property value).
Anyways, it’s far beyond my back of the napkin math to include compression in a bond calculation, since that varies by properties and their relationship to current assessed value (which in turn is related to assessed value in the mid 1990s). I’m sure the city or county economist would have a better idea of exactly the rate, but I was just trying to get a ballpark
I saw a comment to the effect of “Green thinks the City of Portland doesn’t flex its bond-issuing capacity as much as it should.” One hopes he has gone deeper than a napkin on the issue. 🙂
Be sure to tell that to all the people forced out of their homes because of the high property taxes we have to pay.
And don’t forget all the people forced out of the rentals when their costs go up too make up the hike for the owner.
Are you trying to get Portland to bypass New York in the taxng department?
He’s talking about less than $5/month on a house assessed at $500,000.
The likelihood of someone being displaced by an increase in this magnitude is small, though not zero. And property taxes in general in Portland are extremely low relative to other cities. In Milwaukee, the total rate is around 3% – in Oregon, it’s capped at 1.5% (and is typically around 1% in Portland, since market value has vastly outpaced both inflation and the rate of new taxes since the Great Recession).
I am saying that this bond both not that large in terms of what would be levied, and is worth paying. You can disagree, but to imagine that a bond which will cost far less than most existing line items on property tax bills will cause extreme displacement is just not realistic.
It should be a resident tax, like the art tax.
This IS generational. Plus even the great existing sidewalk network built during the streetcar era has outperformed and exceeded its lifespan…nearing or past 100 years of operations versus the likely expected lifespan of 50 years. Lots of work to do. PS. Perhaps CoP will learn from Seattle’s successful sidewalk and mobility votes?
Sounds like another aspirational project from the City . . . Vision Zero
Shall we call this Vision Sidewalks?
Zero was such an overwhelming success I’m expecting the same for Vision Sidewalks
This city and county keep chasing the shiny objects instead of doing basic maintenance.
Ah yes, the shiny object of “having a sidewalk” doesn’t count as “basic” enough for Middle o the Road Guy. The only thing that qualifies as basic maintenance is filling those dang pot holes!
Could be why he’s Middle of the Road Guy and not Full Width of Right-of-Way Guy.
Given the maintenance backlog, can you justify new build?
So ..3 billion dollars?
I doubt very many people on this blog, and thats not an accusation, people only know their own experience, have tried to get around on foot in East Portland.
Many of the roads have the asphalt abruptly end into an inch or two of air above the gravel, which forms puddles in the rain that extends up to or into the driving lane, you get your feet wet unless you go into the driving lane, well into it.
You’ll easily get splashed if a car comes at that time cause there’s nowhere to go.
The whole dance sucks, its degrading and makes you wonder what you are doing there.
Like say when my car was stolen for the second time in a week and I walked over to the impound lot on 111th and I was literally crying to my mom “I hate this place, I hate the utopian voters who make East Portland pay the price for their utopian criminal justice ideology and don’t give a crap about giving us sidewalks or all the homeless camping all over our public spaces and stealing our crap.”
And i did move. But nothing has changed it seems, apparently sidewalks for East Po are a “waste of money”
Unfortunately I still own real estate in the area and as a 6th generation Oregonian no one is getting me off this blog or these topics, sorry.
If property owners without sidewalks, want sidewalks they can do it. It’s called a LID (Local Improvement District). This is how it has been done in Portland…property owners pay for their sidewalks. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Contact Andrew if you want more information on how to do it.
Andrew AebiLID Administrator & Project Manager, PBOT
andrew.aebi@portlandoregon.gov
503-823-5648
https://www.portland.gov/transportation/pbot-projects/lid-projects
There is always a chorus calling for LIDS. Turning to SW, how do you build a network of pipes via a LID? The channeled stormwater flow created by a curb has to go somewhere, where? Not to the streams. Where would you send it?
The Big Pipe combined stormwater/sewage facilities weren’t built via a LID, all Portlanders pay for the system via water bills. Yet it only benefits inner city neighborhoods.
I would strongly contest that the Big Pipe only benefits inner city neighborhoods. It benefits everyone to not have raw sewage in the Willamette, albeit maybe indirectly for someone living on 122nd and Powell in the Johnson Creek watershed. But even for direct benefits “inner city” is not a very illustrative term – St Johns sees tons of direct benefits by having more human river access and is decidedly not in the inner city.
SW neighborhoods in the Fanno Creek or Tryon Creek watersheds probably see the least direct benefits, but I reckon plenty of people who live in those places have enjoyed waterfront park or river recreation since the Big Pipe. Plus all the non-human benefactors..
Agree! That’s why I gladly support so many programs/projects that don’t, in the most limited sense, directly affect me. But I was replying to a commenter who seemed to resent having to contribute to a project that might benefit other people more than her. So I pointed out that people who live west of the west hills, pay large water/stormwater bills for a system that does not serve their stormwater needs.
And I’ll raise you ten: the whole city benefits when southwest does not degrade its streams and creeks with damaging stormwater runoff.
$100M isn’t going to build many sidewalks if it’s all used on providing stormwater management in the SW hills.
But I agree with both of you that proper stormwater/sewage handling benefits the whole city, not just the places where the pipes run.
Another issue with a LID is who benefits from the taxation? If a small neighborhood with no pass-through traffic, it seems equitable. But what about Shattuck? Should the 30 or so people who live along the ROW be forced to pay for whole-road safety improvements needed because thousands of cars from non-residents are the problem?
I could see drawing a reallllly big LID boundary in a few sections of town – like miles across – but even then, the individual tax burden would be greater than if spread across the whole city. And as Lisa said, you can’t really do a LID for 500 million of sewer and treatment facilities.
But there are many streets without sidewalks where the property owners on them may not want to pay for them, but the sidewalks are needed for people in the larger area to be able to walk to buses, stores, schools, etc.
And a sidewalk network with big gaps in sections where the property owners don’t want to tax themselves to pay for them isn’t a very usable network.
I think you are misjudging the readership of this site, who I’m pretty sure largely agree with you in favor of building sidewalks.
I think Zachery’s suggestion to leverage private dollars is spot on. Yes, there are local improvement districts (LID)s, but very few of them because all the costs are borne by the adjacent property owners and it’s more costly to retrofit than build them from scratch. If the city were to apply a 50% subsidy for the LIDs, then you’d get street improvements and sidewalks where people want them. The city could apply an even higher subsidy in areas of persistent poverty, or other metrics that would support the investment.
Subsidies make sense because they make the buy in easier for residents and would likely lead to larger and more efficient LIDs. Storm water improvements have benefits over a wide area and they do moderate climate impacts. The city could also cap the price for residents so that they know the full cost going in.
There was a discussion before about lien financing which could be made an option. It makes an LID more tolerable in a rising market or for people who are retired. It would also add to the number of people who could afford a project so that LID projects are more likely to succeed.
I know of at least 30 families at the school I work at who could have their kids walk to school if the collector street we are on had a sidewalk and crosswalks (or some kind of path or whatever). The district doesn’t provide bus service because they are close enough to walk in 5-10 minutes.
The status quo is that most of those folks drive their kids to school, crowding our car line and wasting their caregivers’ time. The irony is that increased car traffic makes it even worse to walk for the few who do walk out of necessity.
We do a once-weekly walking school bus with a ton of staff and parent volunteers but that isn’t something we can sustainably do every day long-term while serving every household in our walkshed.
The thing that frustrates me is that the sidewalk that would help us out is in the East Portland in motion plan passed over a decade ago. If city council is going to be putting a bunch of infra on the credit card they should just fund the plans and designs that already exist for pedestrian connectivity. Or maybe the state could give us that $800 million for sidewalks instead of a fucking baseball stadium.
PBOT is so deeply in the hole with deferred maintenance, an inexpensive part of this effort to make Portland more walkable should be to start banning cars (except local access) from neighborhood streets, funneling them to major arteries.
We should do our best to avoid more concrete and more debt.
Just wait, PBOT will form a group to ticket and penalize homeowners for cracks in their sidewalks, kind of like the overbearing Forestry department “protecting” trees with $1000/day penalties. Just think how much money PBOT could bring in and not have to do any maintenance at all!
This is great for both pedestrians and bicycling. Sidewalks enable very small children to experience the joy of biking. Those parents who live on an “incomplete street” (no sidewalk) tend not to let their kids bike in the street, which means mall children have no where to bike except their driveway. I live across the river in Vancouver. I hope my city follows Portland’s lead. My bet is that other satellite cities will.
Sidewalks enable adults to enjoy cycling too — and especially so in areas with shit in-street cycling infrastructure.
I think Roger Geller’s typology is missing a category: Frustrated But Stubborn. I put myself in that one. I don’t want to ride on a sidewalk, or on the shoulder of a freeway, but I have before and likely will again.
You might as well make up your own categories. That’s what Roger did.
Zing! It’s true, he just made them up, got them to be cited in academic papers as if they were a law of nature, then he cites those papers as proof that he was correct.