City Life: Why Portland Works and How Dallas Could

THE LATEST ADDITION TO MY CUBICLE wall is a map of downtown Portland, Oregon. I picked it up on a visit about a week ago. Already, the map of intersecting streets, a winding river, and buildings labeled in fine print is starting to tear at the seams.

“Is that Dallas?” more than one co-worker has asked me, pointing at it.

“It could be,” I’ve said.

From a distance, the map really does look as though it might be of downtown Dallas. A river, the Willamette, runs along one side of the business core; freeways line the other. On paper, the Willamette looks just like the Trinity. Except it’s an actual river, with actual water. And the freeways are just like ours, except not as abundant.

But even upon closer inspection, someone might mistake the map in my cubicle for one of Dallas. Light-rail tracks run through Portland’s downtown like an artery, and a trolley line closes a loop. A museum, performance hall, and theater are within three blocks of each other. A convention center and sports arena are on the other side of the river, removed from the congestion of downtown. A cross-section on the map even reveals a building topped by something that looks suspiciously like our red Pegasus (though Portland’s animal, atop the White Stag Building, turns out to be a deer).

Dallas has been planning—and planning to plan—its downtown for years, but still it languishes. And, obviously, what worked for Portland won’t automatically work for Dallas. (Portland’s building regulations for unobstructed views of scenic beauty would be laughable in Dallas, where the most scenic views between buildings are of other buildings.) But even though Portland can’t serve as a strict roadmap for downtown revival, it can point us in the right direction.

Portland adopted its Downtown Plan in 1972 and has been winning urban planning awards ever since. The city has come to be known as the poster child for the New Urbanism, and Dallas wouldn’t be the first metropolis to crib from it. “Good ideas are borrowed, great ideas stolen,” says Nancy Hormann, the relatively new executive director of Dallas’ Downtown Partnership. Here are some of the ideas we could steal from the architects, planners, developers—and even the voters—of Portland, the City of Roses.

Lesson One: Dallas Needs a Living Room

Unfortunately, the similarities between Portland and Dallas are harder to find once your plane lands. They become even more abstract when you ride the MAX, Portland’s light-rail train from the airport to Pioneer Courthouse Square, a public space at the heart of the city. The trip costs just $1.55,
lasts about half an hour, and once you get there, you realize Dallas has nothing like it.

Architect Will Martin described the Pioneer Courthouse Square he built out of an old two-level parking lot as “a downtown living room for the people of Portland.” Nearly 20 years after its completion, the square is still crowded with businesspeople, tourists, street kids, and shoppers.

And why wouldn’t it be? It’s in the heart of downtown and has its very own Starbucks. Nordstrom is across the street and other retail surrounds it. Plus, Pioneer Square sits at the cross-section of the city’s transit mall, where the bus lines and light-rail trains intersect. A year-round calendar of events helps draw more than 2 million people to the square every year. But even when nothing’s going on, something’s happening, from older people playing chess to kids kicking around a hacky-sack.

Sure, Dallas already has places for people to congregate, with Pegasus Plaza as the most recent and centrally located and the upcoming Nasher Sculpture Center as the most promising. But the Nasher is going to charge admission, and even if Pegasus Plaza were crowded with businessfolk on a lunch hour, visitors on a rest stop, and kids on summer break, it would look nothing like Pioneer Square. The reason Pioneer Square works and Pegasus Plaza doesn’t is because Pegasus doesn’t do enough to attract people and doesn’t do anything to encourage them to stay. There are rumors of development around Pegasus Plaza, but as of now it’s not like a living room at all—more like a foyer (a foyer, truthfully, that’s often occupied by people we wouldn’t want in our house).

In Dallas, developer Ken Hughes has a park in mind that he doesn’t know where to put. The county owns land on the west side of downtown that it plans to convert. A pretty place might lure visitors, but Pioneer Square proves it takes more than that to keep them around.

Lesson Two: Dallas Also Needs a Front Yard

Officials in Portland are fans of the metaphor. Just as Pioneer Square has been dubbed the city’s living room, Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park is often referred to as Portland’s “front yard.”

A highway was once sandwiched between downtown Portland and the Willamette, separating the city physically and psychologically from the river. As part of the Downtown Plan to revitalize the west side, the four-lane expressway was demolished to make room for Waterfront Park, which opened in 1974.

Now, the mile-long park—73 acres of greenery, jogging paths, and fountains—draws joggers and sightseers. More important, the increased foot traffic attracted developers, who transformed the south end of the waterfront into RiverPlace, a collection of residential, retail, and office spaces that now includes 480 multifamily housing units, 40,000 square feet of office space, and 26,000 square feet of retail—all of it almost completely leased.

As you read this, Dallas officials are still hiring consultants, scratching heads, and flipping coins about what to do with the Trinity Highway/Parkway. Portland built an expressway years ago, only to tear it down. Let’s hope that Dallas builds a highway that decades later it won’t come to regret.

Lesson Three: Get the Portland Development Commission to Adopt Us

The RiverPlace accomplishment is but one notch on the Portland Development Commission’s belt of revitalization. In 1958, Portland voters created the PDC, the city’s urban renewal, housing, and economic development agency. The mayor appoints five commissioners of volunteer citizens that the city council ratifies, the executive director reports to the board, and then everyone who works there reports to the executive director.

The structure of the organization is not unique. Nor are the methods of funding (mostly tax-increment financing but also funds from private and commercial investors). What makes the PDC so worthy of study are its results. In addition to the thousands of housing units and thousands of jobs that the PDC has created or retained, the real market value per acre has tripled in each of the urban renewal districts the PDC has identified. Crime rates have been reduced anywhere from 25 to 68 percent in the urban renewal areas. In short, the PDC has never met a blighted area it didn’t like.

Bruce Allen, a senior development manager, has worked for the PDC for 16 years. He admits that not all Portlanders are fans of the agency. Even though PDC concentrates just as much on providing affordable housing as it does on urban renewal, critics cry gentrification. “But to me, gentrification is a good thing,” Allen says.

The Downtown Partnership is the closest thing Dallas has to the PDC. Under interim director Susan Mead, the organization got property owners on board and in full agreement to hire Madison Retail Group to design a Main Street shopping area. The plan is to create about 250,000 square feet of street-level retail space. Now Nancy Hormann takes over with experience, enthusiasm, and momentum. What she lacks is the legal clout of PDC.

Lesson Four: Parking Is a Necessary Evil

The workforce in Portland is not as large as it is in Dallas, and there are a fair amount of commuters who ride to work on a bus, train, or bicycle. Still, Portland had a problem with parking lots. Just as in Dallas, there were too many lots but never any where you needed them. And the lots that were centrally located were unsightly.

The Portland Business Alliance, a merger between the Association for Portland Progress and the Portland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, unified several garages and branded them under the name SmartPark. They also organized about 200 downtown retailers with a validation program: each purchase of at least $25 gets you two hours of free parking.

The surface parking lots in Dallas are just as unseemly and problematic. Thankfully, the Downtown Partnership is working on solutions, such as coordinating valet stations, where you can leave your car at a valet stand on one end of Main Street, eat and shop and spend money, then pick it up at the other end. New buildings are in the planning stages that have retail on the ground floor, parking above it, and residential units, too.

Lesson Five: Public Art Doesn’t Have to be Ugly

Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council monitors the city’s Percent for Art Program, which encourages art that’s publicly visible (i.e., not tucked away in a lobby) as part of new building projects. Dallas has a similar program, but for whatever reason Portland’s art is bold, eye-catching, and good. Dallas’ public art is bland, bad, or made to resemble livestock.

Lesson Six: Dallas Can Never Be Portland

Portland has the Willamette River running through it, Mount Hood standing nearby, and about 100 other things that make the city unique. Even the things that aren’t unique are hard, if not impossible, for Dallas to emulate. For instance, the city is so pedestrian-friendly, in large part, because the original plat is half the scale of other cities. Blocks are only 200 feet by 200 feet, making active corners and open spaces abundant.

Portland’s Design Review Commission, appointed by the mayor, approves all building projects. “You can’t require good design, but you can prevent bad design,” Allen says. There was a period in Dallas (read: the ’70s), when aesthetic voices were too quiet.

Portland designated an Urban Growth Boundary in the ’70s, restricting development far away from downtown and reigning in urban sprawl. For Dallas, that toothpaste is already out of the tube.

Public transportation works in Portland so well because the citizenry uses it, and the city is renown for being so accommodating to bicycles because people there ride them so much. People in Dallas might ride their bikes around White Rock Lake on a Saturday; riding them to work is a different proposition altogether.

Finally, Dallas in the summer is hot, very hot. As Mark Twain once said, “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” The same could be said of downtown Dallas.

Photo Courtesy of Portland Oregon Visitor’s Association