City & Region

PDX Index: June-uary

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 07:31:00 -0700

Portland's New Alternative Scouts

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:38:00 -0700

Cascadia Scout Jackson Jewett at the Tillamook Forest Center

Ethan Jewett and Travis Wittwer launched the 55th Cascadia Scouts with a wink. The “55” comes from Wes Anderson’s affectionately kitschy portrayal of retro camp life, Moonrise Kingdom. The two local scoutmasters cobbled together uniforms: matching brimmed hats; army-green shirts; worn boots; and blue, green, and white neckerchiefs (à la the unofficial Cascadia flag).

But whimsy aside, while the century-old Boy Scouts of America pledge to “be prepared,” the upstart 55th may be better suited to the future. The troop—open to boys, girls, men, and women—aims to become part of a growing “alternative” scouting scene. Over the past few years, the BSA has outraged outsiders and alienated supporters by excluding gay participants. (The organization recently proposed admitting gay scouts, but not leaders.) In a city where no social problem is too big for a homespun solution, Jewett and Wittwer hope to make scouting multiple choice, for their kids and others.

“It’s something a lot of people in this community are really looking for,” says Jewett. “We just happened to be the first to take action.” A seven-year veteran of scouting, Jewett argues that aside from discriminatory policies, the BSA has drifted from its roots. Instead of building campfires and navigating trails, many of its scouts are glued to computer screens, earning their “programming” or “game design” badges. The Cascadian rebels are affiliated with the Baden-Powell Service Association, a US branch of a British group that weds a still-woodsy approach with social tolerance.

“It’s all about getting back to the roots of scouting,” Jewett says. “Being indoors is a distant second to exploring the outdoors.” The new troop intends to create age-appropriate expeditions, from day hikes in local parks to exploring the Pacific Crest Trail.

Image: Nomad

So far, the 55th has attracted notice from one of Portland’s more famous outdoors wanderers. “A lot of people whose sons are Boy Scouts disagree with the discrimination,” says Cheryl Strayed, the author whose hit memoir Wild recounts her own misadventures on the Pacific Crest Trail. “They simply decide to overlook it, but I can’t.” She says she hopes to involve her two kids in the new outfit.

The 55th isn’t looking to butt heads with Portland’s mainstream scouts. Jewett says he’d like his troop to collaborate with the BSA, especially when it comes to leader training and adult background checks. In the aftermath of high-profile sex-abuse cases, Jewett says the BSA now has top-notch safety training for prospective troop leaders.

By spring, 90 registered Cascadian scouts were active in four age-group sections. At one meeting, parents eagerly pitched Portlandian fundraising ideas (“A bike wash!” “Cupcake sale!” “Can we sell beer?”) for uniforms and gear. The showing left Jewett confident that the 55th is blazing the right trail.

“Portland is ready,” he says, “to make the core values of inclusive scouting a priority.”

Watershed Politics

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:29:00 -0700

Lawrence Halprin’s drawing of opening day at forecourt (now Keller) fountain in June 1970

The distance between Keller Fountain and the farms and vineyards of the Willamette Valley can be measured in miles, or the inches between the late landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s ears.

As Oregon celebrates the 40th anniversary this month of the legislation that protected much of the valley’s agricultural lands, it’s worth a pause to ponder the ways in which one designer’s creative vision helped shape both a city and a region.

Between 1963 and 1970, Halprin and his San Francisco firm completed a series of fountain plazas in Portland’s South Auditorium District loosely based on the idea of a watershed, starting with an artesian spring and ending in a waterfall. Called Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt (later renamed Keller) Fountain, they instantly became people magnets, earning photo spreads and critical plaudits across the globe. The final plaza, Keller, with its 13,000-gallon-a-minute cascade, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

Two years after Keller Fountain opened, Gov. Tom McCall hired Halprin to help sell a vision for another watershed: the Willamette Valley. Halprin’s study, The Willamette Valley: Choices for the Future, would play a pivotal role in McCall’s efforts to pass Senate Bill 100, the law that laid the groundwork for urban growth boundaries. Without the bill or the study, the valley today would almost certainly have fewer farms and vineyards, and more sprawl. But for Halprin, a watershed was a watershed: design metaphor or breadbasket, both deserved to be nice places for people, and for that, you needed to maximize interaction.

Until Halprin’s plazas, Portland public spaces were passive, tree-lined parks. The new fountains offered a hybrid of the town square and the swimming hole. As Halprin wrote in his notebooks, they were designed to “say come in not stay off.” Within months of the opening of the first one—Lovejoy—Portland’s citizens decided they wanted more, holding protests and votes that eventually led to transforming a riverside highway into Tom McCall Waterfront Park and a parking lot into Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The study of the Willamette Valley also invited citizens to “come in”—to the political process. It offered two scenarios for a million more people living in the valley: one developed on the 5- and 10-acre lots much of the valley was zoned for; the other with tight urban growth boundaries. In dozens of town hall meetings Halprin’s team led across the valley, they asked the citizens to get involved and imagine what kind of future they wanted.

With their high, poured-concrete precipices and plunging waters, no city would build these fountains today: liability lawyers and ADA regulations wouldn’t let them. Similarly rowdy political risks would scarcely allow a 21st-century governor to commission a designer like Halprin or a study like Choices for the Future. Even at the time, skeptics in McCall’s administration likened Halprin’s simple, hand-drawn scenarios to the cartoonish world of the Beatles’ still-fresh movie Yellow Submarine: strip malls propagated by “Blue Meanies” in contrast to the “euphoric utopia” of controlled growth.

Yet, four decades later, the Willamette Valley looks a lot more like euphoria than the land of the Blue Meanies. And the first of the statewide planning goals adopted under Senate Bill 100? Citizen involvement. Or as Halprin might have said, “Come on in.”

For our in-depth exploration of urban growth and the Willamette Valley, see our feature article Pushing Boundaries.

Pushing Boundaries

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Mike and Debbie Duyck own a 50-acre farm that straddles a northbound road just a short walk from the city limits of Cornelius at the base of the Coast Range. On one side, they graze and milk 40 dairy cows. On the other, they grow vegetables for a summer roadside stand. But in 2011, the strip of asphalt dividing their land turned into a battle line. The City of Cornelius designated one side of Cornelius-Schefflin Road as “urban reserves”—land for future development.

Mike Duyck says he’d like to continue farming both sides of the land his parents bought in 1957. “How do you farm on one half and have houses and industry on the other half?” he asks. When land moves from “rural” to “urban” on planners’ maps, the clock toward eventual development starts ticking.

The fate of the Duycks’ farm and 28,615 other acres of new urban reserves designated across the region has bounced between city and county governments, Metro, and the state for over two years. Oregon’s Court of Appeals is poised to decide the matter in the coming weeks—ironically in near perfect timing with the 40th birthday of Oregon’s unique process of drawing firm lines between its farmland and cities.

In May 1973, the Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 100, the landmark law mandating that every city in the state begin to manage its growth. Before the bill, wide swaths of the state’s rural lands were zoned for 5- and 10-acre lots, prime for the kind of estate homes and farmettes that colonized rural land across the country. After the bill, top-grade farmland earned protective zoning and strict caps on property taxes.

Image: Courtesy Bruce Forster

At SW Scholls Ferry Road and 175th Avenue, the city of Tigard ends in a messy edge, but an edge nevertheless: the metro region’s urban growth boundary.

Without SB100, much of Sauvie Island would have almost certainly been carved into home sites. Early Oregon vintners experimenting with pinot noir grapes would have had to compete with homebuilders for the sunny, south-facing view sites of the Dundee Hills. The quick farm-to-table commute for fresh vegetables and proteins, which made Portland’s ingredient-obsessed food scene the talk of the country, would almost certainly be longer and less direct.

Yet as the state’s professional planners prepare to stage a gala celebration of SB100’s 40th on the very day it was signed—May 29—some of them argue the system the law created now needs dramatic change.

“Senate Bill 100 was one of greatest planning experiments that we’ve had in this country in the last 40 years,” says Nohad Toulan, founder of Portland State University’s esteemed College of Urban and Public Affairs. “But is the current system sufficient? My answer is no.”

Since the first pioneers wandered down the Oregon Trail, incoming Oregonians have chosen the Willamette Valley over other parts of the state. Toulan’s research shows the pattern of settlement has barely changed throughout the state’s history. In 1870, 90,000 people populated the state, 81 percent of them in the fertile 15-county region bracketing present-day I-5. In 2010, 3.8 million people lived in Oregon, 3.1 million of them in those counties—82 percent. Project the same proportions ahead at Oregon’s average growth rate of 1 percent each year, and by 2040 the 15 counties will have 4.5 million residents. By 2100, they will have 10 million.

Gov. Tom McCall’s “Project Foresight” laid out two visions for a million new residents: one without planning and one with it.

And if doomsday scenarios about global warming come true, Toulan warns, “We will be the lucky ones here. We still have water—maybe not what we’ll need, but far more than our Southwestern neighbors.”

“So what is going to happen in the next 90 years?” he asks. “Nothing will be different, if we continue doing what we’re doing.”

Toulan believes that as effective as SB100 has been in reining in sprawl, the system the legislation spawned is too steeped in the state’s agrarian past to deal with the dramatically more urban world to come. He and Arnold Cogan—who, as the state’s planning coordinator in the ’60s and ’70s, played midwife to SB100’s birth—are arguably the two most respected planners in the state, and they’re making an impassioned plea for what they believe is now needed: a state-level strategic plan to deal with the big changes ahead.

Indeed, it was this kind of wide-angle, long-range view of the valley’s future that produced SB100 in the first place.

Stories abound of Gov. Tom McCall’s quippy salesmanship of SB100. (“We need growth,” he warned, “but not the chain-letter type that leaves future generations with an empty mailbox.”) History buffs and political insiders still marvel at the brilliant farmer and Republican state senator Hector Macpherson’s acumen in shaping the actual legislation, and liberal urban senator Ted Hallock’s hammering together of the deals that got the bill passed.

But the research and outreach campaign McCall conducted for two years before has largely faded from memory for all but those who were there. Known as Project Foresight, it involved a deep analysis of the Willamette Valley’s future: population trends, projected traffic and air pollution levels, energy demands, and recreation needs. Prefaced with a personal letter from McCall, Project Foresight began with a poll to 50,000 residents of the Willamette Valley asking them simple, direct questions on what about the valley they valued and what their state government should prioritize.

The research and polling effort culminated in a study by the San Francisco landscape architecture firm Lawrence Halprin and Associates called The Willamette Valley: Choices for the Future. It plainly laid out two scenarios for the coming 30 years, one with the expected 1 million newcomers sprawling across the valley in those 1-, 5-, and 10-acre lots, the other with new development compactly focused in existing cities and new town centers arrayed along commuter rail lines. The document, 41 years old now, marks the first appearance of “transit-oriented” development—a guiding ethos ever since—in an Oregon plan. With its colored-pencil, bird’s-eye view of the valley for a cover, typewriter text, and hand renderings of sprawl and more compact growth, the 112-page, 11-by-14-inch book recalls simpler, more idealistic times. McCall’s lead staffer on the project, Bob Logan, even unveiled the book at a meeting of 600 elected officials, businesspeople, farmers, and activists to the Cat Stevens song “Where Do the Children Play?” And Halprin’s team conducted more than 275 town-hall-style meetings across the valley with a 200-image slide presentation.

“Thousands of people came to those meetings and chewed on the idea of two paths to growth,” Cogan says. “It really built a groundswell of public support for a stronger approach to growth controls.”

By some measures, it worked: in the pre-SB100 world of 1969, the seven counties at the heart of the Willamette Valley boasted 1,539,978 acres of cultivated crops. In 2007, the latest figures available, the valley had 1,240,571 acres in production—a loss of just 20 percent. Clark County, just across the Columbia River, by contrast, lost 37 percent of its farmland over the same period.

But bringing land into the urban growth boundaries has been slow, litigious, and, often, economically ineffective. The largest expansion of Metro’s boundary—13,000 acres in Damascus envisioned as an eventual compact satellite city with a town center and nearby factory district surrounded by housing—spawned many political battles, but virtually no new development. Oregon City’s last expansion remains fallow because voters turned down annexation of the land. Despite vying for hundreds more acres in this round of expansions, Cornelius has yet to develop—or even annex—the new land it won the last time the boundaries changed. Meantime, land for new industrial development easily connected to existing roads and utilities remains limited.

SB100 grew from an era in which agriculture and timber dominated Oregon’s economy. Logically, protection of productive land was the highest priority, observes Duncan Wyse, president of the Oregon Business Council. Two things have changed: the economy is mostly urban, and protecting natural habitat is now a critical priority.

Bringing land into the urban growth boundaries has been slow, litigious, and, often, economically ineffective.

“Back then we gave very little thought to how urban areas work economically or how critical habitats function,” Wyse says. “With all the benefits of the present system, we have basically one tool: land regulation. There are other tools—land swaps, conservation easements, infrastructure placement—that have been used to great effect elsewhere over the last 30 years that we don’t think much about.”

Poised on the line of uncertainty between both the agriculture and the cities the Willamette Valley needs for the future, farmer Mike Duyck puts his dilemma succinctly: “You can’t do any long-range planning.” So, too, the state. At a recent international conference, Toulan and Cogan presented a paper titled “The Next 40 Years,” calling for Oregon to create a new state planning office and a “Commission for the 22nd Century.” Within four years, they argued, the state should develop a strategic plan for the next 40 years and beyond, coordinating policies for everything from transportation and environmental quality to investment and seismic safety. With shades of McCall’s vision and Halprin’s penetrating study, the effort would focus on “the general health and well-being of the entire state.”

Without a wider, deeper look at the future, says Toulan, “we will go from one crisis to another because of the disconnect between what we are trying to do and the economic realities.

“When we talk about planning, we need to get out of our obsession that it is only about land use. We need to integrate economic and social concerns and demographic analysis and look to the future and ask, what do we want?”

PDX Index: St. Patrick's Day

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:40:00 -0800

Image: Michael Novak

Slide Show: PDX Index | St. Patrick's Day

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:39:00 -0800

A by-the-numbers guide to an annual tradition

Slide Show: What I Learned

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:06:00 -0800

Image: Leah Nash

School Stats Kids (Actually) Care About

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:01:00 -0800

Click to enlarge image

Image: Michael Novak

A Book-Infused Beer—And More!

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:44:00 -0800

Image: Michael Novak

News that Powell’s Books and Rogue Ales are collaborating on a beer infused with actual pages of Moby-Dick raises the troubling prospect of 50 Shades of Grey–flavored absinthe.

Image: Michael Novak

Twilight starlet Kristen Stewart has done her part for Portland’s global branding campaign by sporting A MARY’S CLUB HOODIE here and there, to the apparent astonishment of British tabloids.

Image: Michael Novak

Trail Blazers forward Jared Jeffries’s GO-TO KARAOKE SONGS (from his reportedly avid visits to local karaoke bars) include “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Journey), “The Dance” (Garth Brooks), and “Regulate” (Warren G., featuring Nate Dogg).

Image: Michael Novak

A recent incident in which a man with a sword, a shield, and a wolf-hybrid dog confronted firefighters suggests that Portland first responders may need to consult Game of Thrones as a training manual.

Image: Thomas Cobb

The great citywide baby elephant custody crisis of 2012 inspired one of our designers to craft this banner for Portland’s pachyderm partisans, based on Texas’s historical “Gonzales flag.”

Our Schools Guide 2013

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:29:00 -0800

Welcome to our annual schools guide—a comprehensive listing of 596 public and private schools in Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington, and Clark Counties.

To help you understand the best educational options for your kids, we’ve gathered dozens of points of information, from demographics to dropout rates. We’re offering a laser focus on achievement data, showing how well students are doing on standardized tests in math, reading, writing, and science.

Why? Because this information is increasingly becoming crucial to how schools will be evaluated in the future. Over the past two years, in fact, the Oregon Department of Education has significantly toughened reading, math, and sciences standards in grades 3 through 8 to align them with expectations of high schools, and to make sure even younger students won’t hit snags on the way to graduation.

“We want to ensure that we have a streamlined process for getting accurate information on how prepared students are—and to avoid any surprises,” says Crystal Greene of the ODE. “We don’t want them to get to high school, and go, ‘Wow, I’ve always done well in school before, but now I don’t know if I’m going to graduate.’”

But an even greater paradigm shift is yet to come: in 2014, Oregon will begin implementing a national set of achievement markers called the Common Core State Standards that will allow us to directly compare our schools with those in 44 other states (including neighboring Washington). Though at times controversial, proponents believe the new standards will not only make the reams of state achievement data more useful, but also help Oregon’s students become more competitive in a national job market.

Download the expanded data below to see how your child’s school is doing.

PDF Oregon Public Schools Data

PDF Washington Public Schools Data

PDF Oregon/Washington Private Schools Data