Wayward words and the path to wisdom

I found a recent correspondence to The Red Electric both troubling and encouraging.

The writer was broadly responding to the post “Four Phases for Hillsdale.”

He referred readers to a posting on his own web site. There he claimed to be familiar with Hillsdale and wrote with an indignant and hollow authority about the place.

Still, I sensed in his voice a note of caring and passion. That was the encouraging part.

But as I got into his critique of Hillsdale, it became apparent that he had little understanding of what’s been happening here for the last 15 years.

In essence, he was shooting from the hip, hoping that at least a few shots would find their mark. Or he may have been announcing his Hillsdale awareness or simply filling space on his blog.

I was tempted to take the writer to task, but then I thought of the times I’ve written with woefully superficial knowledge. At best I offered a "fresh" perspective, however wrong it might have been.

So I commented on his web site without picking apart the errors the writer made. I said nothing of his ignorance about Hillsdale and its recent history as a Metro-designated Town Center. He thought that the term “town center” was some journalistic contrivance. Accordingly, he also had no clue about the purpose of the Metro area’s 13 “town centers” — namely to absorb population growth by up-zoning areas well served by mass-transit. If the writer had looked into the matter, he would have agreed with the goal of making us all less dependent on cars by encouraging us to live more compactly near bus and light rail stops. The town centers fight urban sprawl, combat pollution and save precious farm land. They are the urban planners’ answer to smaller carbon footprints.

The writer also seemed unaware of the foibles surrounding the siting and construction of the Hillsdale Branch Library, which went $3.5 million over budget. County officials wrongly decided to squeeze the new building onto a small site. In the process they demolished the old library, an architectural gem. As attractive as the new building is, it is already too small to meet increasing demand.

The writer also seemed to think that the “open space” many of us would like to see developed in the Sunset Triangle is actually being used for some public purpose. It’s mostly unused backyards invisible to the public.

There’s more, but I’ll stop here. The thrust of my response was to encourage him to get involved. I’m a believer in Daniel Kemmis’ response to civic criticism: Got a problem? Get involved!

I invited the critic to the next Hillsdale Neighborhood Association meeting (7 p.m., Wed. Jan 7 at St. Barnabas Church on Vermont Street) or the next Hillsdale Alliance meeting (7 p.m., Wed, Jan. 14 at RE/MAX, corner of Sunset Boulevard and Capitol Highway).

Through involvement, he’ll discover for himself how he got Hillsdale wrong and where he might redirect his energies.

As I say, he has my sympathies. I’ve gotten things wrong too. Often it has been only after years of involvement that I’ve discovered exactly how wrong I was.

The trick, of course, is to learn from one’s errors and not commit them again. I’ve found the best way to avoid mistakes is through skepticism (including skepticism about oneself) knowledge (which means asking good questions of informed sources) and humility.

Put all that together and on rare occasions you might come up with something that approaches insight — and even wisdom.

Four Phases for Hillsdale

Issue #35 of the Hillsdale News, which I sent to 430 on-line subscribers this morning, reports on the results of three Town Center planning sessions held this fall.

I didn't have room to show all the critical phases of the strategic plan that SERA Architects, the planning consultants, developed for the crucial Sunset Triangle. I thought I'd share most of them with you here.

Phase 1 is above left. The black square in the middle is the Hillsdale Branch Library. The initial phase calls for the extension of Dewitt Park (shown in green) down to Sunset Boulevard and the extension of Dewitt Street to the west/southwest. Mixed-use buildings (brown) would be on either side of the street extension.

Phase 2 (below right) defines a hybrid street/walk going from the mid-block crossing on SW Capitol Highway to meet the new street at the point indicated by the yellow circle. Note that the small yellow areas at the intersections indicate plazas.

Also, note phase 2's reorientation of the buildings to accommodate the intersection in the circle. The building now occupied by Edward Jones and Kuman Learning Center would be removed to open the passage for the new street.

Some folks who attended this fall's meetings questioned the need for this street and worried that it might remove needed parking. The consultants believe that new parking can be provided under some of the new commercial buildings.

The phase also calls for a new northern extension of Dewitt Street to cut through what is now a low-density residential part of the Triangle. As proposed, the new street would be narrow and "green." It would encourage pedestrians and discourage through-traffic. The rendering to the left shows a cross section with swales, and traffic-calming trees that intrude on the right-of-way.

The fully completed extension of Dewitt would link with a street that is already platted for a recently subdivided property on SW 18th Drive. The extension would open the backs of the deep lots facing on 18th Drive and Sunset Boulevard to further subdivision.

I've omitted the rendering for phase 3. It looks at the intersection of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, Capitol Highway, Bertha Court and 18th Drive. Its features have largely been addressed by the recently completed crosswalk at the intersection. The new crosswalk stops all vehicular traffic so that pedestrians can cross safely.

Phase 4 shows a radical reconfiguration of commercial real estate that would affect the Hillsdale Brew Pub, Casa Colima, the Union 76 station and the shops between the liquor store and the Bank of America. Such a change would require more cooperation between commercial property owners than we have seen in the past.

Notably, the gas station vanishes because it is assumed that by the time we reach this phase, we will no longer rely on gas-driven vehicles. We will be walking, taking buses or driving electric cars.

Also, the Hillsdale Shopping Center to the south is depicted in two "staple" shapes, orienting more to Capitol Highway.

How much of this will be accomplished, or even desired, in the next decade or two is impossible to predict. The idea is to proceed phase by phase and to keep talking about where we are headed and where we want to go.

Experience teaches that surprising and innovative new phases change old ones. Indeed, we are entering a phase that was unanticipated when the Town Center strategic planning began earlier this fall. Call it the "Deep Recession" phase; it has put all the phases discussed here on hold.

More blight arrives in the Hillsdale Town Center

Today, walking down to Hillsdale’s commercial center, I noticed that workers were piggy-backing technological bric-a-brac on one of our utility poles again.

We have wires, barrel-sized transformers, defunct wireless cones and now — what?

Cell phone antennae of course. After I took this photo, workers attached a large equipment box the size of a three-drawer filing cabinet to the pole.

Lovely.

Of course, each of the several cell phone companies has to have its very own antenna.

Call it antenna envy.

Our Hillsdale commercial center is what Metro, the Portland-area regional government, has designated a “Town Center.”

Hence “the Hillsdale Town Center.”

The idea is to make the Town Centers pedestrian-friendly so that people walk to shops, schools and buses and leave their polluting cars at home.

Several of us believe that making our Town Center pedestrian-friendly involves making it attractive to walk around in. Actual sidewalks would be nice too.

We have street trees, although I noticed today that the one next to the new antenna-ized utility pole looks seriously stressed.

And some of us have actually had the audacity to propose undergrounding the utilities. No more poles, wires, transformers and, yes, cell phone antennae. The powers that be manage to bury all this stuff downtown, in South Waterfront and in the Lloyd and Pearl districts.

Why not here?

Could it have something to do with politics?

I’ve worked on and off for 15 years on the undergrounding issue. I used to joke that my goal was to see utilities in the Town Center undergrounded before I’m undergrounded.

It’s a joke no longer.

The “City that Works” needs to start working on undergrounding. A decade ago some of us, representing varied interests, including the utilities, suggested that fees should be placed on new technologies like cell phones (they were new back then). If they used the public right-of-way, they ponied up to mitigate the blight. The revenues would pay for undergrounding in Town Centers like Hillsdale.

Vera Katz was mayor at the time we made our report with its funding proposal. She assured us our suggesting would not gather dust on a shelf.

But that is exactly where it is today. While the dust gathers, the antennae and overhead wire blight spread throughout the City. And my own personal undergrounding becomes more real with each passing year.

On a brighter note. Clearly Hillsdale's pigeons are pleased with things the way they are.

Plant a Robo-Tree for Hillsdale undergrounding

The "City That Works" is circulating a survey about where the public wants cell towers placed.

On neighborhood streets? On main thoroughfares? On schools? Churches?

Under rocks (just kidding)?

Or none of the above.

I’d encourage you to take the survey even though some of it poses non-sequitur questions. For instance, if you don’t want cell towers anywhere (which is a choice), why would you offer an opinion about what shape or color the poles should be?

Never mind. Skip to the important comment section at the end.

That’s where I suggested that I wouldn’t mind a humongous cell tower in Hillsdale if the franchise fees paid on it went to pay for undergrounding utilities in the Hillsdale Town Center (see photo below to the left).

Call it "blight mitigation."

Besides, the cell tower designers have come up with some clever (or weird) ways to disguise their handiwork. See photo above. A bizarre note: there is also a palm tree model. Attention Salvador Molly's!

Look at the photo closely. This could be the very tree used as the model for the Oregon license plates. Can you find the antenna in the "branches" of this faux Doug fir?

Doug fir. Palm. Dogwood. Baobab. Whatever. I’d accept any model robo-tree/cell tower to get rid of our poles, wires and transformers in Hillsdale.

How about you?

Take the survey.

Metro to hear Hillsdale Nov. 29

The elected Metro Regional Council will meet in Hillsdale on Nov. 29 at 5 p.m. to listen community plans for making Hillsdale a "model town center." The meeting's location has yet to be determined, but Wilson High School is the expected choice.

Metro Councilor Robert Liberty, who represents our district, initiated the Council's meeting here after he broached the idea to the Hillsdale Alliance in early July.

Moreover, City Commissioner Erik Sten has asked to speak at the November session. Sten, who took a Hillsdale walking tour Thursday, wants to discuss his efforts to help families continue to live in neighborhoods they may no longer be able to afford. The city assistance would help reverse the flow of families to the suburbs and their crowded schools and would help keep Portland's schools open.

The threatened closure of Rieke Elementary School last year resulted, in part, from a shift in enrollments both to the suburbs and to private or religious schools.

Developing Portland town centers, like Hillsdale, will also boost school enrollment by providing more close-in housing located near the schools as well as businesses and transit.

Community leaders here argue that Hillsdale has all those desired elements, as well as an engaged citizenry. That makes Hillsdale an excellent candidate to be a "model" for what town centers can be.

The question to be decided between now and Nov. 29 is what needs to be done to maximize Hillsdale's potential?

And Liberty and his Metro colleagues are asking us how they can help.

Hillsdale's job is to tell them.

Officials to get Hillsdale "Walk-Arounds"

Neighborhood leaders hope that up-c0ming Hillsdale "walk-arounds" with city officials will result to fewer run-arounds in dealing with them later.

Hillsdale Neighborhood Association (HNA) President Don Baack shared plans to lead officials on walking tours of Hillsdale with the HNA Board on Wednesday, June 6.

On Friday, June 22, Baack and other community leaders will lead City Commissioner Erik Sten and Metro Councilor Robert Liberty on individual tours of the Town Center.

Community members are invited to join in the walks, which take approximately 2 hours.

The Sten stroll will start at Baker and Spice at 9:30 a.m. Liberty walkers will convene at 2 p.m. at the big oak tree near the Capitol Highway entrance to Wilson High School.

City Commissioners Dan Salzman, Randy Leonard and Sam Adams have walked with Baack and others in the past. Baack believes that the recent funding of a fully signaled cross-walk at Capitol Highway and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway resulted from walks with the commissioners.

This Monday, June 11, a 7:30 a.m. walk with Brian Winchester, the new facilities manager of the Public School District, is scheduled to start from Starbuck's.

Baack said that he and others want to talk with Winchester about installing bike racks near the entrance of the Farmers Market and about parking improvements next to the Wilson Stadium. Parked cars now block pedestrians from using the sidewalk there. Another item on the walking agenda is a Rieke site inspection with an eye to a civic plaza and the placement of temporary buildings

Baack, renowned as a pedestrian advocate, said the walks are intended to familiarize officials with Town Center issues such as the development of a pedestrian loop, the civic plaza, undergrounding utilities and traffic calming.

Officials who have walked around Hillsdale have a much better idea of what is needed here, he said.

"If a picture is worth 1000 words," said Baack, "walk-arounds are worth 2000."

“Deep Economy” meets “A Pattern Language” at the corner grocery

Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy” stresses the urgency of building small communities, nurturing local economies and living simply. The driving force is global warming and the planet’s limited resources.

Reading his book, I’m struck again by how much, and how quickly, we in Hillsdale need to change.

(By the way, “Deep Economy” is the choice this month for our Hillsdale Book Club. We discuss it this Thursday, June 7, at 7 p.m. at the Multnomah Arts Center. You are welcome to join us, whether you have read the book or not.)

As I see it, the first needed change is to connect with our neighbors, taking back time that is now “screen time” spent with mediated, fictitious people and places.

To bring about such a change requires those of us trying to build communities to make community life and involvement manageable, attractive and, yes, more important than screen fantasy.

In Hillsdale, we have a prototype for what I’m talking about in the Farmers’ Market. A sheltered civic plaza (with solar panel shelter) would build on the community center concept.

We also made great progress when, in the mid-'90s, we reconfigured neighborhood boundaries, creating a Hillsdale neighborhood with a Town Center at its a center. Another step forward came with the resolution of boundary overlaps with the Southwest Hills Residential League last year.

But Hillsdale, with 6,000 people, is too big to be a true neighborhood. In recent years, considerable research has shown that much smaller numbers are needed for a community to be cohesive and effective.

One source for this observation is the remarkable book “A Pattern Language.”

The book’s authors (Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel) recommend that neighborhoods should not be “more than 300 yards across, with no more than 400 or 500 inhabitants.” They go on to say that cities should “give the neighborhoods some degree of autonomy as far as taxes and land controls are concerned.”

Actually, cities should give autonomy to what we now call Town Center neighborhoods—Hillsdale being one of them. They should be rightly called "Town Center communities" consisting of smaller neighborhoods.

I’ll return to the Town Center Community concept at a future time.

For now, let’s focus on one aspect of those small neighborhoods. They are really defined by how far we can comfortably walk with a small push-cart full of groceries. We would buy those groceries from a great American institution that was killed off by the automobile and the supermarket: namely, the locally-owned corner grocery store.

More than small businesses, corner groceries were meeting places where neighbors would linger and get caught up on local news. They were, and once again would be, seven-day-a-week, small, indoor, neighborhood farmers markets. The owners, far from being some giant corporations in Delaware or New York, would be the family living upstairs.

A community like Hillsdale would have 10 to 12 neighborhoods, and 10 to 12 corner grocery/local gathering places.

And yes, not surprisingly, the authors of “A Pattern Language” had something to say about corner groceries. McKibben doesn’t mention them per se, but you can feel their presence in much of what he writes.

Of course to revive corner groceries means major revisions to Portland's zoning codes. And that means dealing with City Hall, not an institution prone to empowering neighborhoods, let alone a new civic entity called “a Town Center Community.”

But perhaps the Herculean challenges of these times will shake up the city's planners and powers that be.

We’ll see.