This lot, at the corner of MLK and Hudson Streets in Columbia City, sits slightly more than two blocks away from the nearest light rail station.
As you might expect for a piece of property so close to rail, zoning on this lot allows residential buildings as high as four stories.
Tall residential zoning and proximity to transit are the ideal recipe for transit-oriented development—a type of mixed-use development whose defining characteristics include things like dense housing, emphasis on pedestrian and transit access over automobile mobility, and a diverse mix of land uses and activities.
Here’s an example, from Portland’s Pearl District:
Unfortunately, potential doesn’t always translate into results, especially when the path of least resistance leads to doing the same old thing you’ve always done. So, instead of a dense, mixed-use development, the developer has proposed a two-story building with three spacious condos, four retail spaces—and 14 brand-new parking spots. That’s about as far away from transit-oriented development as you can get without putting in an auto-repair shop (or, for that matter, a drive-thru Starbucks).
How was this allowed to happen? According to Bryan Stevens, spokesman for the city’s Department of Planning and Development, the lot is a few blocks outside the city’s official station-area overlay area, which “general[ly] extends about ¼ mile beyond the station.” Inside that area, new development must be dense, pedestrian-oriented, and include no big surface parking lots or other street-killing design elements. Outside it, everything more or less goes—including, apparently, a three-unit condo building with four-and-a-half cars’ worth of parking for every resident.
To reiterate: This building, with its ample parking and low density, will be two blocks from a light rail station.
Is it the worst thing in the world? No. But it is a major missed opportunity that speaks to our reluctance, as a city, to change our way of thinking about development. As long as the single-family house is sacrosanct (in city hearings about the development, single-family neighbors actually argued that it was too dense), developments like these will keep getting built in places, like MLK and Hudson, where they really don’t make any sense at all.
There is an alternative—or there was. Last year’s transit-oriented communities bill would have encouraged denser development within a half-mile of light rail stations—a radius that would have comfortably encompassed this development. That bill, however, died under pressure from neighborhood activists who complained that it would bring too many new residents too close to single-family neighborhoods.
Neighbors of the project (full disclosure: I’m one of them) could have gotten a new pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use building that actually fit in the context of this changing, densifying area. (The housing could have also been less expensive, given that each parking space adds around $25,000 to the cost of a unit.) Instead, it’ll be a low-density, car-oriented waste of space—a nice place to live, maybe, but hardly an asset to the neighborhood.
