Fairview Hills Revives as Single Detached Housing Subdivision

With Fairview on the mind, in research a new project emerged for the last parcel. Last month a revived project there initiated a file with the City.

2004 concept plan and 2024 proposed plan

The New Project is just Houses

The new project is a ways away yet, and it retains the same ownership, Simpson Hills LLC and the name Fairview Hills. It is also associated with Holt Homes, a large home-builder with sites in Washington and Oregon.

It's for 552 single detached houses over about 102 acres, with a street pattern that mostly goes downhill rather than across the hill. The green space roughly corresponds to the greenspace in the 2004 concept (see image at top). The zoning is "Fairview Mixed Use," with nearly all of it in a "mixed intensity" (aka "medium intensity") overlay.

The mixed-intensity area comprises primarily residential uses, along with a mix of small-scale neighborhood commercial, employment, and public services uses. Buildings will be a mix of one-story to three-story detached, attached, or stacked housing types sited on smaller individually-owned lots with private yards and street and/or alley access, or larger lots under multiple or separate ownership with shared street and/or alley access. Townhouse development is appropriate at the higher density range.

Simpson Hills 2012 Refinement Plan (detail)

At Lindburg Road the lower half of an earlier concept from 2012 (itself a modification of the 2004 concept plan) had more apartments and townhomes, and more of a parking lot than street system. It also had a little commercial cluster. It's density was a little over 13 homes per acre.

Proposed street, alley, and path system
Green runs downhill, blue dashed across the hill

This new Fairview Hills deletes all that and reverts to more conventional patterning with streets and single lots — though there are several alleys also for garage access. Interestingly, not all blocks have an alley.

It also looks like there will be fewer view lots on this plan and a lower density of about 5.5 homes per acre, including the parky areas (a calculation that excludes them will be higher, obviously). With only single detached homes, there are fewer homes than there would be with more middle housing forms or actual mixed uses. Which again, the "medium intensity" overlay ostensibly encourages.

Nearly everything is "low intensity" now
Original overlay concept, comments added

Battle Creek Road: Sidewalkfication and Embiggening

The proposal also includes a half-street improvement for Battle Creek Road. This is assigned a slightly serpentine multi-use path instead of bike lanes and a sidewalk. This might work for slower-speed neighborhood recreation or for schoolkids, but for commuting or errands along Battle Creek, for through-travel and external trips, it's not so good!

Proposed Battle Creek Road half-street improvement

Proposed Battle Creek Road half-street improvement

The enthusiasm for multi-use paths is misplaced.

The plague of the multi-use path

On the boundary streets, the thing to lobby for is narrower travel lanes and slower speeds. The sidewalkification of bicycling is also an autoist strategy for leaving the auto travel lanes unaltered, for business as usual! Drivers are the ones often advocating for them. Path gets the pesky bikes "out of the way." And it forces people on foot and on bike into more conflict, especially when people on bike are scorching. Rather than taming the cars, we escalate conflict between non-auto users, especially as electrification raises bike speed and power.

12 foot travel lanes are too wide!

The plans also show 11 and 12 foot travel lanes, which permit 40 and 50mph car travel and even greater speeding. 10 foot lanes are plenty wide. There is also a center turn pocket. This is the "upgrade" to our contemporary "urban standard," two travel lanes and one center turn lane.

A protected bike lane would very likely narrow the car travel lanes and prompt slower design speed and slower actual speed. 

Indeed, with Leslie Middle School nearby, we should think of a "school appropriate design speed" rather than a near highway design speed with temporary "school zone" speed limits. Instead of designing for high speed all the time and asking for moments of slower speed, we should just design for slower speed period.

Factor No. 1 "How Cities Can Learn from Crashes"
Brand new report at Strong Towns

The brand new report from Strong Towns, "Beyond Blame: How Cities Can Learn From Crashes To Create Safer Streets Today," echoes this. Arguing against stroads, they say

In municipalities where high-speed road designs are routinely used in complex urban areas, city officials must modify local street standards to reduce speeds and improve safety.

The path here also further fragments the bike lane network. A multi-use path on the northeast side here and the new one on the southwest side at Mahonia Crossing mean that if multiuse paths aren't built on both sides of the street, bike travel along the corridor will have to switch sides occasionally, maybe constantly. That's annoying and potentially hazardous!

The multiuse path may appear as a spot improvement to be some terrific thing, but as part of a total system and corridor, it is sometimes unhelpful, and disadvantages other users on foot.

Other Items

The intersection of Reed and Battle Creek Roads also appears in line now for a traffic signal.

The packet includes a map with a 1/2 mile distance, as if people will find it easy and convenient to walk or bike to Trader Joe's or Costco.

This may be transportation analysis by drawing lines on a map, not by thinking through the street-level conditions of actual routes. It will be interesting to see how this analysis is developed.

"1/2 mile" to Trader Joe's and Costco

At the corner of Reed and Battle Creek Roads, right across from the future Reed Road City Park, there will be a privately owned park. There was an orchard here and the soil is not now clean enough for residential construction.

The planned park at the corner of Battle Creek Road SE and Reed Road SE will repurpose a previously unusable portion of the property. Due to soil contamination from the orchard, which was previously located on the property, this area is not suitable for residential development and has strict limitations from the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) on how it can be utilized. The property has been carefully designed to create a park that meets DEQ guidelines and serves as a central gathering place for the community.

A decade ago they scraped the soil, piled and stored it in the future park area and capped it. We manage this same basic situation with Riverfront Park, so maybe it's not really a very great problem, but it's probably worth some attention.

Hops on side of Reed Road (2022)

This also is where stray hops were visible on a walk a couple years ago, and the natural history of that orchard remains of interest. In 1963 there was a quarry there, a notch in the orchard area along Reed Road, and they've since enlarged the quarry to use for the contaminated soil and created a separate tax lot for it so they can assign special care and conditions to it. That means the hops are new and not any vestige of historical hops growing. (It was a fun idea while it lasted!)

Orchard and a quarry in park area
From 1963 aerial series at OSU

Things could change and the concept plans here aren't necessarily what will be in the final built conditions. There will be more to say as the plans develop and mature!

A Footnote on W. H. Simpson

1878 Atlas
(Note the RR and Pringle/Battle Creek Roads)

In the latter part of the 19th century and at the time of the 1907 land purchase for what became Fairview, William Simpson owned the hillside sloping down from what is now Battle Creek Road, just south of the bend where it becomes Pringle Road. So the name Simpson Hills LLC must be an homage.

Here's an unfortunate, but also interesting, vignette on the period just before the land purchase by the State in 1907.

January 13th, 1903

The area was known as the "Pringle district," and sheep and grain seemed prominent. Simpson himself was mainly known as a leader in the Grand Army of the Republic's local Sedgewick Post. (Though there were other William Simpsons around here, including a much older Circuit Rider, and getting them all straight is not always obvious.)

We'll come back to this another time. Abijah Cary had a DLC here, he traded it and left, and there was a good bit of fragmentation and owner churn by the time the State purchased the land. History narrative has focused on the history of the Institution, but of course there is a settlement and pre-colonial history before that also.