The front page of the Sunday paper has a big piece on climate disruption. It's oddly framed, a little like an investigative report that is presenting some hitherto unknown set of facts. But apart from that oddness of tone, and the mention of causation a little deep in the piece, it clearly points at greenhouse gases.
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| Climate on the front page today |
From the piece:
Reporters read thousands of pages of climate assessments, scientific papers, weather reports and government documents. They interviewed more than 70 people, including climate scientists, academic researchers, local and federal officials, and residents forced from their homes by drought and flood.
Taken together, the reporting reveals a stunning shift in the way precipitation falls in America.
(There were other articles on water, too: "Rockies winter starts with whimper, Experts: Drought could threaten water supply" and "How Midwestern rainfall poisons the Gulf of Mexico.")
Deeper in the paper, the Council preview doesn't link up much with the front page. It leads with the prospect of drastic change, but not the change we are already experiencing. This rhetoric will trigger loss aversion. It's a little alarmist. The piece doesn't start with the existing drastic changes from climate, like those discussed on the front page, and our urgent need to reduce our emissions and adapt to changes already in process that cannot be stopped.
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| "drastic" |
That push-pull ambivalence is probably all too accurate.
In addition to getting an update on the Climate Plan, Council looks to initiate adoption of Our Salem. The next step would be a formal Public Hearing at the Planning Commission next year.
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| Zoning change areas (May 2021) (The interactive layers were not updated) |
In the most general terms, there seem to be three main problems with Our Salem:
- It protects residential neighborhoods from change and doesn't distribute change widely enough. Confining the main change to swaths of new mixed-use zoning on arterial corridors will not be effective.
- With the arterial corridors there is not enough attention to how much it sucks to walk or bike along these roads. Merely adding a bunch of new apartments on top of retail or other commercial uses won't alter the sucky road conditions, and will fail to induce large proportions of people to make new walk, bike, or bus trips. There needs to me more thought on stroad-to-boulevard conversions.
- It does not address greenhouse gas reduction enough.
Probably when it goes before the Planning Commission there will be more to say. (Posts on both Our Salem and the Climate Plan, which go into more detail on both, are organized here. And the post on the Climate Plan from a couple of days ago.)
Code Update and Amendments
Also on the agenda is a Public Hearing and First Reading of updates to our tree preservation code, middle housing and HB 2001 compliance package, important reduction to off-street parking requirements, and a couple of other smaller items like ending drive-thrus downtown and improved bike parking standards.
The current summary in the Staff Report is useful. It's long, but it is outlined and organized in mostly plain language.
The Report also suggests a few further amendments to exclude some nuisance or invasive trees from the "significant" tree definition, as well as some other housekeeping details.
Previously here:
- "Planning Commission to see Proposed Middle Housing Code"
- "Proposed Code Changes, with City to end new Drive-Thrus Downtown, at Planning Commission Monday the 16th"
- "Planning Commission to Consider Code Amendments on Middle Housing and Trees"
- Formal comment from Cherriots and Eric Olsen in "City Council, November 22nd - More on MUHTIP"
Altogether, changes contemplated in the Climate Plan, Our Salem, and the Middle Housing reforms are not yet sufficient to our moment, and by framing them as "drastic reshaping," they might seem to be superfluous novelty with unintended consequences rather than an urgent and necessary response to climate exigency. Doing nothing, or doing little, will entail a much worse "drastic change."
6 comments:
I don't agree that the Our Salem plan "protects neighborhoods from change." I think you need to expand on that claim a bit more. Thanks to the state legislature, we will not have zones restricted to single families but will now allow duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, town houses, and row houses in what was formerly single family zones. The council previously permitted ADU's. The Our Salem Plan created significant new swaths of multifamily homes. Whether the neighborhood hubs actually work, we'll see but it, too, represents at least the possibility of change. Basically, we have the potentially for increasing the density of what had been singe family zones by a factor of 4.
You nail, in my view, the more important issue that the City is not going to succeed with its mixed use corridor strategy without seriously investing in improving the quality of the streetscape. My fear is that the City will decide that reconfiguring the major corridors to make then not just pedestrian-friendly but actually attractive would be cost-prohibitive.
You could say that some of the disagreement is definitional: You are including the State's middle housing changes as part of Our Salem, and I consider the compliance changes to be external and separate. If you look at the map with the outlined zoning changes, there are vast swaths of residential neighborhoods unaltered. Probably I will wait until the matter comes to the Planning Commission to argue in greater detail, as you question is a fair one.
The other factor is that change is not distributed uniformly. If in any given year, just for argument, 5% of land uses change, the more land that is zoned for change the more land will actually change. This is a great problem with the neighborhood hubs. Not all sites designed for them will actually change. So we have to oversample/overdesignate in order to achieve the outcome we actually want.
In South Salem, there are 3 large tracts of land that are well on their way to becoming depositories for about 500 single family homes. Basically a small city worth. Unlikely that there will be any duplexes, town homes, etc. I don't know about MNA's position on two of the projects but they do have a concern about the effect of one of them on the transportation system. My guess is that pure single family will be supported by the MNA and the PC. Preliminary plans seem to indicate that that is what the developers prefer so ...
As anon points out, the prevailing preference will remain single housing and the 4x increase Slater points out will remain very theoretical, a paper increase.
In the first round of Public Comment, on the Climate Plan, there are letters of institutional support from Cherriots and Willamette University, and NW Methane Gas lawyered up and wrote a blustery letter in opposition.
On the code amendments, a person who had appealed "The Woods" to LUBA (which reversed the approvals, so that project may be on hold) threatened another appeal, claiming that the revisions on Fairview were a direct response. Those matters may deserve more later in a separate post.
There is also a collection of boilerplate letters supporting questions about the way lots are aggregated/assembled for larger developments. The primary letter cited the way the YMCA assembled lots for the 34 apartment Veterans home project, and suggested that the new proposed process would really slow things up on projects like that with new red tape and administrative sludge.
Our Salem is theory. I wonder if anyone has gone back and evaluated how well the previous Comprehensive Plan actually changed Salem. My impression is that starting day one of the new Comprehensive Plan back in 1987 or so, there was an application submitted by a developer to do a zone change. And in every subsequent month after that more changed to the CP. I am assuming that the same will happen with Our Salem.
Our Salem is a 'vision" ,,, a desired outcome, but it is not binding. Yes, the City can permit duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and even row houses and such in single family zones, but it does not mean they will happen. For over 30 years it has been permitted to put in rowhouses in Salem and yet almost none exists to day. Why? Because the market does not support them. Same with the other middle housing types.
Recently an architect friend explained the financial elements of building infill housing beyond a duplex. He said at $200 a square foot the livable duplex would cost slightly more than a single family house, but a triplex or fourplex is likely to cost upwards of $1 million. That's a heavy lift for a single person. And would a developer with the financial capacity waste their time on a single unit verse just investing in building a typical apartment complex?
As a prediction I look at the much hyped ADU concept. How many have been built over the last 3 years? I recently ask staff for a list so I could see what they looked like. They could only give me a few and it turned out that they are just garage conversions. Why? Cost. Pure and simple.
Creating an opportunity, is not the same as creating something concrete. I wish Our Salem had spent a bit more time thinking about what kind of policies or incentives might get us to the goal of higher density, less vehicle travel and lower carbon emissions.
While the discussion doesn't always exactly apply in specific detail, the general point made in "Upzone the Side Streets! Putting apartments on busy roads and houses on quiet ones is an injustice" is relevant here, and gets at some of the questions Slater raises.
"[O]ne older Black resident made the distinction between “block people” and “avenue people.” Block people tended to be homeowners and their tenants, middle-class and stable. Avenue people were low-income renters in poorly maintained housing. They came and went, and the implication was that they were responsible for most of the neighborhood’s problems.
I’ve thought about that dichotomy a lot since, because it’s a neat way of summing up the way that zoning, architecture, and social class interact. It not an accident that American neighborhoods tend to have apartment buildings on their busy thoroughfares and one- or two-family homes on the side streets."
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