Our Salem at the Planning Commission: Make it Stronger

The Planning Commission will hold a Public Hearing on Our Salem tonight, Tuesday the 15th. (The Staff Report and materials are split oddly between the Commission page and Our Salem page.)

At this point there is little new to say. Public Comment has focused down to the micro scale. Nearly of all of the comment in February is variation on this form:

I live near/I own such-and-such lot and I love/hate the proposed zoning changes.

That's it. It's all nitpicking or nit-praising. Mostly nitpicking.

Legibility in Proposed Zoning change maps
May 2021 (left), March 2022 (right)

The way the map of proposed zoning change areas has developed really hides the main structure (see the March 2022 map) and makes you zoom in to see fine detail in order to grasp anything. So perhaps it is not surprising that comment has gone this way. The zoning scheme is also way too complicated, and we should have simplified more. At a glance, what does that March 2022 map say?

We need to go back to the macro, to see and assess the plan as a whole. Here are the main points from here:

1. Attention is now too much on individual trees and we've lost the forest.
2. Even with the provisions of HB 2001, we still are insulating neighborhoods from change and focusing change on arterial corridors.
3. If we insist on concentrating change on arterial corridors, we shouldn't leave street reform as an ancillary matter for the Transportation System Plan, but should center it more in Our Salem itself. It needs to be primary, not secondary.
   
4. If climate is urgent, but seems too gradual and distant, a war and rising gas prices focus more immediate attention on geopolitical problems of fossil fuel, and we should center that frame in our analysis and debate.

The Forest: High-level Goals and Plan Structure

Whatever happened to our "Indicators" and the "Report Card"? The Report Card was last updated in the Spring of 2019, and there has been a number of changes, many of them deletions and reductions, to the plan concept that was the current draft then.

We deserve a full reassessment of the current plan concept on these indicators. It is likely the current plan concept does worse.

The State is likely overstating our situation

On one of the most important ones, for complete neighborhoods, there was also disagreement between the State and City. The State counted 11%, the City 65%, and 50 points of difference is no mere rounding error!

City and State with very different
counts of "complete neighborhoods"

Additionally, even the more ambitious concept plan in Spring of 2019 offered failure across the board on walking and biking, and also increased rather than decreased emissions.

Why are we settling for these failures?

The problems from a year ago have not yet been remedied.

• "Our Salem Draft Plan v2.0 Still Fumbles on Climate"
• "Our Salem and Weasel Words on Climate."
  

So in a whole lot of ways, the current concept plan for Our Salem doesn't accomplish what we want to accomplish.

Insulating Neighborhoods from Change

The plan relies on HB 2001 for a certain amount of lifting. In a comment from December Commissioner Slater said

I don't agree that the Our Salem plan "protects neighborhoods from change".... 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.

In residential areas Salem doesn't structurally go further than what the Legislature mandated and which Salem enacted in our HB 2001 compliance package.

The question is whether this will be enough to hit our targets on emissions and non-auto travel. Sure, it's an improvement, but as we see with current proposals for the Meyer Farm and for the Mahonia Nursery area, and for the on-going development at the former Fairview site, allowing middle housing has been very theoretical, and the incentives don't yet align properly for any meaningful scale. Onesy-twosy scattered smallplexes won't be enough to support neighborhood hubs. We also will likely need more potential hub sites so that the market winnows them and finds the winners where they can be successful. 

• "We may Need more Neighborhood Hub Sites"
• "Apartments may be Needed to Support Hubs"
• "City Deletes Three-Fifths of Proposed Neighborhood Hubs Sites"

Uneven, scattered redevelopment with smallplexes will yield an increase with something like factors of 1.2 or 1.5, not a factor of 4. It will be small. In order to achieve our targets, we will need to oversample and overdesignate. We should not confuse theoretical increase on paper, as if all designated sites will convert, with probable levels of scattered increase in practice.

The City missed an opportunity for a kind of case study or forensic analysis of Fairview, the North State Hospital Campus, the State Street Corridor, and the current Meyer Farm and Mahonia Nursery subdivisions. All of these look backwards to 20th century patterns and not forward to much anticipation of what we want to see in Our Salem. Why is that? What do we need to do differently? How are the incentives still not aligned right?

Think More about Transportation Itself

Mismatch in streetcar and corridors

If the big transportation investment is going to be a streetcar downtown, as some may be preparing to argue, it's hard to see how the arterial conversion to mixed use actually happens. The big stroads will need conversion to boulevard design and more intense transit, even formal Bus Rapid Transit, will be necessary to make low-car and car-free living viable on the arterials themselves and in the neighborhoods a few blocks away.

• "Our Salem Relies too much on Arterial Conversion"
• "Cherriots and Our Salem should give more thought to future BRT"

War, Gas prices, and Climate

That is the question, LA Times

The City has an opportunity to reframe the conversation a little bit. 

People don't like change. People like to drive.

Changes to our development pattern and making it easier not to drive will not only reduce emissions and help prevent climate catastrophe, but it will also mitigate against the kind of price shock, instability, and war we see right now because of a petro-state autocrat. We can mitigate unwanted change from war and disaster by planning for change more intentionally.

This also is another reason to return to the indicators and to assess the whole rather than getting lost in changes to individual lots. We should also reconnect Our Salem with the Climate Action Plan.

If you don't like war, if you don't like expensive gas, you should support a shift away from our autoist, fossil fuel urban pattern.

Our Salem should be stronger. If it can't be stronger right now, we should wrap it up promptly and initiate the next set of revisions. 

Running out of time, Washington Post this month