Friday, December 2, 2022

City Council, December 5th - Housing Crisis and Road Safety

With the holiday season, Council meetings come in a rush, one-two-three in consecutive weeks. They meet again on Monday.

A couple of items on our housing crisis lead the way.

They will extend "Emergency Declaration related to unsheltered residents through December 31, 2023." This will help get the microshelter villages and safepark site up and going.

Perhaps emboldened by recent action in Portland and Bend, they will also start a "policy review" on "unsheltered homeless." On the surface this looks like it will include the search for ways to criminalize people camping. Others will have better things to say on many of the details. I want to focus on one element:

What reasonable options exist to the City to protect human life by restricting outdoor sheltering near busy or high speed roadways?

We should remember that being sheltered in a single-detached house with a mortgage is no guarantee of safety.

The house was no protection, in 2017 via Twitter

Speed is the problem. We should protect human life by curbing car abuse and jaydriving.

Front page this week

Here's a larger list of deaths during the phase that prompted the declaration of emergency.

Killed in 2022

Killed in 2021

Killed in 2020

Some of these, particularly those not named, were likely camping, and are people envisioned as subject to the "policy review."

But our problem with death in or near the roadway is fundamentally a driving problem, not always, or even often, an "outdoor sheltering" problem. 

Both I-5 and railroads are access controlled, and those operating vehicles on them have long stopping distances. They do necessarily imply different standards than for urban streets. But a busy street like Lancaster Drive or Front Street is still an urban street, and we should not apply the same standards we would on I-5.

Hopefully Council and Staff will undertake this review with nuance, not victim-blaming, and properly center the fact we have a driving problem also.

There are a couple of land use approvals that are of some interest.

An abandoned proposal back in 2020

You may remember in 2020 a proposal to rezone a couple of lots on the corner of Kurth and Browning across the street from Belcrest Cemetery. That proposal was for apartments, and neighbors seem to have successfully mobilized against it. 

On Council agenda an information item on approval for a revised proposal, subdividing the lots from two into six smaller lots, still with the RS zoning. 

But in the interval, we now have legalized middle housing and smallplexes. This could be the first instance of a small development originally envisioned for apartments that shifts to newly legalized middle housing. The approvals are preliminary, contain no information about the building forms themselves, so this is all speculative at the moment. But the development is positioned to take advantage of the middle housing provisions if the developers would like.

So it will be interesting to watch.

There is also the approvals for Mahonia Crossing, a project for affordable housing with 129 apartments.

See recently:

In the conditions of approval, there are several fences, some decorative, some sight-obscuring.

The south edge borders the Woodscape Linear Park.

Woodscape Linear Park, with paths

With so much fencing, there may not be sufficient visibility into and out of the path system in the linear park, and there could ultimately be questions of safety there. This will be something to watch.

Finally, there is a continuation on the Staff Recommendation for Denial on a request to vacate a stub of Cross Street at 20th St SE. But the latest recommendation is considerably less definite and rather squishy now:

City Council may deny the vacation or approve the vacation...

But elsewhere in that same updated Staff Report say

Staff’s recommendation to deny this petition is based on adopted Council policies expressed in the Salem Comprehensive Policies Plan and the Salem Transportation System Plan (Salem TSP). These plans include policies relating to local street connectivity and block standards to support all modes of travel.

Petitioners had protested, noting

a few past occasions, including in the 1970s and 1990s, when the City chose not to pursue extending this local street. There are several reasons that the City may have chosen not to pursue an extension of Cross Street in the past. City policies change over time, as do interpretation of policies by different City Councils. There may also have been limitations on what could have been required through development exactions.

If the City does vacate, there will be a very large superblock between Hines and Oxford without any east-west connectivity. (See previously, with map.)

Separately, and not on Council agenda at all, but at last conceptually related to last week's five year plan, Jim Scheppke reminds us that the Hugh Morrow collection is missing, has been missing for months, and is perhaps gutted.

via FB

The loss of parts, or most, of that collection, devoted to the history of Salem and of Oregon, would be a kind of vandalism.

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