City Council, May 24th - Geer Park

Council convenes on Monday and they look to adopt a new Master Plan for Geer Park.

Park Ave is private, so no changes there
But a new parking strip at no. 13

One neighbor echoes and extends criticism of the overreliance on car parking and insufficient attention for bicycling - even though there is a big bike park right there and the park named for our original bicycling Governor! (Previous notes on history; and on the master plan, with a little more.)

Gov. Geer bikes to Champoeg
Fifty Years in Oregon (1912)

The City's really missing an opportunity to focus the park on bicycling, not just for play, but for transport also.

A decade ago when we were updating the Walking and Biking chapters of the Transportation System Plan, Park Avenue had seemed like a logical north-south route between State Street and Silverton Road, perhaps the most nearly continuous lower-traffic route a few blocks west of Hawthorne Avenue.

A decade ago we abandoned Park Ave

But with the new State Hospital facility, and the existing prison and juvenile facilities, Park Avenue remained a private street and bicycling on it discouraged. The formal amendments to the TSP shifted the preferred bike route a few blocks east onto Illinois.

Now, apparently, there is at least a little change of heart, and the City proposes to site a large strip of parking lot and curbside drop-off areas (nos. 13 and 14 on the map at top) just off Park Avenue, and says it can be used for access.

But the City does not propose any covered bike parking or suggest any changes to Park Avenue with bike lanes or other formal invitation to bicycling.

City Council, May 17th - Housing and Shelter

Council convenes on Monday for a formal Work Session to hear an update on "Initiatives to reduce homelessness and increase sheltering."

Front page SF Chronicle today

Today's story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle is probably apt.

The City's Staff Report says

To help reduce COVID-19 exposure in shelters and spaces that face constrained capacity, camping is allowed in developed areas of two parks, Wallace Marine and Cascades Gateway. Community partners estimate between 200-300 persons are currently staying at any given time in each park. The City, non-profit agencies, and volunteers have worked together to remove garbage, address criminal activity, and establish small, managed alternatives to sheltering in parks. Still, as City parks are not intended for human habitation and camping, the City will need to carefully conclude our Park Camping program.

A "careful" conclusion to the programs and camps, formal and informal, should take care with the rhetoric of cleaning, clean-up, dirt, disorder and such. People may leave copious trash, and be profoundly ill or upset, sometimes even criminal or evil, but they are not themselves dirt to be cleaned up or vermin.

NY Times today

So much of the vilification of unsheltered people and other poor is because they remind us of the precariousness of our own existence, the role of luck in the wheel of fortune, and our own ultimate end. In another more universal sense, we are all just dirt.

From the NY Times:

Suffering and death are facts of life; focusing only on the “bright and shiny” is superficial and inauthentic. “We try to suppress the thought of death, or escape it, or run away from it because we think that’s where we’ll find happiness,” she said. “But it’s actually in facing the darkest realities of life that we find light in them.”

The practice of regular meditation on death is a venerable one. Saint Benedict instructed his monks in the sixth century to “keep death daily before your eyes,” for example. For Christians like Sister Aletheia, it is inextricable from the promise of a better life after death. But the practice is not uniquely Christian. Mindfulness of death is a tradition within Buddhism, and Socrates and Seneca were among the early thinkers who recommended “practicing” death as a way to cultivate meaning and focus. Skeletons, clocks and decaying food are recurring motifs in art history.

Previously on the rhetoric and symbolism we use in talking about "cleaning":

• "Reactionary Politics in the April Clean-Up of 1921"
• Hazmat suits in January 2020
• On cleaning under bridges in November 2019 and again

CANDO may have more detailed notes on contemporary policy, and this post may be updated with comment on that.

An Unpleasant Footnote on the Sam Brown House

You might recall some attention a couple years ago to the historic Sam Brown House in Gervais.

October 2019

But there's an unsavory footnote, relevant to our current moment, that has been more than a little elided and perhaps even deliberately thrust down the memory hole.

The other day Willamette University Historian Seth Cotlar, who has a large secondary project on the history of conservatism, turned up this note about one of the Brown family.

via Twitter

City Council, May 10th - Housing

Council convenes tonight, and they'll be getting an update on "multifamily housing." The Housing Needs Analysis adopted in 2016 used data up to 2014 in its calculation of a 207 acre deficit in land zoned for attached housing. The report at Council updates this with data from 2014 to 2020.

There's so much going on in it, that our housing policy could easily merit one or more work sessions on it alone. Here are some notes in passing.

We have seen from both local data and statewide data that we used to build a lot more. The report to Council does not give enough attention to building homes as the primary object of policy and analysis.

From the SKATS 2019 RTSP appendices
(comments in red added)

We are currently underbuilding homes
(Oregon Office of Economic Analysis)

The formal summary is instead on zoning:

The City of Salem Planning Division has been working to implement the Salem Housing Needs Analysis (HNA) Work Plan since directed to do so by City Council in 2016. The work plan advances recommendations in the HNA to address the projected 207-acre deficit of multifamily land (2,897 dwelling units) in Salem’s portion of the urban growth boundary (UGB). This staff report outlines what has been accomplished, what is planned, and the progress toward eliminating the projected deficit.

Of course the one thing the City can control is the count of acres zoned for apartments and attached housing. They don't directly control the building. But the relevant metric is homes built, not land zoned. Land zoned is a supporting and instrumental detail, a means, but the report here is nearly framed as if it were the end.

MWACT Talks Biking; Also, New Bicycling Manual from ODOT

The Mid-Willamette Valley Area Commission on Transportation meets tomorrow, Thursday the 6th, and they will talk a little bit about bicycling; and the role of the Area Commissions in relation to the State walking and biking committee, OBPAC, and to the parent Oregon Transportation Commission.

Bicycling on the agenda

I don't have anything much substantive on this, so here are a couple of observations and some other related matters.

Bike Shops Advertise Motorcycles during Bicycle Week in 1921

Probably margins were higher on motorcycles than bicycles, and clearly there was coop advertising available for motorcycles also, but it is interesting nonetheless that for National Bicycle Week in 1921, the Salem bike shops didn't run any promotions, and focused on the motorcycle trade instead.

April 30th, 1921

No ad in Salem this year
The Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer
Bridgeport, CT
April 30th, 1921

Scott's had been selling both motorcycles and bicycles during the 19-teens for several years, so it was not some new line of business. But the emphasis was new.

March 19th, 1921

Later in the summer they did run a big subscription drive and contest for a Harley bicycle with the morning paper.

State Employment Office Parking Lot Rehab to Remove Several Trees

The State Department of Administrative Services has filed an application for a parking lot rehabilitation at the Employment Office on Cottage and Union Streets.

The Notice has no narrative with it, so it's not clear why they need to redo the parking lots. (That we apply budget and effort to renewing parking lots is an unfortunate consequence of our autoism.)

But more interesting are all the trees the site plan appears to designate for removal. The main parking lot is on the east side of Cottage, and it has one big tree on the alley designated for removal.

That's a lot of trees marked for removal

The Office itself (pictured here) on the west side has nearly all the trees in the curb strip designated for removal. Some of them must be in the public right of way and be City-owned street trees.

Union Street here is also an important bikeway, and scheduled for upgrades over the next five years. (See the most recent post about a reduction in scope here, and its development and funding have been discussed frequently in posts about the Downtown Mobility Study.) So the mature shade trees are nice for walking and biking.

This will go before the Planning Administrator, not a full Public Hearing, and hopefully the City will scrutinize the need for so much tree-cutting very closely. On the surface it looks a little gratuitous. Some of the trees in the power lines might be the wrong size - but all of them?

These are some of the trees designated for cutting

Kitty-corner is also the former site of the LaFolette Black Walnut, which was cut down, and a mystery vine that is still standing and may have some significance. (And some follow up on the vine. The matter is still unresolved lore.) Most of the trees in question are not that old, but the old school, Garfield, is still here, and there might be some details and traces in the immediate vicinity that are worth more attention before we carelessly cut or excavate.