When we started on SE Division Street in Portland, Oregon, it was a corridor of resale shops, mechanics’ garages, and a handful of beloved neighborhood institutions. It wasn’t blighted; it was smaller and sleepier than it is today, and already loved by most of the people there. The bet we were making was that a quieter corridor could grow busier without losing its character if you did the work in the right order.
We ended up building six buildings on Division. Today it’s one of Portland’s best-loved streets, a hub of independent, locally owned restaurants and shops, with much-needed new housing above them. That mix was deliberate: our first storefronts went to local, non-credit small businesses rather than national chains, and many of the homes above them were offered at or below the area median income. Since then, we’ve been asked to do the same thing in Tacoma, Denver, Boise, and a handful of Portland suburbs. Here are five lessons from our work in corridor redevelopment. I learned some of them the hard way.
1. Timing — you can’t swim upstream.
The growth of a city reads a little like dendrochronology: tight rings in the capital-cycle winters, wide ones in the summers. Corridor redevelopment is a summer activity. We first tried Division in 2006, retreated when the Global Financial Crisis hit, and didn’t restart in earnest until 2010. The capital markets didn’t cooperate with our plans. Fortunately, we had capacity and partners who were willing to wait it out. Pioneering a new corridor is hard enough with the capital markets at your back. Also, timing is probably the single biggest risk of engaging in a public-private partnership. City agencies answer to city leadership, and politics works on a different clock than capital markets. And in a new corridor, running out of time during a capital-market winter can be a disaster.
2. City support — redevelopment is a collaboration.
Division had a partner we didn’t fully appreciate at the time: the city, then in the process of building out its new Division Green Street/Main Street Plan. I spent hours in neighborhood charrettes learning about the plan and collaborating with planners. The information I picked up became valuable later on as we laid out our development plans for the corridor.
3. Scale — you have to reach critical mass.
A single beautiful building on a tired street is typically a sign of over-investment. To activate a corridor, you need enough new frontage that people feel a there, there. The scale required to reach critical mass depends on your development capacity and the corridor’s geographic size. For Division, five was the magic number: enough to push the street from “a few nice projects” into a destination. If you don’t have the capacity (and the patient capital) to reach critical mass, you’re not redeveloping a corridor; you’re just doing a deal.
4. Bullets before cannonballs.
I borrowed this one from Jim Collins. All development is entrepreneurial, and pioneering a new area is riskier still — so fire a bullet before you load the cannon. Our first project on Division was small, and we put it in the best part of the corridor. We named it Reliable, after Reliable Parts, the appliance-parts store that had stood on the site. From there, once our projections were proven out, we moved on to the next two projects.
5. Be informed by history.
An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic when you’re building in a neighborhood. This approach is better applied as a deliberate strategy rather than a reaction to the angry sentiments of some neighbors. The community’s history should shape your work, architecturally and programmatically. You have to show up, learn the place, and let what you learn change what you build. In general, neighbors are not friendly to developers. Humans like their sandbox and don’t like others crowding it — using up parking, blocking views, generating traffic. Change is inevitable, but the best we can do is be informed by a community’s history, honor it, and mitigate the impact of change.
Reckoning.
When a neighborhood becomes more attractive and in demand, prices rise. Some of the longtime renters (homeowners did fine as prices rose) and small businesses that gave Division its character couldn’t afford to stay. Eventually the same math pushed our own firm off the street too. The vibrancy you help create can displace the very people who gave the place its historical character.
I don’t have a clean answer to that problem. Halting development is not an answer, because over time places either change with the times and thrive, or fall into decay. But I do carry a responsibility to build with the community and its history. And to fight for the mix of incomes, uses, and memory that keeps a growing street from becoming a monoculture. And I judge whether it was worth building by whether the neighborhood still feels like a neighborhood afterward.
Worth reading:
P.S. If your city or district is working to help a corridor grow without building over what makes it special, this is the work we love most — I’m always glad to compare notes.
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Love the insight Eric. Thank you for writing this. Going back to 2006, how much weight do your team place on a community's decision to invest in a corridor before deciding to participate in a long term redevelopment plan?
Thanks Eric!