Advocacy Group?

P

Patrick

Guest
I think the time has come to form an official development advocacy group. A group that could lobby on behalf of increased density, more development, more height, better streets and transportation initiatives, better inter-urban-connectivity, etc. I am thinking people like myself, Corey, Union Station (I'll let you reveal your name, if you'd like), and Portlander (ditto), shazbat and others might want to think about forming some sort of web-based advocacy group, that can submit our collective thoughts to the City on certain ideas, so as to speak with one voice (and a voice with some force behind it in terms of numbers).

I think it is important to organize disparately spaced people with closely aligned urban planning views and have them contribute to the discussion at a city level. Please let me know what you all think, and I will start the process if you desire.

We need a name...something like Citizens for responsible development in Portland?

Citizens for a stronger Portland?

Citizens against citizens who are against things? haha

Citizens for a bigger, better, busier Portland (to quote JFK's grandfather, the former mayor of Boston)...

Something along those lines would be great. We could incorporate as a non-profit, or perhaps start slow and just organize our thoughts, and then deliver messages of advocacy to the city as regards issues important to us. They need to be hearing these things. Archboston is great, but isn't achieving anything politically.

Just an idea. Please, I would be interested to hear your thoughts when you have a moment. Perhaps this would be a good way to involve some of the other members of the community who feel as we do but who don't know about Archboston. Maybe it would really be a good way to say the things everyone is thinking but no one expresses. ??

Actually, edit, I am thinking a name like "Grow Portland" might be better...?

PortDev?

Portland Growth Initiative?

Portland Rising?

Just some off the top of my head.

Please write back asap as this is an idea about which i am beginning to become rather excited. Why didn't someone think of this earlier? I think this is the first time in the forum's history--even going back to www.urbanplanet.org in 2004--where we have had so many people with similar views all speaking at once.
 
Great idea Patrick! You can certainly count me in as an interested party! The only question I have- Isn't this what GrowSmart Maine is supposed to be doing? Or MAST, or GPCOG or any number of sustainable-development non-profits out there? Or would this groups mission be more focused on Portland specifically?
Either way, your right that there seems to be a lot of growing momentum out there towards a very specific approach to sustainable development. I might also venture that the established groups are so busy bickering amongst themselves that they don't seem to recognize a whole new generation of engaged citizens has grown up around them! I wonder how many people who grew up in in Portland, Maine have moved to Portland, Oregon? I wonder how many would move back if PACTS started to look more like TRIMET?
Lets keep this conversation going! I have a million orphan project ideas looking for a home and a group like this will fit like a glove!

PS- I remember seeing a study called something like "A Tale of Two Cities: Making Portland, Maine more like Portland, Oregon" by Cambridge Systematics, but I can't find it anywhere after I first saw it on Google... I tried the CS site to no avail... Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
 
Think a more focused version of GrowSmart Maine, and one which applies specifically at the local Portland level. This could be extended to include the metro area/region, but my interest is primarily at the municipal Portland level. Moreover, GrowSmart is focused on government and environment, etc., all worthy focus areas, but more broad than what I have in mind.

And GPCOG is a council of governments dedicated to planning initiatives--different than what I am referring to. I am not referring to planning, but rather more to a sort of pro urban development lobbying effort.

MAST is different, too, because it is aimed primarily at sustainable "transportation"--again, I am referring specifically to urban development, of the sort we are capable of but which routinely gets turned down at a political level. MAST might be somewhat analogous, but not really. Again, this would be municipality specific.

There have been several large projects proposed for Portland that hear very negative criticisms from nearby landowners, but there is no voice to express support for these projects from the wider community (primarily because that community is not organized, and has a more general, less specific interest in seeing projects succeed than the vocal neighbors do in seeing a project fail). Lets tip the balance in favor of development, urban development. That's what I'm talking about. Municipal leaders need to be told that large buildings are ok by Portlanders, that a high rise or super dense row house development would be welcomed, that new urban headquarters are preferred, that we are pro-cities and everything that support them.

Do I mean tear down Congress Street and build the empire state building? No, absolutely not. I just mean the city could benefit from a more open dialogue on the subject of urbanization in general, because right now there seems to be a bias against it, due to a lack of organization on pro-development sides. Pro development people are always viewed as self-interested people with direct financial gains from development, and I think there needs to be a voice for people who support urban development for its own sake, not just because we stand to make money from it, but because we enjoy cities for what they are.

This is an evolving idea.
 
I guess the best way to put it, analogizing to an existing organization, would be a local version of something like MEREDA (the Maine Real Estate Development Association) http://www.mereda.org/about.php

Only difference is that it would be not just real estate development, but URBAN real estate development.

The stated purpose of MEREDA is to "to present the views of participants in the state?s commercial real estate industry to lawmakers in Augusta." Lets do something similar, at the City Council level, and lets do it not from the perspective of real estate investment, but from the perspective of city residents and citizens from surrounding towns who like urbanized settings for their own sake.
 
Portland Urban Development Association ("PUDA") or Urban Development Association of Portland ("UDAP")?
 
This is a great idea, and something that has been mentioned in this forum from time to time. I would gladly be in on something like this. Count me in. Besides, I am a social worker....initiatives like this are right up my alley.
 
A group like this could have a really strong voice....especially in some of the Bayside projects. Id be really excited to get something like this going....let me know!!
 
Todd, I can't believe I didn't list you above...you've been on board with this idea or something similar to it since 2006 at least. OK, so we have an initial yes from Union, Todd, and me. Others????

Once we agree on pursuing the idea, we can then start to formulate, as a group, a more definite game plan as to what the organization should look like and be.
 
"Grow Downtown Portland" = GDP (perhaps a nice acronym for economic growth implications?)

could also be Coalition for the Growth of Downtown Portland, i.e., the Coalition for GDP??
 
How about something simple like THE PORTLAND COALITION or THE PORTLAND GROUP?
 
I'm terrible when it comes to the naming thing. I wanted to call the new Brunswick chapter of the Young Professionals Network, "The Young Pioneers" until some of the Chamber folks pointed out that it was the name of the Communist Party youth group... I still like the name btw...
I would like something that plays off the traditional dichotomy between hierarchical "Redevelopment Authority"s and opposition groups that usually go by the name of some sort of "Committee" or "Coalition". This is the terminology that came out of the great twentieth-century battles between preservationists, community activists, conservationists and NIMBYs on one side and developers, government agencies and business interests on the other. Of course, things were never exactly that simple but people tend to look at it that way, which is why I like to boil it down to Anthony Flint's thesis in "Wrestling With Moses" about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses (Patrick already knows that I like to bring the two of them up any chance I get:) ). Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge Authority laid the foundation for the "Public Authority" as we know it today. I'm sure most of you know this better than I do, but I'll just get it in writing anway... The modern public authority is based on the "public-benefit corporation" concept but became especially powerful after the "New Deal" granted emergency powers to the federal government in order to combat the Great Depression. Robert Moses used these powers to create what is essentially a private corporation that uses public money. From Wikipedia- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation#Maine)
The widespread use of public authorities in the United States was pioneered in New York state by Robert Moses. The approval of the New York State Public Authorities Control Board is required in some cases when creating an authority. An authority may at times levy taxes and tolls; this means that they are not part of the usual state budgetary process, and gives them a certain independence. Their most admired ability by the New York State and local government, is to circumvent strict public debt limits in the New York State Constitution. Furthermore, they may make contracts; because of public authorities' corporate status, there is, generally, no remedy against the chartering State for the breach of such contracts. John Grace & Co. v. State University Constr. Fund, 44 N.Y.2d 84, 375 N.E.2d 377; 404 N.Y.S.2d 316 (1978). On the other hand, as agents of the state, public authorities are not subject to many laws governing private corporations, and are not subject to municipal regulation. Employees of public authorities usually are not state employees, but are employees of the authority. Ciulla v. State, 191 Misc. 528; 77 N.Y.S.2d 545; (NY Court of Claims, 1948). Public authorities can also often condemn property. See Generally 87 NY Jur PUBLIC AUTHORITIES Section 1 et seq.
Click to expand...

So it is in this context that the term "authority" has come to symbolize "authoritarian" uses of eminent domain, relocation and the callous destruction of neighborhoods in the name of "urban renewal".
The term "coalition" on the other hand is usually taken up by groups opposing an official entity. In the context of urban development, this can best be illustrated by Jane Jacobs' successful "Joint Committee to Stop the Lower-Manhattan Expressway". These organizations usually form in opposition to the development practices of official private and public entities, like Moses' Triborough Bridge Authority. But since a grassroots "coalition" can rarely qualify for financing they rarely actually BUILD anything...
Which brings us to our present situation in Portland, Maine. Most large-scale development in the Portland area since the 1940s seems to follow the "urban renewal" model. The case can be made that the auto-centric projects in the 1970s-80s stemmed the exodus to the suburbs by enabling easy access to the city center, but the practices cut a wide swath through the heart of the city and left a void in the city's cultural identity.
The legacy we are left with is a deep-seeded suspicion of large-scale development that transcends political ideology. Conservatives oppose any public spending and Liberals view developers as inherently destructive. The prevailing discourse leaves us with the impression that little or no projects of significance have been built in this country for a generation. Compared to the HSR stations in China (http://www.railpictures.net/images/d1/5/6/0/2560.1269886484.jpg), the City of Arts and Sciences by Santiago Calatrava in Valencia, Spain (http://www.dailypress.com/media/photo/2007-05/30053218.jpg)or the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof (http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41687000/jpg/_41687246_1aerialafp416.jpg) all we really have to show is Millenium Park in Chicago, the High Line in NY, the Big Dig and a lot of Frank Gehry museums...
But maybe thats not the full picture... While the world of infrastructure hasn't seen life since the 60s, and politics is at a standstill, the world of communications technology has been advancing into hyperspace. The very nature of the internet is antithetical to hierarchical structures. Digital infrastructure depends on horizontal networks, rather than vertical hierarchies. The task of our generation is to apply the lessons learned from a generation of gaming, texting and facebooking to real-world interfaces like crosswalk design and transit.
Digital technologies, and more importantly our generations' application of these digital technologies, can potentially reverse the old "grassroots coalition=opposition to development" equation by providing communities with the tools to plan, design and implement the most appropriate form of development for their particular needs. This is what initially attracted me to the AIA SDAT report for East Bayside, as well as the Project for Public Spaces' Master Plan for Downtown Brunswick. Both of them started from the position that development should be designed BY rather than FOR the community.
I realize that this is all easier said than done, but I would recommend that our new group look into partnering with Neil Takemoto's "Cooltown Places" (www.cooltownstudios.com) project and the Project for Public Spaces (www.pps.org). Both of them emphasize the term "PLACEMAKING over development. Which is why I propose we include the word PLACE in the name. It may be funny to include the word "authority" in it as well, just to shake things up a little. If all else fails, theres always the "Young Pioneers"...
 
Interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing. I think the word "authority" may be misleading (we would have none, obviously), but I understand the idea of switching things around a bit.

I also understand the want to use "place"

However, I think to use place, we must be careful. because a lot of standards already in force strive to make great places (with setbacks, building heights, etc.), and we want our message to stand out. Nothing currently in force promotes urban development in more than a cursory manner. There has been some change lately in this when Bayside adopted the new height standards, but even those were fought by a lot of people (in a process where the voice of this grouo could have perhaps been very useful).

Also, I understand the planning by the community instead of for it, but I'm not sure I agree totally. The people who plan "for" the community, often "are" the community themselves, in that they have a lot invested in the communities where they work. When you say planned "by" the community, the idea sounds good, but stands the chance of resulting in the absence of planning altogether. I think the best approach is to let experts do it, but do it in a way that is informed by the public (in fact, part of our role as a group as I envision it would be to provide the experts with such input and information from the community, to let them KNOW we support urban development).

anyway, nothing in this post is meant to disagree with what you have written, but rather just to add to it with some rambling of my own.

How about Urban Spaces Association of Portland USAP
or Urban Places Association of Portland UPAP
or
the Association for Urbanized Development in Portland AUDP

??

We have time to think this all through, and I think the dialogue is great so far.
 
Sounds like a good idea, I am interested. Seems that a group of this nature will fill a certain void in Portland.
 
Yes, it will. And, also, Corey, I wanted to mention to you that there are currently two openings on the Portland Planning Board, one of which I hope to secure. applications are due soon. More info on the City's website. I mention this because of your previously stated interest in the Parks Commission.
 
The members of this forum seem to be responding to this idea really well. I think that Patrick and Corey would make great members of the planning board.
 
Tally so far:

Me
Corey
Portlander
Todd
Union
Josh

I think this is a sizable enough interest to go ahead and form something. My thought is that we should have some sort of a name, maybe a website, and should discuss things, agree on a viewpoint (which I assume will always be pro-urban development), and then advocate it. Any of you can feel free to add your own thoughts, because I really think this should be a group effort to get the most out of it. Any ideas? Perhaps we should meet sometime in the future (not now, but when things calm down after the holidays, maybe this spring)?
 
Oh by the way, my name is Andrew... I wasn't sure if this was one of those places where youbwere supposed to hide your real identity...
 
Yeah some sort of a gathering after the holidays have passed would be good. It would also allow time to set up some sort of an online presence, a name, a general mission statement, etc.
 
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