My other Portland Is a Portland

I always find it difficult to leave Portland, Maine. Perhaps it was living near city streets named for Lewis & Clark that satisfied my Wanderlust for the several years I lived on the West End. My current North Street address on the East End offers no such excuses but rather a tantalizing view to the West. Call it allegiance to latitude, or lack of imagination, but my first vacation in five years took me flying to no other city than Portland, Oregon. My flight stopover at Minneapolis-St. Paul failed to yield the expected sting targeting foot-tapping politicians in the airport restroom, yet upon arriving in Oregon, several of the expectations held by this urban planning pilgrim began to be met by the City of Roses.
While in Portland, I paid several visits to City Hall, where bicycle parking was as available as the elected officials. I scheduled a midday walk with City Councilor and Transportation Commissioner Sam Adams, who showed me around “The Next Big Thing,” the massive street rebuilding project to accommodate the expansion of a light rail system from Portland State University through Union Station, a contemporary of the one we had destroyed in 1961. This expansion and the new aerial tramway up to Oregon Health & Science University tie in to new districts to realize Transit-Oriented Districts (TODs). TODs are core to the neighborhood-based development principles of the Congress for New Urbanism, an influential school of thought on city planning whose adherents praise progress in Portland, Oregon.
I also met with Dan Saltzman, another City Councilor and the city’s Sustainable Development Commissioner, who described for me the city's commitment to green building in its mixed-use redevelopment districts right next to the downtown area known as the Pearl District, which is characterized by its excellence in design and a residential density capable of supporting shops and offices and small parks full of young families. The Pearl District looks and feels how neighborhood planning documents merely read in our Portland, not least the unimplemented ambitions of our Eastern Waterfront Master Plan and the Bayside Vision. Somehow we have not had the same success with implementation of our plans here in Portland, Maine.
What's their secret? I might have figured it out once I met neighborhood advocate Bonny McKnight, who convenes salons, collectively known as the Citywide Land Use Forum, with planners and neighborhood leaders. I went to one monthly meeting where topics included filtration of storm water and preservation of trees, yet I was struck not so much by the topics themselves as by the community that fostered such discussion. McKnight explained that for over thirty years the city has been working under a neighborhood system, whereby neighborhood associations are legitimized by the Office of Neighborhood Involvement (ONI). ONI provides support, technical assistance, and funds management for the neighborhood associations and helped to win assignment of a planner to each neighborhood through the District Liaison Program. The neighborhood system has been credited with improving the quality of planning and development. It makes one wonder how we can enjoy better neighborhood involvement with the help of City Hall.
I returned hopeful that we can leverage the wisdom of our neighborhoods, beginning with District One. Email me with your advice on funding priorities for physical improvements to our streets and parks and on the general direction for community planning and economic development goals here in the East End. What are our greatest needs for pedestrian mobility, recreational opportunity, and vibrant community?
Only we the people know what makes us proud and what would make us think twice before ever leaving the Forest City.

Please let me know how we can show pride in our neighborhoods at kjdonoghue@portlandmaine.gov

-Kevin Donaghue