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Sanchez was overheard to solicit an endorsement from Dick Cooley, president of the Opportunity Gateway Program Advisory Committee (PAC). Cooley replied that he didn’t think it would be appropriate for the PAC to take up the issue.
Despite all this, Sanchez has so far declined to bring the issue before the Hazelwood Neighborhood Association or the East Portland Land Use Committee. “We’ve asked him several times if he wanted to have a discussion, and he said it was premature,” Kimura told the Memo.
Sanchez says he intends to convene a meeting in late August of “proponents” to discuss the specifics of the proposal. “Right now it’s too vague to be useable,” he told the Memo. He has not approached Hazelwood or the East Portland Land Use Committee, he says, because it is not the time for a “formal” discussion.
If the matter ever did come before Hazelwood, it isn’t likely it would be approved by “consensus.” Sanchez owns commercially zoned lots at 1353 and 1409 Northeast 112th Avenue, both residentially zoned and both adjacent to his commercial property at 111th Square. Twice since 1995 he has tried to establish commercial ventures there and have run afoul of the zoning. At the time, neighbors expressed concern about commercial “encroachment” into residentially zoned areas.
Sanchez says that this is not about a personal development proposal of his. “If it were, I would just go out and ask for a rezoning,” he says. He also says it is a citywide issue, not just a matter for Gateway.
“My feeling is that if you have a client who wants to do something that’s beneficial to the community, within reason you should find a way to do it,” he says. He cited rezoning to allow a US Bank building to proceed.
Rommel’s letter is wrong in at least one respect; the city is not “considering” the matter, at least not through the Gateway zoning process. “We feel that this is a citywide issue,” Ryker says. In addition, “It’s outside the Gateway Plan District Boundary. Also, if there is any absolute in the Gateway Plan District, it is that there should be no increase in density or commercial expansion into single family zoned properties.”
Sorry, Joe
Note that Ryker refers to single family ZONED properties. Single family homes that carry other zone designations are fair game, for reasons fairly similar to Sanchez’s reasoning.
For more than a year, Northeast 103rd Avenue homeowner Joe Rinella and his neighbors have expressed concern about large scale development on adjacent lots facing Northeast 102nd Avenue, and the effects of same on their property. One of the proposed changes, noted above, is a “step down” in zoning where a high density zone abuts a single family property, intended to address exactly this concern. The catch is that it would not apply to properties zoned for other uses, even if they are still a continuous row of homes, as is the case with the west side of 102nd. It is zoned CM, for mixed residential and commercial use.
At a meeting earlier this year Rinella asked if the block could be rezoned. Ryker replied that it could not be. That is still the city’s position. “This is a very tightly drawn district, and a fairly small one,” she told the Memo. For this reason, the city wants to see the commercially zoned lots developed. This would be hard if the west side of 103rd were zoned residential and harder yet if there were constraints to building on 102nd, where the lots are quite narrow.
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