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City, developers call for big box retail at CascadeStation

Is the project becoming “A suburban mall with urban features?”

LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO

“Why are we building big box retail on a light rail line?” Portland Planning Commission member Ruth Scott asked when that body reviewed the CascadeStation project in the year 2000.

The Portland Planning Commission is a volunteer group appointed by the mayor to recommend policy.

Told that regulations would prohibit structures of more than 60,000 square feet in the 120-acre development Scott said, “OK, why are we building medium box retail there?”

Her answer, couched in diplomatic terms, was that the station’s developers, the Bechtel and Trammel Crow corporations, were paying a good piece of the freight for the city’s latest light rail line, so they got what they felt they needed.

The same is true today.

The Portland Planning Bureau and the Portland Development Commission are pushing a set of amendments to the CascadeStation Plan District regulations. Among other things, they would allow buildings of up to 200,000 square feet at three locations (one discussion draft calls for a 265,000-square-foot building), reduce the total office component of the project from 1,325,000 square feet to 1,115,000, reduce the hotel component from 1,200 rooms to 250, and increase the total retail component from 500,000 square feet to 807,000.

City and CascadeStation Development Company officials say the changes are necessary to get development off the ground, where it has stood for three years, and a reasonable adaptation to changing circumstances. The more cynical might say it is inching toward what former Planning Commission Chairman Rick Michaelson once dubbed it: “A suburban mall with urban features.”

The original vision
The original concept for CascadeStation sounded like a win-win-win-win situation for the city and its investors. Bechtel and Trammel Crow would pay $28 million of the $125 million cost of what eventually became the TriMet MAX Light Rail Red Line to the airport, allowing the line to be built without a vote of what was then a very skeptical public. In exchange, the corporations, as CascadeStation Development Company, would have free use of the vacant 120-acre property for 85 years. Even then, it would be subject to strict design controls: creation of a park blocks through the middle of the project, 15-foot sidewalks, minimum heights, and prohibitions on parking between the street and entrance, to name a few. With offices, hotels, retail, restaurants and theaters, it would be a true transit-related urban village.

Portland City Commissioner Charlie Hales, in particular, said it presented a unique opportunity (what other city has so much vacant land so close to a major airport?) for travelers to spend their time - and money - while they waited between flights. It would have enough synergy within its component parts to sustain itself independently, while providing attractions from the rest of the region. It would be a very desirable alternative to “big box retail and strip malls,” Hales said.

What went wrong
Of course, the project has been the victim of unforeseen and probably unforeseeable circumstances. The Red Line opened to great fanfare on Sept. 10, 2001 - exactly one day before Osama Bin Laden and his friends altered air travel forever. The rate of air travel dropped 50 percent from what it had been. It eventually recovered, but to a world of drastic new security measures that most passengers did not want to endure more than once if they could help it. Retail services within the secure area adapted surprisingly well; between flight delays and over compensation for security delays, many travelers found themselves with time to kill, and restaurants and shops had a captive audience. However, not even CascadeStation Company representatives think such travelers could be their customers, although they say they hope for business from PDX’s 9,000-person work force.

Quite apart from changes in the travel industry, the bottom has dropped out of the office market. “There is no demand for office,” CascadeStation’s Sonia Axter says. Nor, it is said, is there demand for high quality retail space in the configuration the plan proposes. The strategy now is to get something really big and exciting that is not only not afraid to settle in what is now a wilderness, but is capable of attracting other things to it. “Once that is established, it allows the office market,” Axter says.

Just what would this wonderful retailer be? Officials hint at something really dramatic, although they name no names. “A variety of people are being talked to,” Jeff Murphy of CascadeStation says. However, “Until we know what happens with the zoning, no one will sign.”

The original plans for hotels were made at a time when Portland had a shortage of hotel beds. Since then developers have over-responded to the need, the tourist market is still depressed, and there are plans for a new Headquarters Hotel of 600 or more rooms in the Lloyd District. “The hotel market is probably more depressed than the office market,” Axter says.

A suburban mall
However, some aspects of the project were arguably doomed from the start. Given that PDX was never a regional travel hub like Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, there was no prospect for large numbers of passengers waiting endlessly for connecting flights and looking for a place to hang out, even in the pre 911 world.

Look closely at the proposed project diagram, and you will find that behind the park blocks and the urban streetscape that faces them, there are acres of surface parking. Planners realized that, office, hotels or no, CascadeStation’s retail shops would be aimed at regional clients, most of who would come by car. As Michaelson observed in the year 2000, “You may get more than the traditional 5 percent transit ridership for developments like this, but you’ll never get the 40 percent you get downtown.” Axter estimates transit ridership will be less than 10 percent. Thus, most visitors will never even see the streetscape the city is trying so hard to create.

Part of the selling point of both the Red Line and CascadeStation to Mid-County neighborhoods was that it would bring more people to the area, and perhaps tempt them to check out what communities such as Parkrose have to offer, in a way that a freeway access ramp would not. Wayne Stoll, former president of the Parkrose Business Association, was an enthusiastic backer of this idea when the station was first planned. “This will give us access to the whole light rail system,” he told the Memo in 1998. “People from Hillsboro might ride out to Parkrose to see what it’s like.” Bechtel and Trammel Crow “have the capacity to do it right as long as they stay true to their vision.”

And if they depart from it? Could what was once seen as an economic engine for Mid-County become a giant vacuum sucking the life out of everything around it?

Hazelwood Neighborhood Association Chairwoman Arlene Kimura doesn’t see the big boxes as a threat to local retail.

“People will go there for a specific reasons,” she says, “and I don’t see them as competing with neighborhood stores. However, she adds, the Hazelwood Neighborhood Association has “informally” discussed the proposed changes, “and we’re not happy with them. A lot of thought went into these regulations. It seems like a knee jerk reaction because things aren’t moving as fast as you’d like them to.”

Acceptance or apathy?
Such thoughts either didn’t occur or didn’t bother the few people who attended a public open house on the proposed changes. According to planner Debbie Bischoff, only 15 people who were not staff or associated with the project showed up. Of these, only one submitted a written comment, objecting to the big boxes. Based on informal remarks by others, they seemed to be divided on the issue, she said.

One attendee, who asked not to be quoted by name and said she takes her dogs to run in the area, was annoyed by the fast pace of the review process. (The Planning Commission is scheduled to act on the proposal at an evening hearing on Nov. 23, and the City Council to enact it in December.) Regarding the substance of the proposal she asked, “What else can they do? No one will come here unless there’s something special waiting for them.”

If nothing else, CascadeStation has two very persuasive arguments going for it: Given three years to bear fruit, the original plan is clearly not working; and the city has gone too far to pull out now.
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