This summer, nearly 13 acres of highly desirable urban land will become available to Portland restaurants and nonprofits that might use some of it for a pittance.
The land comes in the form of 3,500 city-maintained metered parking spaces on miles of under-25 mph streets in Old Town/Chinatown; the Pearl District, just north of downtown; the Lloyd Center area, in northeast; and the booming South Waterfront, a Gold Coast-in-the-making south of downtown.
Only a fraction of the spaces will be claimed to extend sidewalk seating or to mount an art show, however, leaving most of the land to serve its original purpose: to park cars. But curb-high wood decks with tables and chairs and Cinzano umbrellas could appear anywhere in the areas recently outlined by the city's
as available for such alternative uses.
The alternative-use program, known as Street Seats, kicked off last year with a pilot of three restaurants that extended seating into areas previously open to cars. The restaurants reported expanded business and happy customers. And what's not to like?
Most folks enjoy dining al fresco, particularly on languid summer evenings. And restaurateurs, who typically work on thin margins, can turn more tables by spending modest upfront costs and then by reimbursing the city for lost meter revenue, hardly a whopping sum at the end of the day.
Nonprofits have not yet participated. But reports from San Francisco, where this type of program started a few years ago, are that most folks enjoy more and varied street activity -- and all one has to do is consider how much of Rome's magic depends upon its piazzas, where cars and pedestrians and food and music and bikes and performance art often collide.
But we're neither Rome nor San Francisco, where car ownership is breathlessly expensive and even punishing. It's no accident Portland's downtown core is excluded from the program -- prodding by a concerned
fenced off the transportation bureau from encroaching.
The hard fact is that Street Seats can limit the use by cars of parking spaces that widen and line streets in a city with persistent and growing parking problems. The 13 acres' worth of metered spaces were originally installed as street surface projects of enormous expense to taxpayers, who see neither reimbursement in the new uses nor uses that were conceived at the time of construction.
Portland has a parking issue that needs to be addressed. It's not as if our parking spaces are weedy brownfields begging for new uses. That the transportation bureau wants to seat people as well as move them suggests mission creep. And it's sadly ironic that restaurant-bound people circling busy neighborhoods in search of available parking might find it fractionally more difficult to do so if Street Seats expands substantially.
The transportation bureau says it has heard from 32 interested parties, some or all of which will apply by May 1 for inclusion this summer. A spokeswoman for the bureau was clear in telling The Oregonian's editorial board on Friday that no application will move forward without the full involvement of neighborhoods and businesses situated near the restaurant or nonprofit wishing to make use of valuable public parking spaces.
That's as it should be, because everyone owns Portland's finite supply of parking spaces, metered or otherwise. Going forward, city commissioners and transportation bureau leadership should ask whether colonizing our street parking spaces is the best way for the bureau to promote urban dynamism -- or whether ensuring Portlanders they can drive and expect to find parking is enough. We'd suggest the latter.