Intentional Planning
Gil Kelley, Director of Citywide Planning for San Francisco and former Planning Director for the
City of Portland, was the keynote speaker at our Annual Meeting, August 16 at the home of Kate Mills. Gil is also a part time resident of the Hood River Valley. His wife Jan has recently become a fulltime resident of Baldwin Creek Drive and Gil joins her on long weekends and holidays. This is an excerpt of his talk.
I was asked to relate my San Francisco experiences to Hood River. That question may seem like a head-scratcher at first, except that, in some ways, what happens in the cities and towns in North America has the largest influence on the areas outside them, the rural areas. As a colleague of mine, Mike Houck often says, “In livable cities is the preservation of the wild.” Making cities work so that people want to be there and not spread out across the landscape is the new and emerging paradigm in land-use planning around the country.
The people who began the Oregon land use system with discussions in the late 1960s that culminated in the 1973 statewide system were quite prescient, not only in terms of preserving resource land but in motivating good cities and towns. We need to be grateful to the land use pioneers–Tom McCall, Hester MacPherson–the whole group that created our system and brought together agricultural, environmental and urban interests to establish something that is a benchmark in the history of American urban development. We take it for granted and complain that the system isn’t working well enough—whatever side you are on—but when you step back it is an amazing thing we have here in Oregon.
Why did I get into this business? There were a couple of forces that were crashing together early in my life. Beginning in high school, my father was involved in Portland’s downtown planning effort that galvanized the business and civic community to create the eventual 1972 Downtown Plan. I remember tagging along to some of those meetings and thinking “Boy this urban stuff is really cool, I’m really into this.” Doing city-making on a big scale from what I’d done as a kid playing with building blocks. I liked the civic engagement and optimism about the future that was in the air in the late 60s. But on the other side of it, we were celebrating the first Earth Day and we were starting recycling and doing all this stuff appreciating nature. These were two very divergent experiences for me until I realized that actually they were about the same thing: making great cities and preserving the wild, agriculture and a great countryside all at the same time. When the whole statewide land use planning discussion came forward, I remember hearing Henry Richmond extolling the virtues of the legal framework that would ultimately deliver on the things I was hoping would happen.
As a planner, I don’t think of the physical form first, I think about the people. The Hood River Valley has amazing natural assets and physical beauty. But I would say that your first asset is your social capital –the resources you possess as groups of organized people who care and your ability to foresee the future and come together to make it happen. That’s your greatest asset here with all apologies to the big mountain sitting over to the south. The meta-lesson that I’ve learned from my years in planning is that the future is you. It’s whatever you guys decide.
It’s hard not to get lost in day-to-day micro issues. But groups like yours –and I’m happy to see that you are infiltrating local institutions and local politics– really need to take that energy and fast forward, focus on the future and then back cast. What is the future you want to see for your kids and grandkids? What does that mean about the tough choices you need to make today and the battles you need to take on? In planning we sometimes of lose track of that. Planning is always supposed to be about the future but we often forget that as we get involved with the latest skirmish on building heights or setbacks or the number of parking spaces. What is it that we are actually fighting about? It’s important to take that step back and think about the future.
Portland is very much like San Francisco but on half speed instead of notched all the way up. San Francisco is a volcano. Unlike most cities in the US, San Francisco is on a trajectory to become a world city because of the presence of technology and the talent, capital and innovation that keep spinning from Berkeley and Stanford. It’s no longer the quaint charming seaside town that New Yorkers looked at as a little cottage village. It’s now threatening New York as the pre-eminent city in the US and it will be the pre-eminent city on the West Coast if we fast forward 20 or 30 years. Portland is not on that trajectory, but it is gaining some of that presence of innovation, young people wanting to move there. Portland, in large part because of the civic innovators like Neil Goldschmidt who got engaged in the land use planning system happening at the state level, was forward looking and created an infrastructure of planning that San Francisco has never had. In many ways, as this demographic trend lands on Portland, it is better prepared than San Francisco has ever been to anticipate growth and figure out what to do about it. There are lots of complaints around the margin about Portland –“there’s congestion, bicycle car conflicts, four story apartments going up with limited parking.” People love it and people hate it but, when you stand back, Portland is a remarkable city among American cities its thoughtfulness. The outcome is its livability.
The common thread I’ve found in Portland and San Francisco and in advising small and large cities over the years from San Paulo, Brazil to small towns like Walla Walla, is to be very, very intentional about your future. It goes back to my comment about getting lost in the weeds sometimes. To be very intentional means that you as a community, including your political institutions and businesses, really need to think deeply about what you want as your collective future. I’m hoping that the City of Hood River’s current planning effort can do that–not just talk about numbers, density, and demographics but actually engage people in how to enhance quality of life and what it ought to look like.
I’ve continued to stay involved with Oregon planning and politics. I’m involved with a non-profit called Oregon 2050 that aims to create a common vision and action agenda to ensure a healthy, vibrant, and resilient future for Oregon. Our cities and towns are where human activity comes together and is intensified — innovation, learning, economic activity, social and civic interaction, recreation, and everyday living. All of these activities are enhanced and magnified in communities that are highly walkable. Many cities in Oregon still struggle to provide safe, clean, well-connected, and walkable neighborhoods We want to develop a demonstration project where we develop a walkability audit that can be performed by residents by walking around, identifying the obstacles to walkability. Sometimes the problem is sidewalks, or traffic speeds or blank walls or just weird intersections. Bringing it down to a scale where people can actually walk around and note what works and what doesn’t work can be a much more informative discussion with planning commissions and city council and even engineering and public works departments.
Along those lines, I would encourage Hood River to think about walkability as the leading platform for engaging people. There is no reason the Heights shouldn’t function as a walking village. It’s got the bones, it’s just got a lot of missing teeth and some so-so buildings that don’t even open to the street. Let’s make that a real place. Why don’t you take the Heights on? Add a few stories here and there, add some housing, widen the sidewalks, tame the traffic a little and really make that a great village that has some of the same qualities that downtown does.