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| Ladd carriage house: Coming back anytime soon? |
Like other urban centers, downtown Portland suffers today from vacant storefronts, vacant offices and boarded-up windows. Starting in 2020, the COVID pandemic changed office practices and heavily crippled traditional downtown retail and nightlife.
Urbanists realize that major downtowns will not recover to
being their former selves. So, what are
the options for improvement? A Portland
City Club panel with experts from San Francisco and Denver said cities’
priorities are largely similar: clean, safe streets; night-time and cultural
activities; mixed uses with more housing; activated public spaces and
pedestrian-friendly streets.
But they agreed every city has to find its own solutions;
what works in one city might not in another.
Sarah Dennis-Phillips, director of economic and workforce
development in San Francisco, offered a few interesting possibilities that
Portland might consider. She said a
change in law allows bars to provide sidewalk drinking spaces which are proving
popular. She also said the city is
working with landlords who are willing to offer up to six months of free
ground-floor rent for new commercial businesses.
While concerts and cultural events can draw people downtown,
Dennis-Phillips said cultural institutions themselves are facing financial
challenges, presumably stemming from the Trump
Administration and many unrelated individual factors.
“We have a good sense of what works and what people want,”
she said. But she said a key factor is
figuring out how to maintain amenities without requiring on-going subsidies.
Like many cities, Portland’s downtown suffers from an office
vacancy rate of approximately 30 percent.
Many of those offices will not be refilled, given the popularity of
working from home learned during the pandemic.
Since 2022, Dennis-Phillips said, “The world has changed for good.” While converting offices to housing is often
suggested, she said realistic opportunities have proven rare.
Portland’s interesting supply of historic buildings
potentially should assist in revitalizing downtown. The most obvious candidate is the shuttered Ladd
carriage house, which offers a turn-key opportunity for reopening an attractive
fully-equipped bar and restaurant.
More problematic is the old Multnomah County Courthouse,
once approved for being converted to office spaces and public events, and the
magnificent Roman-style temple that once housed U.S. National Bank. Someday,
one assumes that creative thinkers will find attractive uses for these engaging
buildings that will help reenergize downtown Portland.
----Fred Leeson
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