Homing In On Portland

Helping you home in on your best life in Portland

Mission critical – finding your happy place. My Facebook page can help you get more joy out of your home, neighborhood and city

The places where we live, work and play have a deep impact on our mood, behavior and health. So it’s important to choose them with care. Thoughtfully designed environments can bring out the best in us.

Running just over 2 minutes, Episode 3 of my vlog sketches a few thoughts on how to find your happy place. A key takeaway? You’ll find help and support in that quest on my Facebook page. Click the play button below to watch. (BTW, you can cherry pick its contents using the timed outline just below the embedded video.) Then click here to visit and like my Facebook page.

To cherry pick video content, use this timed outline:
Intro 0 – 0:15
Finding your happy place at home 0:15 – 0:42
Finding your happy place in Portland 0:42-1:23
How my FB page can help 1:23-1:54
Your next step – visit & like my page! 1:54-2:03

Are you a fan of Portland walks and walkability? Here – in 6 buckets – are tips and resources to learn and enjoy more

Episode 2 of my vlog counts the many ways Metro area walks and walkability enhance our lives. In case you didn’t catch it on Youtube or Instagram, you’ll find the video at the bottom of this blog post. The written tips and resources below are a companion piece. I hope they deepen your understanding and appreciation of where you live.

Bucket 1: Get walk scores

Find the walk score of your home or a listed property if you’re looking to buy. Just enter the address in the search window on this home page

Bucket 2: Learn how walkability affects home values

You’ll find Portland-specific data in the graphics of this Redfin article

Bucket 3: Join a Meetup walking or hiking group and let someone else plan your next outing (outdoor groups remain active in the pandemic)

Bucket 4: Buy or borrow guidebooks to memorable walks in Portland and Oregon, some tailored to active seniors and kids

The links below the images will take you to amazon.com, but you may be able to find the e’books on the virtual shelves of your neighborhood public library.

Click hereClick hereClick hereClick here

Bucket 5: Brush up on walkability, the 15-minute city, and Portland’s complete neighborhoods

Bucket 6: Last but not least and because a picture’s worth 1,000 words, here’s a slide show of the nature walk just steps from my door – meant to inspire you to get more joy out of your neighborhood or to visit mine

  • Have seen a Snowy Egret & a Great Blue Heron in this spot!
Homing in on Portland, Episode 2

Get on the fast track to community — and the heart of Portland living — through your neighborhood association

 

1865 home of Cedar Mill founding father, John Quincy Adam Young

One of the things I like best about my work is being out in communities – walking or driving streets, talking with residents, and engaging with institutions and businesses that serve them. Neighborhoods expand and deepen our sense of home, offering connection and belonging beyond property lines and family ties.

The spirit of place thrives in Portland. Did you know that it has 95 recognized neighborhoods? And each is represented by an association that gives residents a voice in local governance? The city’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement (ONI) provides funding, information and technical support to help Portlanders build more inclusive, safe and livable communities.

Grand Central has become Cedar Mill hub since launch of 1st suburban location here 12/15
Signs of Cedar Mill’s past – site of 1855 business that gave community its name

In 2005 and 2006, Portland’s League of Women Voters published a two-part study of our neighborhood associations – past and present. They grew out of the activism of the 70’s. Some weighed in powerfully on land use decisions in the early days, helping to limit freeways and nudge the city toward walkable development and mass transit solutions. Over the past 40+ years, they have continued to evolve – through dissent and conflict as well as partnership, across changing political climates, and in good and bad economic times.

The vitality and achievements of our neighborhood associations command national attention. To take just one example, Portland occupies the whole final chapter of Better Together: Restoring the American Community (2003). Co-authored by Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, the book focuses on the power of networks or “social capital” to help people renew their communities and improve their lives.

Rare lull at Market of Choice wine bar in Timberland Town Center
Open spaces and native flora protect Cedar Mill's water quality

At the same time, associations have struggled with top-down city programs; insular perspectives or NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”); limited funding and capacity; lack of accountability and inequities in how resources are used and shared across the 95 associations and five area coalitions they make up; and not enough diversity among those who participate in them.

Monthly meetings of Cedar Mill’s Community Participation Organization are held at Leedy Grange, built in 1903

It is both because I value community and see opportunities to strengthen it that I recently started attending meetings of my neighborhood association. If you haven’t and would like to, here’s how to get started:

  • Type your home address in the search window of portlandmaps.com and hit enter.
  • The name shown beside the heading ‘Neighborhood’ is your association.
  • If you live in Multnomah County, the name will be a live link. Click on it and you’ll see contact and meeting info for your association.
  • If you’re outside Multnomah County, simply copy and paste the name to a new web browser window and you’ll soon find your way to your association website.

Of course, as a practical matter it’s also my job to do desk and field research that will help clients decide where to live. Neighborhoods are one strand of content in my blog. So far, I’ve written about Cedar Hills, Forest Heights and Cully. Up next? The West Slope. Stay tuned.

Signs of community – entrance to Cedar Mill Library

A tree is nice – and if you buy one for Earth Day the City of Portland will put money back in your hands

When my kids were little, we read the Caldecott-Award-winning storybook that offers a child’s view of why “a tree is nice.” With Arbor and Earth Day coming up April 22nd, it’s timely to review the many virtues of trees.

Trees are very nice. They fill up the sky. They go besides the rivers and down the valleys. They live up on the hills. Trees make the woods. They make everything beautiful.   – Janice May Udry

Stumptown, 1857 (Oregon Historical Society)

In its frontier days of breakneck growth and timber clearing, Portland was dubbed Stumptown. About 160 years on, the City aspires to the nickname ‘Treetown’ for grown-up economic and environmental reasons.

As every realtor knows, trees boost property values. How much? According to one study, each large front-yard specimen increases a home’s sale price by 1 percent. Neighborhoods with good tree cover enjoy a 6-9 percent price edge over those without. Lower income communities see the highest gains from tree planting and landscaping, by the way.

Curb appeal

Trees also reduce homeowners’ utility costs. Two 25-foot trees on the west side of a house result in yearly savings of about 36 percent on cooling bills and 7 percent on heating bills. When whole cities commit to trees, everyone benefits. A good canopy cover lowers both summertime highs (by 5-9 degrees Farenheit) and demand for air conditioning.

Urban tree canopies also help preserve our natural capital, removing greenhouse gases and pollutants from the air. By one estimate, planting 30,000 trees a year for five years will absorb 75,000 tons of carbon dioxide at a cost of just $34 per ton. By another, the tree cover in the Willamette and Lower Columbia Region removes 89,000 tons of pollutants annually.

Our urban canopy and watershed

As they clear the air, trees also clean our water. Urban canopies absorb and filter storm water – to the tune of about 845 gallons per year per tree – that would otherwise flood sewers and pollute waterways. They also help recharge groundwater supplies.

As recently as 1991, 6 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water flowed into the Willamette and Columbia Rivers every year. Facing an Environmental Protection Agency order, the City built new “grey” infrastructure like a $1.5 billion wastewater storage tunnel. Over time, Portland has given higher priority to building our green infrastructure, a more cost-effective approach to protecting the watershed.

The City launched the Grey to Green program in 2008. Tree planting is one of 6 key activities to improve water and air quality, wildlife habitat and livability. The other pillars of the program are acquiring and protecting open spaces, constructing green street planters, building eco-roofs, controlling invasive species and restoring natural vegetation.

As part of Gray to Green, Portland runs an annual “treebate” from September 1 to April 30. If you plant a tree during this period, your water and sewer utility bill will be credited for half the purchase price up to $15 for small species, $25 for medium species and $50 for large species. Click here for details. Local non-profit Friends of Trees partners with the City in the treebate, helping homeowners to choose, buy and plant.

Legacy trees in the Park Blocks

In part as a result of these efforts, Portland can rightly be called Treetown. Covering about 30 percent of the city, our urban forest canopy made the top 10 list compiled by conservation group American Forests a few years back. But the City isn’t resting on its laurels. Much of the canopy we enjoy today is the legacy of previous generations and needs to be restocked as it reaches maturity. Its quality can also be improved. There is not enough diversity (for example, maples and elms are overrepresented and vulnerable to disease and pests) and we need more species that will be large at maturity.

You can check out the health of the canopy in your neighborhood here. If your area doesn’t have a tree report card yet, you can help organize one. Across Portland, community volunteers have worked with the Parks & Recreation Department to inventory neighborhood trees and develop improvement plans. There’s always work to be done – pruning, planting and so on.

Well-being, recreation and aesthetic pleasure

In addition to their economic and environmental value, trees provide these social benefits:

  • Improved health and psychological well-being
  • Privacy, sound barriers and wind breaks
  • Lower crime rates
  • Stronger community ties
  • Recreation
  • Aesthetic pleasure

Believe it or not, these intangibles can be quantified with hedonic pricing, a method commonly used to calculate the effect of environmental features on the market price of housing. I suspect the hedonic value of Portland’s urban canopy is a factor in the tide of migration to the city and rapidly rising home prices.

Doug Fir majesty

Though my head understands the need for such valuations in public policy and commerce, my heart doubts that you can put a price on our urban canopy – or put the appeal of trees into words, for that matter. Maybe that’s why the storybook comes to mind. Maybe there’s no better testament to their power than the childlike wonder of A Tree Is Nice.

 

 

 

 

If you live in unincorporated Washington County, Virginia Bruce has news for you

virginia-with-outline“I have a passion for community. If people understand the place where they live, they’ll be more likely to stay and invest themselves in it.”

This is how 70-year-old Virginia Bruce sums up her life philosophy and her life work.

Founded in 2003, her 12-page monthly Cedar Mill News has been described as a “must-read” for anyone who wants to know what’s going on in the community by Oregon Live.

Interviewed in the white geodesic dome where she offices just off NW Murray Rd, Virginia talks fluently about many facets of community life:

  • Virtual chats with her neighbors in 97229 on Nextdoor.com
  • The local Business Association board member responsible for banners and flower baskets along NW Cornell Rd and other thoroughfares
  • The need for parks in the new Bonny Slope West development
  • Traffic fatalities on county roads
  • The Cider Festival held every October
  • Plans to restore the 1869 saltbox house of John Quincy Adams Young, who came to the area on the Oregon Trail and gave Cedar Mill its name
  • Governance of urban unincorporated areas (UUAs)…and more

In fact, the area’s unincorporated status is a common thread across many of the topics and issues Virginia covers. Since its days as a rural outpost served by postmaster JQA Young from the saltbox family home, Cedar Mill has relied heavily on private, volunteer and improvised efforts to meet community needs. Even as Virginia continues this tradition with her newspaper, she asks herself and others if there might be a better way.

With Washington County’s growth almost double the state average, densely populated suburbs – including Cedar Hills, Garden Home, Raleigh Hills, West Slope, Aloha and Bethany – still function in a governance grey area. They have passed on the early incorporation examples set by Beaverton, Hillsboro, Forest Grove and Tigard. At the same time, Cedar Mill and other UUAs have resisted annexation by both Portland and Beaverton.

As a result of this history, services normally provided by city governments – water supply, sanitation, roads, schools, parks and libraries – have developed piecemeal through single purpose service districts, private companies, county taxes or volunteer contributions. Though Cedar Mill maintains a Portland address and zip code, for example, it’s served by the Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District and Beaverton Independent School District. Its library was built by volunteers.

The quality of these basic services is generally high, says Virginia. But a 6-part series on the governance of Cedar Mill identifies areas where it lags behind neighboring cities, including representation and voice in local government, infrastructure (such as sidewalks, crosswalks and traffic lights), public spaces and events, community identity and planning, and economic development. Published in 2008, the last installment of the series sums up the choices open to Cedar Mill and other UUAs.

Whether we can get the kind of community we need and deserve without a city to guide our development remains to be seen. Alternatives to annexation or incorporation might include a strong private community development association, the village/hamlet concept that’s being explored in Clackamas County (we could learn from their successes and mistakes), even the provision of another urban service district specifically to deal with [services that are inadequate or lacking].

Eight years on, Virginia’s quick to concede that the County has stepped up its game and law enforcement and road services have improved. But she remains concerned about community identity and economic development.

Whatever the future holds, Virginia and her newspaper are pioneering guides to Cedar Mill. Her curiosity, energy and heart help residents understand its past and present, imagine its future, and feel a part of and give back to the community.