Posted Feb 8, 2016, 2:59 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Portland
Posts: 2,788
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On P.22 of the latest NW Examiner, there's an article about how the Bill Naito Company "always intended" to build housing around Montgomery Park and create a "24-hour mini-city".
Quote:
Montgomery Park, a converted warehouse built in 1919, has enjoyed a successful second life as an office building where 3,000 people come to work every day. But the man who redeveloped the old Montgomery Ward distribution center at Northwest 27th and Vaughn streets in the 1980s had something even bigger in mind. “He envisioned a mini city that would be active at all hours,” said Anne Naito-Campbell, daughter of Bill Naito, who died in 1996. “He envisioned redevelopment something like Con-way.”
Con-way Inc. (now XPO Logistics Inc.), located eight blocks away, represents the ultimate local example of industrial land transforming into a high-density urban neighborhood. The process unfolded long after her father died, but Naito-Campbell, one of four family members on the corporate board, said mixed-use redevelopment appealed to him.
The company delayed pursuit of his vision due in part to nine years of “family feuding” over control of the company after his death, she said.
“Montgomery Park is now the focus of the company’s attention,” she said, adding that the city’s housing shortage and spiraling housing costs heighten the opportunity. The current draft of the city’s comprehensive plan, however, would ban residential construction on the company’s 18-acre holdings, which include vast parking lots and two parking structures in addition to the looming structure—Oregon’s second largest office building, with nearly a million square feet of space.
The property is zoned EX (Central Employment), which allows commercial, residential and industrial activity.
The Portland Bureau of Planning & Sustainability wants to eliminate the “catch-all” EX zone outside the central city and replace it, in this case, with a newly created “General Employment 2.” EG2 would allow current activities to continue, while shutting off the housing option that Montgomery Park’s owners, Bill Naito Co., might pursue at some point.
To Rick Gustafson, who chairs the corporation’s board, putting housing next to the workplace makes sense from an environmental and transportation efficiency standpoint. Gustafson, who was CEO of Portland Streetcar Inc. for its first 12 years and a key player in bringing light rail to the city in 1986, reasons that keeping many Montgomery Park workers off the road would make it possible to convert current parking facilities into more productive use while reducing driving throughout the region.
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(more at the link)
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