Property disassembly: 21st Century urban renewal tool?

Urban renewal, like any land-use improvement methodology, has conventions or habits. Conventions are meant to be a framework for success, a recipe that, if followed properly, will yield good results. Conventions, however, tend to become canonical and restricting after a time. They limit what is an acceptable course of action, reducing creativity and possibility.

One convention I have bristled against lately is the notion of property assembly. The thinking goes that underperforming areas often need to be physically remade, by tearing down older structures and replacing them with newer, more useful ones. The land necessary to do this, however, is not always in the right size and configuration of parcels. An urban renewal agency can help assembled these parcels into more developable configurations, thus speeding redevelopment and revitalization. Or so the convention goes.

But is this always the case? Or more pointedly, is it or will it be the predominate case of the 21st Century? I have my doubts. About a year ago, when the recession was no more than a housing bubble crisis, I attended a mini conference in Portland on the future of retail development, held by the International Council of Shopping Centers . One of the speakers was architect Kevin Cavenaugh , developer of numerous small retail buildings, including the famous Rocket Building on East Burnside . He advocated a totally different kind of development, one that concentrated on small parcels, low overhead, and building right up to the property lines. It was a scale of development utterly foreign to the normal PDC models of bulldozers and tax abatements. It also was one in line with thousands of years of organic urban growth. It was, if-you-will, human scale developing.

It is with no small irony, then, that the Cavenaugh point-of-view seems to be one that the PDC itself is more and more open to. Look no further than the Burnside Bridgehead project for the latest example of this. In late March, the PDC announced a new strategy for the multi-block development at the east foot of the Burnside Bridge : carve it up into small parcels and sell it off to different developers. That’s right, subdividing parcels. The PDC had just turned property assembly on its head, creating “property disassembly” as a development tool.

For some time it has been my contention that the rules of development have irrevocably changed. We are not going to wake up one day and find our economy back in 2006, with all the same rules in place. Credit is tighter, and financiers are more risk averse. Big development is now seen as less sound than diversified development. The currency of the 21st Century’s development may no longer be the size or price of land, but rather the culture, transportation access and mode diversity, and distance from residential areas. Property assembly, simply put, may be little more than an outdated tool, something to be filed away with the three platinum Visa cards and low interest no-money-down mortgages.