PDC drafts new downtown urban renewal area
The Portland Development Commission’s first attempt at creating a new downtown urban renewal district includes large swaths near Portland State University, PGE Park, and downtown itself.
The proposed area also includes most of the Con-way Inc. freight transport company site in Northwest Portland and the current home of Lincoln High School.
The proposals for the new Central City Urban Renewal District's boundaries would also allow the city leeway to consider ways to better link the Goose Hollow neighborhood with downtown.
The city could explore ways to deal with Interstate 405, which cuts off the westside from the city’s core. Neighbors have championed either capping the freeway or adding buildings that sit on top of it.
“We’re not saying we’ll cap it or bury it,” but PDC recognizes that the freeway is a big barrier, said Peter Englander, a PDC senior project manager who helped draft the district’s proposed boundaries.
Englander previewed the boundaries Friday as an urban renewal committee that’s shaping the Central City plan prepares for a Tuesday meeting. The proposals are part of a “45 percent draft” suggesting areas in which the city could add urban renewal programs. The city could seek to assume as much as $345 million in debt, through bonds, if no changes take place to the proposals.
The commission believes urban renewal projects could help double the assessed values of properties within the 325-acre district over 33 years. Without adding a new district, the assessed property values would rise from $917 million to $2.35 billion. With a new district, the assessed values could reach $5.1 billion, according to the commission.
Urban renewal works through a program called tax-increment financing cash advance loan no fax. Through tax-increment financing, programs pay off bonds that fund projects within urban renewal areas. As property values rise, the increased tax revenue pays for the bonds and other projects.
Since 2001, the strategy has helped boost property values by 195 percent in the River District, 268 percent in the North Macadam area and 47 percent in North Portland’s Interstate district.
The city has explored adding a new urban renewal area to primarily develop westside and downtown neighborhoods for the last year.
Adams’s committee had considered adding the new area from parcels comprising more than 600 acres. The group chose a smaller area because the city is bumping up against a 15 percent restriction on the overall land it can deem eligible for urban renewal benefits.
The proposed Central City area is contiguous, but contains scattered blocks that wouldn’t be part of the tax-increment districts. Those blocks include the downtown parcels holding the Hotel deLuxe, the 12|W mixed-use building and the uncompleted Park Avenue West building. Englander said the blocks were initially withheld from the proposals to help ensure that the overlapping taxing jurisdictions can also benefit from increased property values.
The boundaries, along with the inclusion or exclusion of certain blocks, will remain a work in progress as the district receives further consideration.
The Portland Development Commission’s board must eventually approve the changes, as would the Portland Planning Commission and the City Council. The final approval could take place by 2011.
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