PORTLAND, Ore. - Raised in Florida suburbs, J'ena SanCartier and Philip Losasso know Atlanta well — as the traffic jam they dreaded on their way to somewhere else.
Relocating from Florida last year, the artist and software developer never considered Atlanta. They flew 2,500 miles away to a new home in Portland. Now, instead of highways, they travel via streetcar. And that's how they like it.
No: "love it," in SanCartier's words.
Multiply their story by thousands and you get a pretty good picture of one way Portland differs from Atlanta: since 2000 it has excelled at attracting young, educated, so-called "creative class" workers. The dominant reason, according to one narrative prevalent among city planners, is that young folks gravitate to high-energy, walkable, eclectic neighborhoods where they don't need cars — and that projects like Portland's streetcar help create those neighborhoods.
Architects of the Atlanta Beltline, a $602 million chunk of the July 31 regional transportation referendum, hail it as just such a cityscape-altering project. They even hired the man who wrote the Portland streetcar's plan to write a plan for the Beltline.
"Portland, Oregon, is the model in the U.S.," Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said in 2010, upon winning a grant to build a streetcar line that he called the "spine" of the Beltline. "We have strong evidence that infrastructure creates jobs and stimulates economic investment."
But no project on the referendum list spurs more derision from its opponents, who view such projects as expensive toys that stifle rather than promote real prosperity.
"If every city and town in America tried to replicate what we're doing in Portland you'd bankrupt the country," said John Charles, a free-market opponent of the Portland streetcar. "It's all propped up by state, federal and local subsidies."
In nine days, voters across 10 metro Atlanta counties can help make the Beltline happen with the T-SPLOST vote.
Or they can decide it's not for them.
As they weigh their votes, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution took a tough look at Portland's experience to answer two key questions:
Did the streetcar produce the benefits its fans claim for it?
And, if so, would what worked there necessarily work here?
Transformation
In the 1990s Portland's Pearl District was a partly disused rail yard dotted with warehouses, gritty and forbidding. But artsy and adventurous types gave it a go, moving into some of the cheap or abandoned spaces.
Then heavyweight developers and the city decided the area had potential. Developer Homer Williams and the city knocked out an agreement: His team would build condos, lofts and apartments, and the city would run a streetcar through the area.
Today the streetcar, which opened in 2001, drops shoppers, tourists, workers and residents at the district's dozens of shops, restaurants, bars and residential buildings.
The four-mile line cost $103 million to build, with the largest pieces being $30 million from city parking fees, $19 million from property owners along the line, $17 million from federal grants, and $20 million borrowed against future property tax revenues. The city also funded some improvements such as parks and gave tax breaks for building affordable housing.
The yearly operating budget of $5.5 million is paid for through payroll taxes, parking fees and fares. Fares have been free within part of downtown, but in the fall the city will start charging everywhere, and will also open a new 3.4 mile extension.
As of April 2008, when the city formally tallied up the value of the new development, $3.5 billion had been invested within two blocks of the streetcar alignment. Since then the condo market has sputtered. Still, developers have announced or built nearly two dozen new projects, according to Rick Gustafson, the director of Portland Streetcar Inc.
"And we could have sworn the economy was in trouble," he gloated.
Williams, who kicked off the district's transformation, acknowledges he would have invested even without the streetcar — but only a fraction of what he's poured in to date.
"Between 2003 and 2008 we did $1 billion" he said. "We would not have done $750 million of that if the streetcar wasn't there."
Mayor Sam Adams feels certain the streetcar didn't just attract money that, without it, would have been invested elsewhere in the city. He believes the project changed the quantity of development, not just its location.
"That's net. Additive," he said. "That's above the historic rate."
John Carroll, who developed a swank condo tower called The Eliot, agrees: "That investment would not have been made generally in the market."
Opponents say such arguments are seductive but wrong.
"No one's ever going to prove that claim or disprove it," said John Charles, president of the Cascade Policy Institute, a libertarian Portland think tank. "It's all snake oil. If it was such a great development tool, all the developers would put the money up themselves."
The thing about streetcars
Lisa Watson only knows that her bakery, Cupcake Jones, does well in large part thanks to the streetcar.
"I honestly think the streetcar has built a destination," Watson said. "People go by in the streetcar and we'll see them looking out the window at us, pointing. Then they'll get off next stop and walk back."
What makes a streetcar different from a heavy rail line or even a bus, is how easy and pleasant it is to ride. In most cases, people get directly on and off at street level, and it moves smoothly down the street at a moderate pace, almost like an amusement ride.
Portland officials are under no illusion that a streetcar can succeed on its own. Streetcar riders are pedestrians first. That means that buildings along the line must present a friendly face to the street — full of windows and doorways that provide glimpses of inviting spaces, and not forbiddingly tall.
Portland has enacted strict zoning laws to make sure development along the streetcar conforms.
One payoff for the city is denser development that places less of a burden on taxpayer-funded services than spread-out suburbs do.
"It costs money to extend infrastructure," said Catherine Ciarlo, Portland's transportation director, whether that be roads or sewers.
In fact, Portland's strategy for years has been not just to encourage denser development through initiatives like the streetcar, but to flat-out prohibit development beyond an encircling line called the Urban Growth Boundary.
Portland planners readily admit their choices are shaping development. But so do all choices, they say. A highway is a government-funded development plan that is destined to draw certain types of buildings and certain types of people.
The youth economy
The holy grail for many cities these days is the group some researchers call "young creatives." They're educated, relatively affluent and consume less in the way of government services than children or the elderly.
In the race to attract them, Portland is doing much better than Atlanta. Within the last decade, Atlanta saw a 10 percent increase to Portland's 24 percent, said Joe Cortright, a researcher who studies the demographic of 25-to-34 year-olds with college degrees.
Why? Neighborhoods such as the Pearl, where you don't have to have a car, are one reason, Cortright said. "Transit is sort of part of a package of things that talented young people are looking for in cities."
Sam Blackman, 36, owner of a Portland video company called Elemental Technologies, bore him out. "I don't know if the streetcar on its own is a recruiting tool," he said . Nevertheless, he said, it would be "very, very difficult to recruit the top folks to the suburbs these days. They just don't want to be driving 45 minutes."
Nike's creative director, Scott Williams, does commute by car — from a his condo on the streetcar line to Nike's suburban campus. He hails from Los Angeles, with its "car culture," but he's come to love Portland's urban vibe. He doesn't mind the slice of his taxes that go toward the streetcar. "I'm all for it," he said.
One thing the streetcar has not done is unsnarl traffic throughout the larger Portland region, which is almost on par with Atlanta's. The national congestion study, Urban Mobility, recently ranked Portland 19th worst in the nation, behind Atlanta, at 13th worst.
Portland's suburban congestion is "horrendous," said Don Feltham, 56, a high-tech salesman who lives in the suburb of West Linn. "Every day it's bumper to bumper. In winter if it snows it's a mess."
Even so, he favors spending tax money on the streetcar, believing it can only help.
Not everyone is on the bandwagon. The suburb of Lake Oswego recently shelved plans to extend the streetcar line to a point within its boundaries.
"I don't really want the city to go spend hundreds of millions of dollars on something like that now," said Shayne Kiness, 35, who owns a wealth management firm. He lives and works in Lake Oswego.
Atlanta is not Portland
Across metro Atlanta, many Beltline opponents don't much care what people in Portland like.
"We have chosen a land-use pattern," and it's not dense, said Baruch Feigenbaum, an analyst with the free-market Reason Foundation. "From my perspective we should be producing the transportation system that people want."
Even some transit advocates who support the Beltline shy away from the Portland analogy. "Let's face it," said Ashley Robbins, president of Citizens for Progressive Transit, "Atlanta's not Portland."
Eighty-one percent of metro Portlandians commute by car, and in the city itself 6 percent commute by bike, an astronomical number. In metro Atlanta, 88 percent commute by car and the next largest group is telecommuters.
But Atlanta does have pockets of dense, walkable space, including some neighborhoods that would be linked by the Beltline, such as Inman Park, Georgia Tech and Poncey-Highland. In parts of Atlanta, a quarter of commuting is done by transit, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission.
Even more people would use transit, Beltline advocates argue, if more options existed. Studies predict the Beltline would draw 11,800 passenger trips daily by 2025.
"Atlanta's a little more spread-out city, but this is a core area of intense development, and these are historic streetcar neighborhoods," said Patrick Sweeney, the former Portland planner who now works at the Beltline.
Carroll, the Portland developer, looks at a map of the Beltline corridor and sees opportunity: major universities, thriving residential and business areas and disused areas that can support new development.
Whether the region's voters will agree the the opportunities justify the costs remains to be seen.
Steve Anthony, a former director of the state Democratic Party, has seen recent polls that show support for the referendum slipping. He thinks polarized opinion on high-profile projects such as the Beltline is part of that.
"I think it has a shot one day to get passed and implemented," he said. He just isn't sure when.
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