Suzanne Harold would love to enjoy her front porch this summer. There’s just one problem–the unimproved road alongside her house is home to a pothole so large that neighbors have dubbed it “Lake Carlton.”
During the winter and spring, the pothole fills with water and sometimes ice, engulfing nearly the entire road. While this 20 by 30 foot mud or water pit (depending on the season) may deter many vehicles from driving through this residential block, it hasn’t exactly brought peace and quiet to the residents living alongside it. Lake Carlton has become a pretty popular route for all terrain vehicles. The sound of flying gravel and resulting dust clouds of passing traffic does not set the best scene for enjoying summer evenings on the porch.
Life on Lake Carlton
“We moved here four years ago,” says Harold, “and it's been a growing problem: dusty in the summer, full of icy water in the winter, and a magnet for 4x4 vehicles speeding through the neighborhood and tearing up the road.”
In addition to the sound pollution, the popularity of this block for all-terrain enthusiasts has contributed to the growing size of Lake Carlton, and as the water sits stagnant during the warming spring and summer months, the pool provides an ever-growing breeding ground for mosquitoes.
“We have a lovely front porch that's begging for a porch swing,” Harold reflects, “just as soon as it's pleasant to sit outside!”
Suzanne Harold is not alone. Unimproved streets are a reality for many Portland residents, especially those living in the outer Northeast and Southeast neighborhoods.
Approximately 2% of Portland’s roads are unimproved, measuring a total of about 128 lane miles. These roadways are typically dirt or gravel lanes that suffer from ineffective drainage, overgrown vegetation and undefined edges. It’s not uncommon for potholes on these blocks to grow to a size fitting for a duck pond. Lake Carlton is a prime example.
The major challenge in dealing with these roads is that, according to Portland’s City Charter, the maintenance of unimproved roads are not the responsibility of the City. The residents living alongside unimproved roads are responsible for their upkeep.The only way to get the City of Portland to begin maintaining an unimproved road is to bring the road up to city standards–including curbs, proper drainage and sidewalks.
Photo courtesy of Roadway Not Improved.
Residents are given the option of paying individually to fully improve the road or organizing as a Local Improvement District (LID) to split the cost as a group. The LID process is the primary mechanism the City provides citizens for bringing roads up to city standards, and even though it provides landowners with access to low-interest loans, the $10,000 and higher investment required from each homeowner is an expense far beyond the reach of most residents living alongside these roads. This leaves most property owners alongside unimproved roads with the burden and challenge of street maintenance.
Woodstock Residents Envision Alternatives for Unimproved Streets
With approximately 8% of its roadways unimproved, The Woodstock Neighborhood Association (WNA) has long been exploring the challenges and opportunities unimproved roadways.
Kenny Heggem, who serves as WNA’s Media and Public Relations Chair, is excited about the potential that Woodstock’s unimproved streets provide for building a self-sufficient neighborhood. He sees the scattered blocks that are now a serious obstacle course for him as a bicycle commuter as a potential center of community through projects like community gardens, dog agility courses and a variety of pedestrian and bicycle paths.
There are other Woodstock residents who want to permanently close the unimproved road next to their property to end littering and criminal activity.
Despite differing views, Woodstock residents are stepping up and saying they want to take matters into their own hands. The challenge is figuring out exactly what can be done, how to connect the plan to overall access and transportation needs, and how to bring neighbors together to agree on a plan.
Recently, the WNA partnered with LARKE Planning, a group of five Portland State Masters of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) students, in a project called Roadway Not Improved, to explore the opportunities and challenges created by Woodstock’s unimproved roads and offer up potential solutions.
In a May 24, 2010 Oregonian feature, Matt Wickstrom, the Southeast District Liaison for Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability advisor and the MURP students’ technical advisor, described the project as recession-era planning, because the residents were exploring how to use limited resources and existing assets to achieve community goals.
Leah Hyman, one of the PSU MURP students and the Neighborhood Land Use and Sustainability Program Manager at the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Coalition, likes Wickstrom’s recession-era planning comparison: “To me, it’s really shown me how motivated citizens are when they more or less have to be.”
Planter boxes along Southeast Tolman Street near Southeast 43rd Avenue.
Roadway Not Improved
From January to June 2010, LARKE worked as consultants for WNA. They first inventoried and mapped the street characteristics of all Woodstock roads, researched city policy and met with city planners and engineers to gather information about property owners' rights and responsibilities related to rights-of-way (ROW) adjacent to their property.
This background information was the foundation for what the students considered the project’s most important information gathering–talking to residents and property owners about how they currently use and perceive unimproved roadways and how they would like to use them in the future.
These conversations took place throughout the five-month project, beginning with a Discovery Session and a web survey and followed by an advisory meeting, a public meeting and a final presentation. LARKE also held a focus group to gather residents’ experiences with the Local Improvement District process.
The community discussions provided a way for residents to connect over a shared concern. By participating in the community discussions, Harold discovered that many of her neighbors were also dealing with the challenges of living on an unimproved road. “The only unimproved street that concerned us prior to the Roadway Not Improved project was the one immediately across from our house,” says Suzanne Harold.
The maps produced by the students served as an effective tool for residents to visualize and talk about what to do with unimproved roads. “Seeing a map of the area drove home that none of the east-west streets between Glenwood and Woodstock and 39th and 46th connect all the way through,” Harold said. “As Woodstock continues to develop and get busier, people in the neighborhood will need ways to get around without always using Woodstock. Simply closing off all the unimproved streets to vehicles isn't a viable solution.”
Woodstock’s Discovery Session revealed that paving all the roads was also not a solution. When surveyed, 39 out of 60 respondents preferred to keep at least some of Woodstock’s unimproved roadways unpaved, even if funding was not an issue.
With the valuable feedback gathered from community discussions in mind, LARKE explored alternative policies, designs and funding strategies that would address the residents’ desires and concerns. They came up with potential street design options for residents to consider.
These options, which included designs for DIY dirt, gravel, interim pavement, shared courts, serpentine streets, shed streets, community gardens and linear parks, were first presented to an advisory committee of city planners, engineers and elected officials to evaluate legal, technical and political feasibility.
The design ideas, along with the estimated price tag for each option, were then presented to the Woodstock neighborhood for feedback. At the project’s conclusion, the student’s findings and recommendations were presented through two final products:
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The Roadway Not Improved Community Toolkit provides step-by-step information for community members interested in collaborating on improvements or temporary uses of unimproved roadways. The Toolkit informs property owners of their rights and responsibilities under current city policy, provides information about choices, outlines strategies for collaborating with neighbors, and plants the seeds for a neighborhood approach to maintenance and advocacy.
The Final Report documents the project’s findings and recommendations for city planning and is designed to provide local decision makers with an understanding of issues relevant to unimproved streets.
Neighbors Work Together to Improve Problem Roads
After participating in Roadway Not Improved, Suzanne Harold and other Woodstock residents have realized that it is possible for neighbors work together to improve problem roads themselves.
In the coming months, a group of neighbors living on Southeast Carlton plan to partner with the PSU graduate students to make improvements to their block that will transform it into a road that is hospitable for pedestrians and front porch swings. The goal is for this to be a demonstration project that will inspire other landowners living alongside unimproved roads to come up with their own solutions.
Leah Hyman says that even though the Roadway Not Improved project is completed, she and the other four MURP students are committed to working with the Woodstock neighborhood to make sure that this does not become another study that gathers dust on a shelf. She sees the coming months as the Roadway Not Improved Implementation phase.
Shifting the project under the umbrella of Southeast Uplift Coalition, where student Leah Hyman works, the LARKE team is taking steps to make sure that Roadway Not Improved will inform and impact the development and policies surrounding unimproved roads not only in the Woodstock neighborhood but also in neighborhoods across the city.
Transforming the Lake Carlton block into a demonstration project will allow the students and Woodstock residents to test-drive the Roadway Not Improved Toolkit, and make improvements as needed.
The group also hopes to partner with neighborhood coalitions and associations to broaden the distribution of the Roadway Not Improved Toolkit both through print and web.
From the project’s onset, LARKE and the WNA shared the hope that the project’s findings would inform the Portland Plan, a plan that will guide city planning for the next 25 years. Roadway Not Improved is tentatively scheduled to present at City Council this October.
“I hope the discussions that have started, and the information that's been shared, will help the neighbors in my immediate area come together and create a plan for fixing the situation at ‘Lake Carlton,’” says Suzanne Harold.
She also hopes that the tools LARKE outlined in their report can be used by other neighborhoods in Portland. “While Woodstock has a higher percentage of unimproved roads than many neighborhoods, our situation is not unique.”
The Roadway Not Improved Toolkit and Final Report and well as photos and more information about the project are available online at: www.roadwaynotimproved.com.
Wow. I had no idea that unimproved roads were the responsibility of the local homeowners. That seems really unusual. I hope more communities can take advantage of the toolkit program if they want it.
I was surprised to learn this, too. And I was even more surprised to learn about the ATVs using these unimproved roads for recreation and making them even worse (and more expensive to repair). Don't get me started on Lake Carlton. This was an eye-opening article, for sure. Like you, I hope that more communities can take advantage of this program.
The effort to develop a "toolkit" is admirable. However, many of the options proposed include walkers sharing the same paved roads as cars, which is not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and dangerous for many of the disabled, children and the elderly. Some options include walkers shunted to a meandering path instead of a direct route. Other options would reduce the public space that public streets provide, by privatizing large parts of the right of way. While auto travel does not need encouragement and paving the auto path might be optional, planning for an oil-depleted future would call for first-class smooth, paved (mud-free) sidewalks, not paths shared with cars. It is worth noting that this "toolkit" is not endorsed by the City of Portland, and that Transportation staff reviewed the proposals, but did not "approve" them.
Better options to encourage walking and biking would include paving concrete sidewalks (the most long-lasting and thus most economical material) in their traditional locations at each edge of the right-of-way, so that people could travel these streets, and leaving the street paving (and possibly storm drainage improvements) to a later date.