Portland State Magazine Fall 2013

18 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE FALL 2013 Students and neighbors create a safe, pleasing and even enviable plan for busy North Lombard Street. Reimagining Lombard VACANT LOTS overgrown with weeds, and business fronts splattered with sloppy graffiti dot a two-mile stretch of North Lombard Street between Chautauqua and Martin Luther King boulevards. The four-lane corridor in north Portland feels more like an unsightly obstacle than a neighborhood hub. Urban and regional planning graduate students set out to change this by working with the surrounding community on the plan Lombard Re-Imagined. “The street really acts as a barrier between neighborhoods because it’s such a highway. When you’re walking on Lom- bard, you don’t feel like you’re anywhere,” says Kathryn Doherty-Chapman, project manager for the student team, which named themselves Swift Planning Group after the historic Swift Meatpacking Company that once owned the entire area. Swift Planning Group was formed as part of the Master of Urban and Regional Planning workshop in the College of Urban and Public Affairs. Each year, student teams take on projects that help local communities with planning issues. Most of the projects are based on proposals from community members—somewhere between 40 to 60 submitted each year. This past year, in addition to Lombard, student teams took on five other community needs, including plans for housing in downtown Oregon City and anti-displacement in Portland’s Cully Neighborhood. Each project serves as the culminating work for earning a master’s degree. “This is not a theoretical project,” says Ethan Seltzer, workshop adviser and professor of urban studies and planning. “This is an actual project with real people who have things at stake. We want our students to experience the implications of interacting in that environment.” THE SWIFT Planning Group received its proposal from the Kenton Neighborhood Association. Lombard Street runs through Kenton as well as the Piedmont and Arbor Lodge neighborhoods. In addition to Doherty-Chapman, the team consisted of Rebecca Hamilton, Brian Hurley, Jodi Jacob- son-Swartfager, Zef Wagner, and Jake Warr. All earned their MURP degrees in June. The students reached out to area residents through walking tours and surveys, by attending neighborhood association meetings and by setting up a website lombardreimagined.com and an associated Facebook page to organize their efforts. They were amazed at the enthusiastic response they received. “We were expecting to have to create some sort of interest in this street. And personally, I went into this project thinking the attitude was going to be, ‘Oh, it’s just a highway, nothing can be done,’” says Warr, technical lead for the Swifts. “But it turned out that there was all this untapped energy.” Based on the community’s responses, the team identified safety as the most pressing problem, since the street is part of the fast-moving Highway 30 bypass. First on the students’ WR I T T E N AND P HOTOGRA P H E D B Y HEATHE R QU I NN - BORK Lombard Street has a few murals and interesting old buildings, but they’re not enough to make the area pedestrian friendly.