Parents Want Pearl with Kids

Condo dwellers in the Pearl District, the pair rode the streetcar to the Southwest Jefferson Street stop downtown, took pictures in the sculpture garden outside the Portland Art Museum, played in the South Park Blocks, then wandered over to City Hall, where they delivered a handful of letters to Mayor Tom Potter.

Davis delivers the letters – more than 30 so far – every week. The letters are from residents of the Pearl District asking city commissioners to support the siting of a school, a community center and a child care facility in the Pearl District.

Two weeks ago the Portland Bureau of Planning released its North Pearl District Plan. The document – to be voted on by the city’s planning commission and then the City Council in weeks to come – outlines a future Pearl District with families, a school, a community center and child care, and the zoning changes that just might make all that attainable.

But the North Pearl plan isn’t so much about attracting families with children to live in the Pearl. What city officials want to do is get families with young children – people like Davis and her husband, Jason Davis – to stay in the Pearl once their children reach school age.

That hasn’t happened in the Pearl so far. It’s a place with few kids, and almost no kids older than 4.

Troy Doss, senior planner with the city’s planning bureau, says families leaving the Pearl has been the undeniable trend in recent years.

Precise numbers for children in the Pearl simply don’t exist. A Portland Development Commission study showed there were 157 births between 2001 and 2005, up from 82 in the previous five years. But the study included a few homes outside of the Pearl, on the west side of Interstate 405. And nobody knows how many children born in the Pearl stay there.

A draft of the new district plan refers to the Pearl birth statistics as “a baby boom.” But if it is that, according to Davis and others, it is matched by an ongoing exit of parents with children who reach school age.

Davis says she knows of three families who have left the Pearl in the past three months. Kirsten Lee, who joined Davis in founding Central Portland Families to lobby for family amenities in the Pearl and downtown area, says she knows of nearly 10.

Dad: Focus on where kids are Not everybody thinks the city should care whether there are kids in the Pearl.

Steve Rawley, an activist on public school equity issues, has two school-age children and lives in North Portland. Rawley says city officials should focus on resources for children in the neighborhoods that already have kids, especially fixing up subpar schools.

“Why do we want to turn (the Pearl) into something that’s appealing to families when we have ample stock in our close-in residential neighborhoods?” Rawley asks. “I don’t understand the need to subsidize development that basically is putting money into the pockets of developers when we could focus on fixing what exists.”

The answer, some planning experts say, is a more vital neighborhood in the long run.

“A neighborhood that is good for kids is good for everybody,” says Gordon Price, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Local planners frequently mention the Vancouver experience when talking about downtown families in Portland.

Price says 60 to 80 children are born every month to downtown parents in Vancouver, and most stay downtown. Downtown neighborhoods have hundreds of kids, and the downtown public schools have long waiting lists.

But Vancouver intended this to happen from the time it began to redevelop its downtown core in the 1990s, Price says, by making provisions for child care, schools and skateboarding parks as well as zoning to encourage the development of multibedroom family housing.

The Pearl, he notes, is coming at the problem backward, once the majority of its development already has occurred – without children. Putting in schools and child care once density has been achieved can be harder, he says.

Price says a neighborhood with children means a neighborhood with parents. And nobody, he says, is more watchful in a neighborhood than parents who want to make sure their children’s environment is safe and well-maintained.

If you build it, will they come? Portland planner Doss says that planners also are convinced there is a negative economic impact associated with parents leaving the Pearl when their children reach school age.

“Some of them work downtown, or located businesses downtown,” Doss says. “If they are leaving, their businesses could go with them. (That) is a job going away. We like to try to keep all that incentive downtown.”

Doss also notes that Pearl parents often walk to work downtown, and every trip not taken in a car is considered a plus for the city.

Doss is convinced that, to some extent, more families living in the Pearl is inevitable. The metropolitan area expects a million new residents over the next 20 years, he says, and some of them will live downtown or in the Pearl District. And some of them, he says, will have children and will want to stay – if the schools, community centers and parks are in place.

The bottom-line question in the Pearl and, to a lesser extent, in downtown Portland, is whether families will be willing to stay and raise their children even if there are schools and community centers and parks.

City Commissioner Randy Leonard doesn’t think so. At least, he doesn’t think many families will stay once their children get beyond preschool age.

“My view is that the demographic that was targeted there are retirees, singles and professional couples,” Leonard says. “There are couples with small kids. There will be families that are willing to raise their kids there, but it will be an exception.”

Big kids need bedrooms Beyond the lack of open space and family-oriented resources in the Pearl, there is another bottleneck – a lack of condos and apartments with enough bedrooms to accommodate families with children. Just ask the parents.

The Monday-afternoon scene at the Pearl Court Activity Center on Northwest Pettygrove Street – just outside the Pearl’s west boundary of Interstate 405 – is slightly out of control, which is exactly as intended.

A dozen children, most not yet school age, are running around the newly waxed basketball court, trailing streamers and throwing balls into the air.

“This is the only chance these kids have other than their hallways to run around and scream indoors,” Nancy Davis says.

The newly opened activity center charges an hourly rate to rent out the gym; a Pearl District community group paid the rental fees for the parents and their children.

Mindy Cordry sometimes attends the play group with 3-year-old twins Hailey and Luke. Cordry lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the North Park Blocks until six months ago. The prospect of raising a girl and a boy told her eventually she’d need at least three bedrooms.

Cordry says she searched for a condo in the Pearl that would suffice. She says she found two-bedroom units for about $550,000 and only a few three-bedroom units, which were closer to $1 million.

So Cordry moved to a three-bedroom house in the Southwest Hills and comes back to the Pearl with her children just about every week to play. And she says she’ll move back to the Pearl – when her kids have gone off to college.

Gabrielle Esbeck also hopes to come back to the Pearl someday, though sooner than Cordry. While watching 4-year-old daughter Isabella run across the gym floor, Esbeck explains that she and her husband enjoyed their 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in the Pearl until children became an issue. Isabella probably won’t be their last child, Esbeck says.

That one-bedroom Pearl apartment was renting for $1,800 a month, Esbeck says.

Recently the family moved to Northwest Portland, near Chapman Elementary School, where they rent a two-bedroom, two-bath house with a small yard for $1,500 a month.

Eventually, Esbeck says, they probably will buy a home. She says she’s heard that there are three-bedroom units available at the Metropolitan, one of the Pearl District’s newest high-rises.

But she’s also heard that they are being priced at more than $1 million – too much.

Still, Esbeck says she hasn’t given up hope of raising her children in the Pearl. “If we can afford to buy, in a year we will be back,” she says.

A PDC housing study found that only 20 percent of the units in the River District (which encompasses the Pearl but also includes undeveloped property that reaches east to the Willamette River) have at least two bedrooms, and that only 3 percent have three bedrooms.

The solution for that, according to the new district plan, is to increase development bonuses for buildings that include housing designed for families. If developers put in more two- and three-bedroom apartments, they will get to build larger projects.

The same goes for development incentives for family amenities. If builders of future condo towers put in space for a school, community center or day-care facilities, they’ll get to build bigger.

Tiffany Sweitzer, president of Hoyt Street Properties, thinks the new zoning regulations proposed in the North Pearl District Plan will be incentive enough to get developers such as her to build more family housing in the neighborhood.

In addition, the PDC is looking at constructing an affordable housing building of its own that would have two- and three-bedroom units intended for families.

Leonard says he will support efforts to put day-care facilities and a community center in the Pearl – resources for families with small children.

But he says he won’t support a new elementary school because he just doesn’t think that many parents will stay in the urban core of the city once their children reach 8 or 9 years old.

But Commissioner Erik Sten says the city should do what it can to encourage more families to live in the Pearl and that he expects more families to stay.

“If you’re gong to have a city that’s kid-friendly, it’s got to be kid-friendly everywhere,” Sten says.

Sten says the city made a mistake in not planning for children in the Pearl when the neighborhood originally was designed, but the time has come to correct that oversight, even if the census numbers don’t yet show a neighborhood with many children.

“My thought for the last couple of years is if you don’t actively create the possibility, then you never get it,” Sten says.

peterkorn@portlandtribune.com