Residential Infill Projects
Various Sites, Oregon | 2020
Many people want to contribute housing opportunities for their community, while also creating more ways to live in community themselves. This year, the City of Portland voted to approve the Residential Infill Project, which encourages deep affordability and density in many of our city's residential zones. These images represent a series of infill housing projects that do all of the above, while also providing new income streams that keep Portland-scale housing financially viable. Fortunately, Portland offers a wide range of ways to achieve all of these goals on a residential scale, including the number of single or multifamily units allowed within any given zone, and a combination of ADU's, Accessory Buildings, Detached Bedrooms, and all manner of support structures and non-permitted structures. All of these are on the design menu, and can be a great benefit to any community when scaled to respect Portland neighborhood scale and texture.
There are also planning design options, including planned development and subdivision approaches. These kinds of designs can have benefits comparable to cohousing communities, where people connect with each other, create opportunities for shared stewardship of community spaces, lower costs by using shared infrastructure, share tasks, tools, friendships, enjoy increased security, and, some would say, a higher quality of life. Portlanders are interested in the benefits of increased density for many important reasons. Besides all the direct community benefits experienced by individuals, these types of infill projects encourage large-scale sustainable development goals. The result is more multimodal transportation opportunities, emergence of walkable communities, holding the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) in order to preserve farm and forest lands, lower overall carbon impact in order to contend with climate disruption, and more.
There are also planning design options, including planned development and subdivision approaches. These kinds of designs can have benefits comparable to cohousing communities, where people connect with each other, create opportunities for shared stewardship of community spaces, lower costs by using shared infrastructure, share tasks, tools, friendships, enjoy increased security, and, some would say, a higher quality of life. Portlanders are interested in the benefits of increased density for many important reasons. Besides all the direct community benefits experienced by individuals, these types of infill projects encourage large-scale sustainable development goals. The result is more multimodal transportation opportunities, emergence of walkable communities, holding the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) in order to preserve farm and forest lands, lower overall carbon impact in order to contend with climate disruption, and more.
