Portland Mega-Construction #1 (not for 56k)

[BrandonTO416]

Portland, Oregon is a city on fire, and its flame won't be going out anytime soon. This wonderful city has always been among my favorites, so I'm happy to show these construction projects currently proposed or started already. Thanks to edirp for the information.

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Start with the amazing South Waterfront project. The plan is to extend the downtown streetcar line, and create a new office, residential, and general commercial/entertainment district connecting south with downtown. The plan calls for 21 highrise/midrise structures to be completed over the next 10 years, some have already started construction.

http://www.planning.ci.portland.or.us/pl_sowa_sum.html

http://www.oregonlive.com/special/waterfront/

The 17-story Cascadian Tower is located along the light rail line in Portland

[monsoon]

[urbanguy]

Portland's gonna totally rock over the next decade especially with the ambitious south waterfront project and all the construction in the Pearl as well as the expansion of the MAX light rail etc

[Neo]

Go Portland, it's your birfday!

[wolfdawg54]

Portland will incredible when that is constructed. What is the population currently for Portland?

[BrandonTO416]

City has 545,000, metro has 2.5 million.

[BrandonTO416]

One thing I do not know about is the height of the proposed towers - they look roughly in the 200-400ft range.

[Allan]

This is great for Portland. I agree, more cities need to follow Portland's lead.

[sleepy]

That development by the river doesn't do anything for me at all. It looks wedged in and disconnected from the rest of the city, and a little too "plaza" like. Given the natural barriers, maybe a park would have been better.

Reminds me of developments of thirty years ago. "Co-op City" in the Bronx-1970-comes to mind.

Of course in fairness, the renderings aren't very detailed.

The rest of the projects look great.

[ChunkyMonkey]

Looks like that waterfront project has a major obstacle in having the highway cut it off from the rest of the city. American cities really screwed themselves with building highways through downtowns.

[BrandonTO416]

This development will be connected to downtown Portland by a streetcar line extension. It is highly pedestrian oriented, and will be contiguous with downtown's urban areas - only disconnected by interstate. Portland has already removed an expressway downtown, so they are doing better then most cities.

Here's a map:

Downtown is right across the Interstate from the area to be developed, which is right to the left of the US-26 highway shield on the map.

They will be continually developing the semi-dead area between downtown and this new development thanks to the streetcar extension.

It may not look like it from the renderings, but it will mend in with the urban fabric really well.

[Southernyank]

Check out the Westerly site

http://www.thewesterly.com/

[Inkdaub]

The Westerly has labeled their crane with a huge neon sign so all will know what is coming.