Good planning means admitting when you’re wrong—and Portland finally is doing so
Central City Code Amendments Project offers a course correction
The City of Portland just released a 200-page zoning document that almost no one will read. It’s called the Central City Code Amendments Project (CCCAP). It’s open for public comment through Feb. 13, and it might be the most honest thing Portland’s planning bureau has produced in years. Honest, because it’s full of quiet admissions that previous rules didn’t work out as intended—and careful corrections that show the city is actually learning.
Reading through this draft, I kept recognizing my own experience as a parent in the Pearl District.
Finding a family-sized apartment
When my wife and I learned she was pregnant with our first child in 2017, we went looking for a bigger place. We wanted to stay in the neighborhood, but finding a two-bedroom that could fit a growing family was a struggle. The options were limited, and the ones that existed felt like afterthoughts: buildings designed around studios and one-bedrooms, with larger units as an exception rather than a priority. That scarcity quietly pushes families out of the Central City.
The new draft tries to change that calculus. It creates a Floor Area Ratio bonus for buildings that include two- and three-bedroom units. FAR is the main lever cities use to control building size: It caps how much floor space you can build relative to your lot. A bonus means developers can build bigger if they include family-sized apartments. The incentive isn’t new; it existed under the original 1988 Central City Plan, was dropped when Central City 2035 was implemented in 2018 and is now being reconsidered.
Rethinking ground-floor retail
We eventually found a two-bedroom live-work unit at the NV. Ground floor with its own entrance, weirdly high ceilings. It served us well through the start of the pandemic and the birth of our twins. But the retail spaces on our building’s corners sat empty and unfinished for the entire time we lived there. They’re still empty now, long after we moved to our house in the Alphabet District. Nine years of plywood and For Lease signs. You stop noticing after a while, but it wears on you.
Those spaces exist because the city mandated ground-floor retail on certain streets, the theory being that storefronts create vibrant street life. But you can’t mandate tenants into existence. A few persistent vacancies on prominent corners are enough to shape how a neighborhood feels, even if the broader market is fine. You walk past them every day. The CCCAP draft reduces the number of streets where ground-floor housing is prohibited, an admission that an occupied home does more for a street than an empty storefront.
Bringing back food carts
The food cart provisions hit close to home, too. Carts have been disappearing across the Central City as parking lots—the most common location for food cart pods—keep getting developed into buildings. The draft allows carts anywhere retail is permitted. (This is distinct from Councillor Mitch Green’s pending sidewalk vending ordinance, which would ease restrictions on sidewalk carts citywide.) A rule designed for one era had quietly become a constraint in another.
With four kids now, quick outdoor food is exactly what we need. Some of our best Saturdays have followed the same loop: Streetcar up to the PSU Farmers Market, walk back through Director Park to play a round on the giant chess board, then give in to the kids asking for Shake Shack or Bonta on our way home through the West End. The holiday pop-ups downtown last winter were the same idea; food and activity in a public space. That’s what works for families. The draft’s expansion of food options in Central City open spaces suggests the city sees it the same way.
Learning from what didn’t work
None of these changes are dramatic. There’s no grand vision here. What there is, instead, is a willingness to look at what isn’t working and try something (slightly) different. The ground-floor mandates weren’t ill-intentioned; they just didn’t pan out everywhere. The family-unit bonus wasn’t wrong; it got simplified away and now it’s being restored.
I think about this with my own kids. You make a plan for the morning, for the week, for how you’re going to handle screen time or bedtime. Then reality intervenes. The plan that made sense in theory doesn’t survive contact with actual children. You adjust. You try something else. The goal isn’t to get it right the first time. It’s to pay attention and course-correct before small problems become entrenched ones.
That’s what good planning looks like, whether you’re raising a family or running a city. You pay attention, admit what isn’t working, and try something else.
If you have opinions about how the Central City should work, now’s the time.
 | A guest post by
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This is the dilemma of all socialized schemes: the idea that some anonymous group of mandarins are smart enough (and clairvoyant enough) to "plan" an entire city. One look at the disaster of mid-'50s planning on the outer east side (the strict segregation of functions, strip malls, etc) ought to be proof that the idea of central planning is flawed.
We're simply not smart enough to do it...and that goes not only for the unelected bureaucrats, but on the motivated people who will "advise" the mandarins, mostly by quiet, back-channel lobbying in "public" hearings. It's a comedy.
The best parts of Portland's urban landscape hark back to a much more lightly-planned era; or unplanned communities that were gobbled up by the tax-hungry central city, which then practiced a paradoxically liberating benign neglect for years.
Now the mandarins and the Machine have summarily declared war on the cogent, single-family, traditional architecture neighborhood, all in the "warmly collectivist" name of density. Neighborhoods, such as outer Mt. Tabor, that were revived by urban risk-takers decades ago are now being nibbled at with funky, crowded, ugly as hell apartments (no parking--take the bus, proles) that will fall apart, physically and socially, before the bonds are paid off.
The problem with utopian planning is that the mistakes only become apparent years too late. And the rewrites only set up a new cycle of failure.
Thanks, Matt! Yes, changing course! Thanks for writing about a topic that is so important to the future of our City’s development and little understood by the public (including elected officials!).