An Era Shifts in Portland

Randy Gragg, one of the best writers on urban design and architecture in America, profiles a Portland developer, Joe Weston, in an article in The Oregonian. Weston, who is building in the Vancouver Style, may the the first of many.

Sunday, March 11, 2007
Standing in the 27th-story penthouse of his soon-to-be-finished condo The Benson, developer Joe Weston foresees a taller, thinner Portland.The building is the city’s first “point tower.” Each floor will be 8,000 square feet or less, hence the “point” compared to the more typical Portland “slab towers” of 12,000 to 20,000 square feet.
Vancouver, B.C., built hundreds of these more slender buildings in the past 20 years, increasing the city center’s population by more than 50 percent and drawing the attention of cities across the world for its combination of higher density and livability. For years, Portland has sent delegations of planners, architects and politicians north of the border to see them.

But Weston is the first Portlander to build one. And he wants to do more, maybe lots more. In the fall, 12 blocks away at Southwest Alder Street and 14th, Weston plans to break ground on the 31-story The Manhattan. After that (he’s uncertain when), The Cosmopolitan, at Northeast Grand Avenue and Multnomah, which could go well more than 30 stories, is expected to follow.
“The city is promoting greater density,” Weston says. “The neighborhoods don’t want big-footprint buildings corner to corner. I thought, ‘This is doable. Why not try?’ ”
Soon he will launch an effort to sell a simple change to Portland’s zoning code that he believes will make building point towers easier: Remove any height limit for buildings with floors of 8,000 square feet or less.
Weston was lured into The Benson as an investor by a young Vancouver developer, Eric van Doorninck, who died in an airplane accident just as the project broke ground. Now, Weston’s a true believer and wants the city to become one, too.
At age 69, Weston is becoming a city shaper, a new role for him. But the role of city maker he’s long played. In the 1970s and ’80s he built more than 130 eastside apartment buildings, nearly all simple affairs with 20 or fewer units fronted by parking lots.
Dubbed “Weston Specials,” they were (and still are) much loathed by Craftsman-hugger residents. But wholly owned and well-maintained by Weston, they have played a manifold role in Portland.
Their considerable cash flow made the Joseph E. Weston Public Foundation among the city’s richest, funding self-sufficiency projects through the likes of Habitat for Humanity and the Special Olympics. Weston is the chief financial backer of Hoyt Street Properties’ transformation of 40 acres of empty train yards into the internationally lauded River District. Without his good-as-gold signature, bank backing for high-density urban projects would have taken years longer. Weston continues to gobble up land for future development, both in the city and suburbs, most recently 20 city blocks along Northeast Sandy Boulevard.
But maybe most important to the vibrancy of the city is how all those eastside apartments with their $700- to $800-a-month rents have become one of the city’s largest sources of de facto affordable housing.
In short, everything from the city’s most successful urban redevelopments to its ever-burgeoning class of musicians, artists and other youngsters living here on barista salaries owes Joe Weston.
But the point towers mark a new phase.
The short-burst sentences of Weston-speak reveal little of the path from tossing up lapsided apartments to building high-rise landmarks of a type no other Portland developer will or even can attempt.
“When you get older,” he says, “your priorities change.”
Longtime friends and associates chortle about Weston’s skyward turn. When I parroted his quick rap on point-tower virtues delivered in The Benson’s penthouse (“They protect view corridors, cast smaller shadows, leave more open space . . .”), Hoyt Street’s president, Tiffany Sweitzer, howled, “He said that?”
Prone to wearing button-down sweaters with American flag ties and driving a late-model VW Bug with a “Buy American” bumper sticker, Weston’s even gone Canadian for his towers; his design architect, engineer and contractor are all from Vancouver. Portland’s LRS Architects serves as the legally required local affiliate.
Former business partner Homer Williams says it’s all just about Weston keeping busy. Despite being one of the city’s richest men and largest property owners, Weston “is bored 90 percent of the time,” Williams says.
“It’s the challenge,” he adds. “Joe doesn’t like anyone telling him he can’t do something.”
So will the city lift its height restrictions?
“It’s an intriguing idea,” says Gil Kelley, Portland planning director. “Point towers could have substantial utility in adding more density on quarter-block sites but preserving the city’s historic, lower-rise, finer-grain character on the other three-quarters.”
The key questions to Kelley are where and how taller towers would “sculpt the skyline” and what developers should give back to the public to get them. To Kelley, they are ripe topics for the planning bureau’s soon-to-commence “Central City Plan Update” in which downtown’s overall urban design will be re-examined. Any change in height limits ultimately must be approved by City Council.
In short, a taller-tower surge is, at best, three years off.
The more immediate question, of course, is whether the 30-story-plus Weston Specials that he can build right now will stand taller architecturally than the two- and three-story ones of three decades ago. The Benson suggests they might — a little. The more curvilinear shapes shown in the early drawings of The Manhattan promise more.
“When it becomes your own,” Hoyt Street’s Sweitzer says in a hopeful tone, “a building is a reflection of you.”
With his swollen cash flow both pushing and enabling him to build, Weston is one of the city’s only developers who is free to push Portland architecture past what the banks allow. Indeed, so why not leave us one proud tower called The Weston?
At a recent Portland Design Commission hearing, chairman Mike McCulloch tried to inspire The Manhattan’s design team to push “the bar higher” with features like solar panels on what will be the building’s sun-soaked, city-gateway site right on Interstate 405.
Weston sat quietly in the back of the room.
Asked later about this, the first landmark building he will develop on his own, he quickly volunteered that what he was really excited about was the garbage chutes: There won’t be any. He wants door-side pickup.
“People don’t recycle when there are garbage chutes.”