Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

The Media Industry In Oregon: Incentive And Impact Analysis, Mike Paruszkiewicz, Emma Willingham, Peter Hulseman

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

Oregon’s media industries have become increasingly well-known over the last several years, thanks in large part to successful feature length films and television series produced in the state. It is widely known that such productions offer visibility, tourism interest, and a boost to local merchants during their visits. More economically important, but less immediately obvious, are the impacts of a home grown industry of professionals and businesses that thrive in regions able to maintain a reliable stream of production activity. Numerous states now offer incentives to visiting media productions, some focused on big-ticket features and visiting series. In Oregon, the …

Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership: Economic Impact Analysis December 2016 Update, Hieu Nguyen, Emma Willingham, Peter Hulseman

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

The Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), founded in 1988, is a network of non-profit agencies staffed by industry professionals and consultants. Historically, MEP has sought to increase the competitiveness of small to mid-size enterprises (which as a group comprise 99% of all U.S. manufacturing firms) by providing expert guidance and access to resources. In recent years, the severe economic recession sparked increased interest in the strength of the manufacturing sector, due to its longtime status as one of the major drivers of the domestic economy. Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership (OMEP), the Oregon branch of MEP, works to provide data-driven analysis …

Realistic Or Utopian? Coordinating Transit And Land Use To Achieve Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, Ian Carlton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Equitable transit-oriented development (E-TOD)—the prioritization of social equity as an outcome of TOD implementation—has become a U.S. DOT policy stance, an objective of many other government bodies, and part of many NGOs' missions. But is it feasible to coordinate transit and land use in ways that allow us to achieve these goals, or is this a classic example of a wicked problem?

This talk will use Portland as a case study to explore some of the internal contradictions inherent in E-TOD goals, the systemic challenges that must be considered, and glimmers of hope for delivering E-TOD. Transportation and land use …

Webinar: The Association Between Light Rail Transit, Streetcars And Bus Rapid Transit On Jobs, People And Rents, Arthur C. Nelson

TREC Webinar Series

What are the job, residential development and market rent outcomes of Light Rail Transit (LRT), Streetcar Transit (SCT) and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)?

LRT, SCR and BRT investments are spreading rapidly across the country but there is scant evidence of their effect on where people work and live, and effects on market rents as an indicator of value. This webinar will summarize several years of NITC-sponsored research into development outcomes associated with these transit investments. The webinar will be led by NITC researcher Arthur C. Nelson who was the principal investigator of two projects: Do TODs Make a Difference? and …

Portland Green Loop Economic Analysis, Jenny H. Liu

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

The Portland “Green Loop” is a proposed 6-mile linear open space running through the heart of the city, connecting existing and new open spaces, parks, gathering areas, and walking and biking pathways. As envisioned, the Green Loop concept requires significant infrastructure investments, and would result in both short-term and long-term impacts on transportation (for all travel modes), environment and economic development. The goal of this project is to characterize, quantify and analyze these costs, benefits and impacts, particularly focusing on case studies of similar infrastructure investments in active transportation and analyses of property value impacts, economic (input-output) impacts and preliminary …

Smart Cities: Improving The Roadside Environment With Distributed Sensor Systems, Christine M. Kendrick

PSU Transportation Seminars

The City of Portland is exploring how distributed "Internet of Things" (IoT) sensor systems can be used to improve the available data that is usable by city engineers, planners, and the public to help inform transportation operations, enable assessments of public health and equity, advance Portland’s Climate Action Plan goals, and create opportunities for economic development and civic engagement.

The City is currently looking at how low-cost air quality sensors can be used to improve and increase real-time understanding of transportation-related pollutants. However, the state of low-cost air quality sensor technology is not usable off the shelf due to sensitivity …

Planning Transportation For Recreational Areas, Anne Dunning

PSU Transportation Seminars

Population growth and increased accessibility of formerly remote destinations have created new needs for planning mobility to and within recreational areas.

Transportation planners studying recreational travel face unusual travel-demand peaks, travelers who are often unfamiliar with their surroundings, and a uniquely important need for traveler and community communication. Planners must consider what characteristics of an individual area make it attractive to visitors, as well as local goals for the special resources of the area.

This presentation will characterize unique facets of mobility in recreational areas, and pose approaches to planning transportation systems to serve them.

Can Location Value Capture Pay For Transit? Organizational Challenges Of Transforming Theory Into Practice, Deborah Salon

PSU Transportation Seminars

Successful public transit systems increase the value of locations they serve. Capturing this location value to help fund transit is often sensible, but challenging.

This presentation will define location value capture, and synthesize lessons learned from six European and North American transit agencies that have experience with location value capture funding.

The opportunities for and barriers to implementing location value capture fall into three categories: (1) agency institutional authority, (2) agency organizational mission, and (3) public support for transit.

When any of these factors is incompatible with a location value capture strategy, implementation becomes difficult. In four of the cases …

Integrative Public Transport In A Segmented City: Reflections From Jerusalem, Galit Cohen-Blankshtain

PSU Transportation Seminars

Jerusalem is perhaps an extreme case of residential and travel market segmentation. It is comprised of four different 'cities', which partially overlap in space: The Jewish-Zionist city; the Palestinian city; the Jewish ultra-orthodox city and the global-tourist city. While the specific delineation of these cities is unique, Jerusalem can be seen as representative of other cities where ethnic and religious tensions create highly segmented urban spaces and travel markets.

In recent years particular emphasis has been placed on integrating transport systems, both across modes and with land use, in order to facilitate and encourage the use of public transport. Spatial …

Developing A Model For Transit Oriented Development In Latino Immigrant Communities: A National Study Of Equity And Tod, Gerardo Francisco Sandoval

TREC Final Reports

This research project is a continuation of a previous NITC-funded study. The first study compared the MacArthur Park TOD in Los Angeles to the Fruitvale Village TOD in Oakland. The findings from this new study further validate the key findings from the first study. This new comparative case study analyzed the extension of Los Angeles’ Gold Line into Boyle Heights and the revitalization linked to Boyle Heights due to two TODs built in that neighborhood. I conclude from all four cases that TODs can help serve as catalysts for neighborhood revitalization in low-income communities by paying attention and building upon …

Developing High-Resolution Descriptions Of Urban Heat Islands: A Public Health Imperative, Jackson Voelkel, Vivek Shandas, Brendon Haggerty

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Extreme heat events affect the most vulnerable human populations and are a lethal health hazard to urban dwellers globally; in the United States, extreme heat causes more deaths annually than all other weather events and natural hazards combined (1). Previous studies described urban heat islands as isolated, static, monolithic areas of cities. We challenged this contention by hypothesizing that diurnal temperature cycles and diverse landscape features create variation in places that amplify heat (2). A temporal description of urban heat islands would identify populations that are susceptible to heat stress, particularly at night, when most people are asleep and unable …

Integrating High-Resolution Datasets To Target Mitigation Efforts For Improving Air Quality And Public Health In Urban Neighborhoods, Vivek Shandas, Jackson Voelkel, Meenakshi Rao, Linda A. George

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Reducing exposure to degraded air quality is essential for building healthy cities. Although air quality and population vary at fine spatial scales, current regulatory and public health frameworks assess human exposures using county- or city-scales. We build on a spatial analysis technique, dasymetric mapping, for allocating urban populations that, together with emerging fine-scale measurements of air pollution, addresses three objectives: (1) evaluate the role of spatial scale in estimating exposure; (2) identify urban communities that are disproportionately burdened by poor air quality; and (3) estimate reduction in mobile sources of pollutants due to local tree-planting efforts using nitrogen dioxide. Our …

The Landscape: Tiny And Very Small Houses, Andrés Oswill

Metroscape

The article describes one of many approaches to creating more affordable housing choices -- tiny and very small houses. The author explains how the current trend returns to an affordable housing approach used much earlier in Portland's history.

Indicators Of The Metroscape: The Young, The Old, And The Single, Elizabeth Morehead

Metroscape

Elizabeth Morehead focuses on the changing demographic of households in the Portland metropolitan region

Periodic Atlas Of The Of The Metroscape: The Geography Of Publicly Subsidized Affordable Housing, Meg Merrick

Metroscape

Meg Merrick maps publicly subsidized affordable housing units across the region, discusses their geography, and describes their location in relation to two important amenities: schools and libraries.

Living On The Edge: The Forgotten Tribulations Of Affordable Housing In The Suburbs, Linn Davis

Metroscape

The article describes how the housing crisis is playing out in the region's suburbs.

From The Frontlines Of The Housing Crisis: Two Vulnerable Tenants Discuss Their Experiences In Portland's Increasingly Brutal Housing Market, Thomas Kerr

Metroscape

Homelessness is the most visible face of Portland's affordable housing crisis, but the numbers of street sleepers and tent campers are nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of beleaguered tenants. They may be hidden away in their separate apartments, but they are suffering the effects of crisis all the same. Forty percent of the 900,000 households in the Portland Metro area are tenants, and half are paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent. A quarter pay more than 50 percent, and the percentages go higher as the households get poorer. Besides forcing them to impoverish themselves …

Pathway 1000 Community Housing Plan, Kaitlin Berger, Anna Dearman, Beth Gilden, Karen Guillén-Chapman, Jasmine Rucker

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Housing prices in the City of Portland have risen dramatically in recent years, and low income and communities of color have been particularly hard hit in the northeast neighborhoods of the city. Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives has embarked on the development of 1000 affordable units over the next 10 years to help meet the needs of displaced residents. The Pathway 1000 Community Housing Plan sets out a strategy for providing those 1000 affordable, stable homes.

This project was conducted under the supervision of Marisa Zapata, Ethan Seltzer, Susam Hartnett, and Lisa Bates.

Lents Strong: Community Action Plan For A Livable, Affordable Neighborhood, Adam Brunelle, Drew Devitis, Carson Groecki, Claire Lust, Katie Sellin, John Todoroff

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

This is a community action and advocacy plan, created in consultation with neighborhood organizations and underrepresented communities most at risk for displacement. It focuses on actions where collaboration and community engagement will have the largest impacts. This is a plan for the next five years.

The overarching goals of the plan are to: Ensure the viability of Livable Lents. Livable Lents should remain a transparent, accountable, accessible, and holistic community engagement process that works collaboratively with nonprofits, city agencies, and community members. This plan serves in part as a collaboration strategy which integrates engagement on a wide range of projects …

The Cycling Gender Gap: What Can We Learn From Girls?, Jennifer Dill

PSU Transportation Seminars

In the U.S., women are far less likely to bicycle for transportation than men. Explanations include, among others, safety concerns (traffic and crime), complex travel patterns related to household responsibilities, time constraints, lack of facilities that feel safe, and attitudes. This talk will explore how this gender gap emerges in childhood, using data from the Family Activity Study. The study collected data from 300 Portland families (parents and children) over two years, allowing us to see how things change over time.

The Value Of Place: Planning For Walkability In The Tigard Triangle, Wala Abuhejleh, Ray Atkinson, Linn Davis, Curtis Fisher

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The “Tigard Triangle” is bounded by highways and characterized by auto-oriented land uses in an incomplete street grid. It currently presents a challenge to the City of Tigard, whose vision is to be the most walkable community in the Pacific Northwest. The purpose of the Value of Place project is to develop a plan for improving walkability, safety, comfort, and aesthetics in the Tigard Triangle. In addition, this project was developed to test the application of the State of Place analytical tools to the planning and design challenges faced by the city.

This project was conducted under the supervision of …

Parking Space Estimation In The City Of Portland, Ashley Colder, Madison Weakley, J. Robert Zoeller

Student Work

This project is a collaboration with Portland Bureau of Transportation, to study city required parking lots spaces, and allowed on-street parking space in Portland. As the city begins to re-evaluate its transportation systems to encourage more travel by buses, trains, and bikes, we want to explore what is the current parking situation by the city of Portland. To understand better about the parking situation in Portland, and how this might affect the parking policies in the future in Portland.

The scope of this project is limited to East Portland. The group was assigned to the Far-Southeast (Far-SE) area. The Far-SE …

Washington County Affordable Housing Development Strategy, Mary Heberling, Hayley Mallen, Danelle Peterson, Jill Statz, David Tetrick

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The Washington County Consolidated Housing Plan estimates a need for 14,000 housing units affordable to low and very low-income households. This project was developed to create an initial strategy for meeting that need. It provides 30 specific recommendations for Washington County to enable it to take action in the coming years. As the plan notes, there is no single action that will suffice. The County can make progress towards meeting the challenge posed by its affordable housing crisis by leveraging the proposed recommendations with each other.

Talent On The Move: Migration Patterns Of The Young And College-Educated In Pre And Post-Recession America - Migration Trends Across The 50 Largest U.S. Metros, Jason R. Jurjevich, Greg Schrock, Jihye Kang

Publications, Reports and Presentations

In this brief, we present U.S. Census Bureau data to compare recent migration trends for young and college-educated (YCE) individuals for the largest 50 U.S. metro areas in 2012-2014 relative to the pre-recession (2005-2007) and Great Recession (2008-2010) periods.

Talent On The Move: Migration Patterns Of The Young And College-Educated In Pre And Post-Recession America – Migration Trends Across The Largest Western Metros, Jason R. Jurjevich, Greg Schrock, Jihye Kang

Publications, Reports and Presentations

In the West, Seattle recorded the largest NMQ gain of YCEs (31.6 percent), followed by San Francisco (28.5 percent), Portland (26.3 percent), and San Jose (26.1 percent). During the Great Recession, as well as the post-recession recovery period, only four metros outpaced the West’s regional gain in YCE net-migration: 1) Phoenix, 2) Denver, 3) San Francisco, 4) San Jose

Connecting People To Places: Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Transit Supply Using Travel-Time Cubes, Steven Farber

TREC Final Reports

Despite its importance, temporal measures of accessibility are rarely used in transit research or practice. This is primarily due to the inherent difficulty and complexity in computing time-based accessibility metrics. Estimating origin-to-destination travel times that include the “last mile” of travel between the transit network and actual start and endpoints of the trip is technically difficult. Not only do such estimations require multimodal network structures, they also require detailed knowledge of transit schedules and sophisticated algorithms for calculating shortest paths using such inputs. Recently, new standards for sharing transit schedules and geographic data, namely the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) …

Talent On The Move: Migration Patterns Of The Young And College-Educated In Pre And Post-Recession America – Migration Trends Across The Largest Northeastern Metros, Jason R. Jurjevich, Greg Schrock, Jihye Kang

Publications, Reports and Presentations

In the most recent period, 2012-2014, the Northeast’s largest metro areas attracted and retained roughly 31,000 YCE migrants. However, this represents 9,000 fewer migrants compared to the Great Recession period— the Northeast is the only region to post a decline in net in/migration of YCEs between 2008-2010 and 2012-2014. All Northeastern metros experienced a decline or a very marginal gain in NMQ values between the two periods, except for Philadelphia, which posted more than a 2,000 gain in net YCE in-migration. In the end however, Boston and Pittsburgh remain the region's two most productive cities for attracting retaining and retaining …

The Economic Impacts Of A Gross Receipt Tax For Oregon With Implications For Initiative Petition 28, Mike Paruszkiewicz, Thomas Potiowsky, Eric Hoffman, Emma Willingham

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

Discussion of the characteristics and projected economic impacts of a gross receipts tax for Oregon.

Daytime Variation Of Urban Heat Islands: The Case Study Of Doha, Qatar, Yasuyo Makido, Vivek Shandas, Salim Ferwati, David J. Sailor

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent evidence suggests that urban forms and materials can help to mediate temporal variation of microclimates and that landscape modifications can potentially reduce temperatures and increase accessibility to outdoor environments. To understand the relationship between urban form and temperature moderation, we examined the spatial and temporal variation of air temperature throughout one desert city—Doha, Qatar—by conducting vehicle traverses using highly resolved temperature and GPS data logs to determine spatial differences in summertime air temperatures. To help explain near-surface air temperatures using land cover variables, we employed three statistical approaches: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Regression Tree Analysis (RTA), and Random Forest …

Talent On The Move: Migration Patterns Of The Young And College-Educated In Pre And Post-Recession America – Migration Trends Across The Largest Southern Metros, Jason R. Jurjevich, Greg Schrock, Jihye Kang

Publications, Reports and Presentations

In 2012-2014, the South recorded the largest gain of YCE net in-migration, among its large metros, of any region at 138,000. What’s more, the only metros to post NMQ values above 30 were both in the South—Houston (36.9 percent) followed by Austin (35 percent). While most large Southern metros posted robust gains in net in-migration of YCEs between the two periods, Louisville (-18.7 percent), Baltimore, (-9.4 percent), San Antonio (-8.2 percent), Dallas/Ft. Worth (-5.5 percent), and Tampa (-1.5 percent) all recorded NMQ declines in net in-migration of YCEs.