Posts Tagged ‘portland’

August 25, 2014

How to Ride a Bike in Copenhagen

by: Paul Loomans

Tweet Today’s post is by guest contributor Paul Loomans. Paul is a development professional involved in sustainability, community, and biking. He is car-free in Phoenix Arizona. Paul is COO of Firefly Living, a new generation real estate organization. He also loves cats. It was my last night in Copenhagen. Over most of the past two weeks, I’d seen the world’s best biking city from the seat of a bike. Since I had gone car-free in Phoenix about three years ago, I figured it was time to visit Mecca for biking inspiration. I stayed with four different Couch Surfing and Airbnb…

August 05, 2014

Is Biking Only for Fit White People?

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Apparently. The biking community in Portland is overwhelmingly white and seems to be comprised of the ultra fit who routinely go on 300-mile bike camping trips or insist on biking long and hilly distances in town, scoffing at those who choose easier, multi-modal ways of getting around. Don’t get me wrong, this level of fitness and dedication is laudable, certainly. But it’s also very intimidating and unusual. The biking community in Portland, at least the biking community I have been exposed to, tends to skew heavily (or should I say muscularly?) toward fit and environmentally conscious white people. Granted,…

July 04, 2014

How the East and West Sides of Portland Unified to Become One City

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet On this Independence Day, let’s take a look at the early days of Portland, how it got settled and how it consolidated three small cities into one large one to compete with arch nemesis Seattle. In 1880, Portland was still a small railroad town with only 17,000 residents on the west side of the Willamette and a few hundred more scattered on the east side. It was more of a country town than a bustling city. The population was a mix of Europeans and Chinese. But by the turn of the 20th century, Portland made a place for itself…

June 12, 2014

What We Lose When We Lose a Food Cart Pod

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Portland is the birthplace of the food cart pod, a cluster of food carts on an empty lot, usually a parking lot. Food cart pods have become a fixture in the city and new ones seem to be popping up all the time. But more and more, as the development craze is taking over neighborhoods, old and established food cart pods are disappearing too. It’s true that the whole premise of food carts is that they are temporary. Food carts are often used to revitalize a barren empty lot. In a way, they are a victim of their own…

June 02, 2014

Gentrification Hits Home: My Rent Goes Up and the $8 Sundae at Salt & Straw

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Last week I heard a shuffle at my front door and saw that my building manager was slipping a notice under my door. I opened it only to read that my rent was being raised by 10%! I have lived in this cute little studio in the coveted Sunnyside Neighborhood in inner Southeast Portland for just over a year now. During this time, my rent has gone up a total of 14%. If it continues at this pace, I’ll have to find another place to live because I’ll be priced out of my very walkable, very centrally-located neighborhood. The…

May 28, 2014

The Problem with Neighborhood Greenways

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Neighborhood Greenways have been touted as the best way to make biking safe and appealing on American streets. They are low-cost, at only $250,000 per mile as opposed to $4 to $5 million per mile for cycle tracks, they don’t require heavy modification of existing streets, and they are easy to engineer. The concept of Neighborhood Greenways was developed by Portland Bureau of Transportation’s Greg Raisman and Mark Lear as a feasible way to make bicycling easy and safe for anyone who wants to bike. Having been first implemented in 2009 in Portland, they were widely installed in 2010…

May 23, 2014

Portland’s Boil Water Notice May Prove the Case to Close Mt. Tabor’s Open-Air Reservoirs

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet This morning, the city of Portland issued a boil water notice for 670,000 customers of the Portland Water Bureau after finding traces of E. Coli in two of Mt. Tabor’s open-air reservoirs. This is significant in light of the city’s controversial move towards covering the reservoirs. Would this E. Coli incident have happened if the city had discontinued its open-air reservoirs over 6 years ago when the federal mandate to do so was issued? Portland is currently in the process of shutting down the use of the open-air reservoirs on Mt. Tabor and is constructing new covered reservoirs at…

December 12, 2013

Livability 101: Living Without a Car in the Freezing Cold

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet Today’s post is the third installment of the Livability 101 Series. Check out installments one and two if you missed them! What do you do when it’s below freezing, the streets are icy and you don’t own a car? This is a true test of livability in your city. For me, as a newcomer to Portland and never having biked in the snow and ice, the frigid temperatures put a wrench in my normal commuting patterns. Why biking is out and that’s OK Biking in below freezing weather when there is snow on the ground is out for me…

November 19, 2013

The Understated and Awe Inspiring Churches of Pietro Belluschi

by: Taz Loomans

Tweet I kept hearing of Pietro Belluschi as a name of an architect I need to know about ever since I moved to Portland. To give you an idea of how prominent and successful this Portland architect became over his fifty years in practice, here is a list of impressive commissions he got: the Equitable Building in Portland, the Portland Art Museum, the Bank of America World Headquarters in San Francisco, and the Julliard School and the Lincoln Center in New York. I came upon one of his buildings for the first time on a Biking About Architecture tour by…