MOVING FORWARD | PBOT’s Healthy Businesses permit program has its faults, but its benefits hold true
Good news: something you probably like that the City government did has lots of benefits and is probably going to become permanent.
Among the many changes Portland has undergone over the past two years, few are more visible than the city’s more than 800 new outdoor seating areas.
Created as a strategy in the early days of the pandemic to allow bars and eateries to reopen while minimizing health risk, the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s Healthy Businesses permit program has been extended twice for Portland’s drinkers and diners. Based on the permit’s popularity among customers and hundreds of small businesses and business associations, there is a chance this emergency strategy is made permanent. But should it be?
When PBOT first began issuing the permit, I had concerns over the fairness of a program that would dramatically change public streets and become a lifeline for some of Portland’s small businesses. Not all businesses can afford to build an outdoor dining structure. Not every business owner knows PBOT exists, let alone think the city’s transportation agency would be the place to get aid during a pandemic.
Most obviously, looking at the map of where PBOT issued more than 2,200 Healthy Businesses permits to more than 800 businesses, not every commercial street is ideal for outdoor dining. Those that are not ideal tend to serve lower-income residents and communities of color.
Yet, the promise of such a program to keep businesses afloat while also getting Portlanders to give up parking spaces to support them was hard for me as a transportation advocate to overlook. Considering the automobile’s role in making our streets dangerous, our transportation network dysfunctional and unjust and our climate unlivable, I think any opportunity to break Portland from our dependence on cars to get around is worthy of investigation.
In this sense, the Healthy Businesses permit has been transformational. Yes, our cities have allowed restaurants to set up tables on the sidewalk, and, yes, we have shut down streets to cars for farmers’ markets and street fairs, and we have even removed highways to bring back access to the waterfront.
But to allow businesses to set up quickly built dining areas for free in revenue-generating parking spaces across the entire city, and for businesses to give up prime parking spaces to take them up on the offer? That would have been unthinkable before the pandemic when many Americans assumed that any restaurant or bar’s most critical public resource is free and abundant parking.
So after a year and a half, what are some folks saying about this permit that was: concocted on the fly; removed what many people have assumed to be vital car parking; raised questions about racial and economic equity amid a global recession and nationwide protests against systemic racism; and implemented as Portland faced a series of additional crises from devastating snowstorms to deadly heatwaves? Mostly good things. Lots of good things.
The pandemic has broken the business community's addiction to free parking
First off, Portland’s customers seem to like the program designed for pandemic relief enough to want it made permanent. In July, PBOT surveyed 2,100 people, 97% of whom claimed to have visited an establishment operating in the public right of way during the summer. Of these respondents, 96% felt “businesses operating outdoors contributed to a safe and vibrant area,” and 93% believed “street space should remain open for business use, while only 5% felt it should not.”
While it may not be surprising Portland’s diners would be so enthusiastic about a program allowing them to eat out during the pandemic more safely, this permit also has support from several business associations, a type of organization not known in this country for taking the loss of car parking lightly.
Businesses for a Better Portland (BBPDX), which has 28 food and beverage members across the central city, has seen the permit grow in popularity since it was first implemented. According to Anna Kemper, BBPDX’s Policy and Engagement Coordinator, the permit is popular among businesses using it to stay open and staff members who appreciate the added sense of safety from working outside during the pandemic.
When asked about the loss of car parking, Kemper said while “businesses are oftentimes not big fans of taking away parking spaces,” in this case, the loss is “definitely a win-win.” By removing parking, this permit reduces the presence of cars on the street, which is good for the climate and health of the region while “creating more opportunity for businesses to expand during the pandemic.”
Even NIMBY neighbors, a familiar foil to progressive solutions in this city, seem to recognize that supporting small businesses with outdoor seating is worth the minor inconvenience of lost parking. In the Beaumont neighborhood, where only a handful of businesses have set up outdoor dining along Northeast Fremont Street, the neighborhood’s business association has received several complaints about customers taking up parking spaces in the neighborhood.
Beaumont Business Association President Wesley Callaway sums the community sentiment as: “We don’t like how it affects our parking,” but “we’re really glad that it’s bringing business” to the neighborhood. Callaway feels residents generally support the program and says his organization would likely smooth out frustrations should it become permanent. While he notes the permit didn’t help retail businesses, he was happy to see McPeet’s, a local bar with a tented area taking up all of Northeast 45th Street, with full tables even in the dead of winter.
The Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association has encountered similar feedback. Tom Perrick, government affairs coordinator for the group, feels the city needs to continue to develop creative, collaborative partnerships to avoid frustration among residents.
Perrick said restaurant owners speak highly about their partnership with PBOT over the past year and believes the city has done a good job identifying “not only where we should be handing out permits, but how can we help that be a very safe, comfortable dining experience.” However, Perrick said if the city makes the permit permanent, “there has to be a lot of communication between neighborhood associations, business associations, the city, and the taxpayers to minimize surprises and hurt feelings.”
Keeping Portland’s culture-defining small businesses open during a global pandemic and recession would be enough to call any government policy a success, but some at the Portland Business Alliance see potential for the Healthy Businesses program to benefit businesses across the entire region.
It’s no secret congestion on Interstate 5 in Portland is terrible, but the business alliance sees the negative impacts of congestion stretch well beyond city limits. In an email exchange, Jon Isaacs, the business alliance’s vice president of government affairs, wrote, “increasing congestion on the I-5 corridor from Vancouver through Portland has made it expensive for businesses to ship goods across the West Coast and increased costs to consumers and businesses.”
The problem is bad enough that the business alliance called for congestion pricing on Interstate 5, which would discourage local drivers from using the freeway during peak hours and make it easier for freight to reach businesses as far away as Salem.
While dynamic pricing has proven to decongest roadways, a lack of walkable, people-oriented streets is what pushes people to drive in the first place. This is why Isaacs believes the city needs policies like the Healthy Businesses permit to “reduce the demand to drive across town for dinner by enhancing the experience in every local neighborhood, which encourages walking.”
There may be some evidence this is already happening. According to PBOT’s Hannah Schafer, feedback from the July survey indicated, “the majority of people who visit these locations, whether it’s a plaza or Healthy Business, they are going by foot.”
While PBOT will not unveil the final results until next year, this makes sense. Given a choice, who would drive 20 minutes to spend 10 minutes hunting for parking on Northwest 23rd avenue (where many businesses have swapped parking spaces for dining tables), when they can walk to their neighborhood’s freshly improved commercial street in half the time?
As shown in PBOT’s summer survey, many Portlanders feel the outdoor seating areas made possible by Healthy Businesses Permits contribute to a commercial street’s “safety” and “vibrancy.” By increasing Portland’s number of commercial corridors appealing to walk to and spend time in — and by making them less convenient to drive to by removing parking — a permanent Healthy Businesses permit could reduce the local demand for highways.
Not only would fewer local drivers on Portland’s interstates help the economy of an entire region, but it would also support small businesses and our city’s climate sustainability goals by reducing vehicle emissions.
Shining light on disparities while showing the city a way forward for social justice
The success of the Healthy Businesses permit program has also revealed its limitations. These limitations mostly fall along the lines of where businesses can benefit from a permit making neighborhoods feel more “safe” and “vibrant” to customers and suggesting PBOT can and must use this and other programs to pursue equitable outcomes beyond the original scope.
While BIPOC-owned businesses held an estimated 20% of the first 1,000 permits, the neighborhoods hosting the most permits are in the central city and tend to be whiter and wealthier. Thus far, PBOT has issued only a handful of permits east of 82nd Avenue, and Northeast Portland neighborhoods with higher percentages of people of color like Cully, Woodlawn, and Piedmont are also home to few permits.
In an email, Schafer said PBOT has found, “businesses located on busy, high-speed streets prefer off-street setups. Additionally, many buildings and businesses in East Portland are located far from the actual street, so it just didn’t make sense for them to serve food on the street when they had closer spaces off-street.” PBOT would refer such businesses to the Bureau of Development Services, which is in charge of regulating outdoor dining setups on private property.
The Healthy Businesses permit isn’t to blame for why it is useless to so many businesses outside the central city. For decades, the city and the Oregon Department of Transportation sacrificed people-oriented streets for highways and car movement, including many of the commercial corridors in East Portland passing through what are now some of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods.
As a result of these public policies and investments, there is a substantial comfort and measurable safety disparity between setting up a few picnic tables on the side of Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and Northeast 92nd Avenue.
To their credit, PBOT has conducted direct outreach to businesses in these neighborhoods and the organizations representing them.
As in many neighborhoods east of 82nd Avenue, the Parkrose neighborhood is home to multiple streets on PBOT’s High Crash Network, including Sandy Boulevard, which serves Parkrose’s largest business district. Historic Parkrose Executive Director Seile Tekle knew from the start helping businesses on Sandy stay open with the Healthy Businesses permit would be tough.
Yet PBOT reached out to Tekle’s organization and found an architect to do pro-bono outdoor seating design concepts for four BIPOC-owned businesses. With help from a Travel Portland grant, PBOT was able to provide three BIPOC-owned businesses with outdoor equipment for their dining areas. According to a PBOT press release, the agency provided “over $40,000 in free traffic control devices” and “20 free outdoor dining plaza kits” to BIPOC-owned businesses across the city, as of summer 2021.
After working with Historic Parkrose to support individual businesses, PBOT provided logistical support and extra tents for a neighborhood pop-up market along Northeast 108th Avenue through its Public Plaza Agreement. With PBOT making it easier to get the necessary permit, Tekle says Historic Parkrose spent more time marketing and promoting the event in the community.
“I am really grateful for the whole experience,” Tekle said in a Zoom call. “(PBOT’s Healthy Businesses team) took their time, helped us, and we really appreciate that.”
The current map of Healthy Businesses permits shows how much work is still needed before this program serves the entire city (Parkrose is currently only home to one permit), but this degree of community outreach may have resulted in other benefits that could serve the city well beyond the pandemic.
Linh Doan, the Jade District Manager at the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), said a hostile streetscape may be one reason why businesses in that neighborhood are “just opening up to the idea” of applying for a permit. However, Doan hopes PBOT’s process for the permit program becomes the standard for community outreach going forward.
According to Doan, the degree of case-by-case and face-to-face engagement the permit required pressed the city to collaborate directly with small businesses in a way they have not before. This invaluable opportunity resulted in new and improved relationships between PBOT and the people its policies serve.
“(The permit) is not perfect, for sure,” said Doan, who feels it needs more resources. “But, I really appreciate that (PBOT’s Healthy Businesses team) have been pushing it for a year and a half.”
Evan as APANO is working with PBOT to determine how the permit could be adjusted to better serve its community members, Doan hopes to see the permit’s public outreach process and the insight PBOT gained from this direct collaboration spreads to other agencies.
“My hope is that the City will be able to collaborate better, to help community development better,” Doan said. “This is a great stepping stone.”
Shaping a healthier future for Portland
The disparities did not have to exist between neighborhoods that could take advantage of this program and those that could not. It took decades of redlining, disinvestment and car-oriented policies to create a landscape where some city streets can quickly be adjusted to serve the people who use them. In contrast, others remain rivers of noise, poison and potential death.
The limited application of the free and popular Healthy Businesses permit has shown that it will take more time and a lot more money before equitable investments result in healthy streets for businesses.
Yet this permit, along with PBOT’s Public Plaza Agreement and Slow Streets Program, has demonstrated to more people than ever that our businesses can survive and even thrive as we transition away from building our city for cars.
Considering the homicidal and property incinerating role automobiles play in our society — a record number of Portlanders have died from car crashes in 2021, while wildfires made worse by climate change torched thousands of homes across Oregon over the past two years — it is hard to overstate the importance of this finding to policymakers from city hall to Salem and Washington D.C.
While every person interviewed for this column had good things to say about the Healthy Businesses permit, there were also concerns over what a permanent version would be. Would it be easier for BIPOC business owners to apply for and use? Would it include more funding for street furniture, including safety features like traffic signs and planters?
While the American Rescue Plan allowed PBOT to waive permitting fees until June 30, 2022, the agency says it would need to start charging permitting fees to pay for staff time and traffic studies. But, could the permit remain free for business owners in historically marginalized neighborhoods and communities?
It’s also worth noting while operators see the benefits of outdoor seating now, it may change when the pandemic becomes less of a threat. While the permit is currently free and PBOT has provided some furniture, business owners and operators still need to pay staff and maintain dining areas. And while PBOT says it is too soon to say, a permanent program could come with a new set of design rules for the dining area structures, potentially raising the cost of building one.
Should restaurants fully reopen, they would likely have to pay for more staff to look after more tables — even if those tables are not generating more customers. Suppose the permit gets a price tag, and the pandemic recedes enough for safer indoor dining. In that case, it isn’t hard to imagine many restaurateurs closing outdoor dining and going back to the way things were, allowing cars to reclaim their dominance of our public right of way.
For the sake of the climate, the region’s economy, public safety and a fair marketplace, this must not happen. Portlanders who have enjoyed dining outside over the past year should demand the Healthy Businesses permit be made permanent and more funding be allocated to the program.
The Healthy Businesses permit is the most dramatic change to how Portlanders across the city use and value the public right of way in a lifetime, and was always going to result in impacts other than keeping businesses alive during the pandemic. Perhaps the most significant is this permit has dislodged the fictional narrative keeping cities doing everything possible in service to the automobile regardless of the costs to the climate, economy and society. As the business community comes around to the benefits of designing Portland’s streets around their customers rather than their customers’ cars, it isn’t difficult to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
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