ACUs, the commercial equivalent of ADUs can contribute to more walkable neighborhoods by working with what's already built
Portlanders need to drive less. An imbalanced transportation system in which the vast majority of our trips are made by car has consequences that are getting more visible and painful every year. These consequences range from a growing number of deadly car crashes to rising costs of living as gas and car prices climb. We must drive less, and the demand for walkable neighborhoods across the country suggests we want to.
Yet for many Portlanders giving up driving — or even driving slightly less — feels impossible. Even for those who struggle to afford to pay the $8,000 every year needed just to use and maintain a car in Portland. A car is often required to access everything from grocery stores to job opportunities. This is especially true in neighborhoods outside the central city, which often lack the same economic opportunities and are suffering more from deadly car crashes and heat waves — both of which are made worse by a transportation system that builds acres of asphalt and prioritizes car travel times over pedestrian safety.
What can we do to address this imbalance? In a previous entry I talked about “growing in,” which is the process in which Portland adds more housing units through less imposing structures like Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs. This is a proven solution that allows Portland’s most walkable, amenity-rich neighborhoods to house more people without getting crowded by luxury high-rises and monotonous apartment complexes. Yet adding more housing units to these neighborhoods won’t be enough to make it easier for Portlanders to drive less. We must nurture new walkable neighborhoods. Step in the Accessory Commercial Unit, or ACU.
ACUs are the commercial equivalent of ADUs. Usually added to a formerly residential-only lot, an ACU might be a garage turned into a bar, a basement turned into a vintage clothing shop, or a food truck set up in a front yard. In many cases, the ACUs are built where there is already a decent amount of foot traffic, often filling in gaps between buildings that were purpose-built for commercial use.
If this kind of structure sounds familiar, it’s probably because many of Portland’s bustling commercial corridors in the central city — including trendy Northwest 23rd Avenue and Northeast 28th Avenue — are sprinkled with ACUs. Like ADUs, there is nothing revolutionary about a homeowner operating a business on their property. It is our current, car-oriented and land-use-segregated landscape that is a radical departure from the history of human settlement. The costs of that landscape are clear. What could the benefits of going back to normal be?
What ACUs can do for your neighborhood
Like ADUs, property owners and small-scale developers are typically the people who build ACUs, often by retrofitting an existing, underutilized space or starting small and scaling up. These structures are a cheaper and less imposing way to add commercial space to your neighborhood than by building a multistory, steel-and-concrete, multi-use building that has become a common sight in places like Southeast Division Street. Their lower-cost construction also means that ACUs do not need to charge high rents to justify themselves financially. Providing that any would-be NIMBYs are more likely to support small-scale development to support business owners they have a relationship with — instead of letting large-scale developers make the decisions (and the money) for them — local businesses with limited capital would have a better chance at securing a storefront.
More significantly for Portlanders who have seen their neighborhoods radically transformed by real estate developers and the gentrification that follows, local urban planner and designer Neil Heller believes, “a larger, out of town developer would never be looking at a small, ACU-type thing,” because these quirky constructions, “are very much a local product. By locals, for locals.”
Along with giving small businesses and neighborhoods a better chance at avoiding large-scale development, gentrification and displacement, ACUs could help make our streets safer. 2021 was one of the deadliest years on record for traffic fatalities, reflecting an upward trend that started before the pandemic. It is no coincidence that Portland’s deadliest intersections for pedestrians are concentrated along East Portland’s commercial corridors, where the road network and geographic spread of commercial establishments are still designed to serve the speed of cars over the safety of people and health of businesses.
ACUs can reduce traffic fatalities by bringing the goods and services we need closer to us and away from roads that function as highways, arterials, freight corridors and main streets all at once. A four-block walk down a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood street to the corner store is much safer than a fifteen-block walk down East 82nd Avenue to reach a strip mall. The more people have the former option, the fewer will choose to drive, the greater incentive Portland will have to invest in infrastructure that promotes safety.
It’s not just the deadly harm that this kind of car-favoring environment brings to our neighborhoods — there is also the social impact. Parents are more aware than ever of the detrimental effect on children stuck at home, but before COVID-19 many American children were already forced to stay at home to avoid increasingly deadly streets, as car crashes are the second leading cause of death for teens in the United States, according to the CDC. Imagine a Portland where kids across the whole city could once again walk or bike to the corner store along safer neighborhood streets, rather than needing a chaperone every time they leave their house.
ACUs have become a hot topic since the pandemic forced many of us to spend enough time in our neighborhoods to realize how few critical resources we can access without driving. Typically, proponents of ACUs describe them as tools that can bring back neighborhoods that are better for public health and safety, but what if ACUs could also be a tool for addressing inequality and decades of gentrification and displacement that have impacted so many Portlanders? While there is strong evidence that ACUs could benefit everyone, the rest of this column examines how ACUs could serve BIPOC Portlanders, specifically Black residents who live in East Portland.
Fighting displacement and building up Black wealth in East PDX
Over the past 20 years, gentrification in NE Portland displaced many of the city’s Black residents to neighborhoods east of I-205. As East Portland lacks the job centers (an interactive map of economic opportunity by the city reveals a job chasm east of 122nd Avenue), and the same transit infrastructure that can be found in the central city, many residents are required to spend more time and money to travel to work, run errands, and access civic amenities. In an era of record gas prices and congestion, the pain caused by this gap is only getting worse.
This transportation barrier also applies to East PDX-based Black entrepreneurs. In order to open a brick-and-mortar business, many would have to travel to commercial areas in the central city, where they must compete with other businesses from across the region to land a commercial lease. Due to redlining, high mortgage rates and high loan denial rates boxing Black communities out of the explosion of generational wealth created by the housing market, many Black business owners are applying for these leases without the capital afforded to their peers — essentially competing with their hand behind their back.
As the creation of more housing (along with more programs and policies that ensure equity in the opportunity purchase homes) could help reverse the five-decade trend of sinking homeownership rates among Black Portlanders, so could adding more affordable commercial spaces in East Portland make it easier for Black entrepreneurs living there to start small businesses. Ideally, ACUs would also create a new opportunity for Black homeowners to earn extra income while supporting local entrepreneurs, and the businesses that open up on their property will create new job opportunities for everyone living east of I-205.
Tralice Lewis, who owns Callie’s Custom Hat Wigs, is very familiar with the barriers Black Portlanders face when trying to start their own business. A Black Portlander who grew up near Northeast Alberta Street, Lewis still drives half an hour each way from “the numbers” back to her old neighborhood to pick up essentials, including products for her business. When Lewis tried to start her business, she struggled to get loans: “I was very upfront (when applying for loans). I don’t have the money, my credit’s not all the way there, but this is my business, this is what I want to offer to the community.” Her loan provider offered Lewis a fraction of her initial request: “I was told, ‘um, no, how about you wait, you need to build your credit, so we are going to give you this hundred dollar loan. Out of a 25,000 dollar loan (application)."
Lewis believes that finding an affordable lease can be just as challenging for Black people in this city as finding affordable housing: “All my friends who are talented, went to school, want to have their own businesses, but then you go out there to get the rent, they can’t be rented to. Nobody wants to give them a step in the door.”
She also agrees ACU owners, by virtue of being people who are members of the community, could be more supportive of Black business owners.
“If we just had the outlet,” Lewis said. “A family member with their own home, and to be able to add to that home, and create that generational wealth, we could leave our children something.”
‘This is often what is talked about in our homes,” Lewis said. “We are talking about, ‘man, if we only had a house we would take this land and put two, three businesses on it. To create it to help other people and small businesses come in.’”
If it is such a good idea, why isn’t it already happening?
Given their potential and popularity on commercial streets in the central city, why aren’t there more ACUs in East Portland? According to the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability’s Principle Planner Eric Engstrom, while there is a home occupancy permit available to businesses, there are long-standing traditions in urban planning that has made it harder to set up an ACU.
“From the 1950s on up until literally the 2000s, the zoning philosophy was to get rid of that stuff because it was intruding on the residential character, if you will,” Engstrom said.
Engstrom claims BPS is taking steps to reverse this trend and has been rezoning small businesses like those in the center of Ladd’s Addition so they won’t disappear. However, Engstrom says the agency has noticed that not only are Black residents facing higher barriers to set up something like an ACU compared to other residents, they are also more likely to see their business get tripped up in the current zoning rules.
“It’s not that there are explicit barriers in the code,” Engstrom said. “But because Black-owned small businesses have less access to capital, they are more likely to be doing things from their home or doing things on a small scale initially. And they get disproportionately caught in zoning violations for having businesses in their home.”
Engstrom says BPS is starting a project this year that will revisit and update these regulations following a pre-pandemic racial equity analysis of the barriers the current zoning codes put on entrepreneurs of color. However, making it easier to create ACUs in East PDX won’t immediately produce thriving businesses, something Deangelo Moaning, a business owner and the Economic Chair of the Portland chapter of the NAACP, is quick to point out.
In an email, Moaning noted the lack of transportation infrastructure bringing customers into East Portland can sink small businesses in its neighborhoods, putting additional financial duress on Black Portlanders:
“If there is no transit bringing outside commerce into the community then there is no financial stimulus being introduced to the neighborhood and therefore no exchanging of goods or services that lead into boosting the local economy,” Moaning said. “I have seen plenty of businesses in East Portland go under as a result of all of the issues that continue to plague the area.”
However, Portland has a long history of infrastructure, particularly transportation infrastructure, either displacing or outright leveling its Black neighborhoods, as evidenced by the MAX Yellow line in the early 2000s and by Interstate 5 in the 1960s. Many Black Portlanders still harbor distrust for city transportation investments because of these projects.
Yemaya Shakur, who owns a “spiritual offerings” health boutique in East Portland and has struggled to find affordable commercial space, would be wary of any transportation investments in East Portland. To Shakur, who was displaced by rising housing costs to a neighborhood on the Gresham border, when the City starts fixing up parks, upgrading the MAX, and adding bike lanes, it is a worrying sign that she is about to struggle to pay rent.
“You start to see more apartments upgrade themselves,” Shakur said. “You see old apartment owners starting to sell their property, and people come in to revamp the property, and then the rent goes up.”
Moaning insists that any action plans for infrastructure improvements, “must be created, developed, proposed, built and executed with the voice of the impacted community at the forefront in order to have these improvements without pricing the people that live in the area out, and it must be done in such a way that the people control the narrative.”
This is the right thing to do, but Portland does not have a good record of doing it — even when all the government parties involved echo Moaning and Shakur’s concerns.
This is why ACUs small scale, incremental nature is so important. As they are smaller investments for local property owners (homeowners), they present both the landlords and business owners an opportunity to take risks where, if things go wrong, the failures don’t have to be devastating. As local economist Joe Cortright put it when comparing ACUs to food carts, another small-scale commercial development that is popular among entrepreneurs with less starting capital: “Fast and cheap failure are really useful economically. It’s better for somebody to find out they don’t have a good business idea quickly and cheaply than it is for them to spend a lot of time and money doing that, and go deeply into debt.”
This kind of low-risk, high reward aspect of ACUs means they don’t need the same kind of foot traffic that say, a storefront at the bottom floor of a brand new, block-long multi-use development needs in order to justify themselves economically.
So, rather than hoping that this time the new infrastructure designed to bring customers into a neighborhood won’t displace current residents, a city promotion of ACUs would allow Black residents in East Portland to build out their community by themselves, creating their own commercial spaces they can use to help entrepreneurs cut out from the marketplace.
Nearly a century ago, Portland was jam-packed with locally-owned businesses that gave residents the freedom to access most of their daily needs by a brisk walk. Their convenience and the sense of community they provided meant that no distant strip mall or corporate supermall could replace them on their own. It took unprecedented government intervention into where small businesses could be built, as well as billions of federal dollars for freeways, to snuff out that type of business that has been commercially successful around the world for thousands of years. All Portlanders, and especially Black Portlanders, are now suffering from the deadly commercial streets, congested highways, higher costs of living, social isolation and world-ending emissions those untested interventions led to.
While ACUs aren’t the silver bullet to address all of these problems, when combined with other solutions proposed in previous entries to this column, including ADUs, equitable congestion pricing for cars (with exemptions or subsidies for low-income drivers) and electric bikes and scooters, they offer a critical tool that can reclaim our neighborhoods from the automobile.
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