Port Property recently held the only required community meeting on their Bayside master plan, a massive proposal that goes before Portland’s Planning Board on Tuesday. If eventually approved, this will lock the entire project into city ordinance, though the developer would still be able to propose future zoning changes if they can garner City Council support.

Portland’s Bayside neighborhood, where Port Property Management has bought numerous properties, including 62 Elm St., lower left, and plans to build more than 800 housing units among seven buildings. The Portland Planning Board will hold a workshop on the proposal Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Hall lives in the Bayside neighborhood of Portland.

I urge anyone who cares about Portland’s future to submit written comment ASAP to planningboard@portlandmaine.gov (deadline noon Monday), or offer a three-minute verbal statement during the remote Planning Board meeting, which starts at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. And I urge Portland’s media to devote time and space to reporting on every phase of this massive, transformational development.

Around 50 people (twice the number of seats provided), from Bayside and beyond, attended the Feb. 21 community meeting on Port Property’s proposal. There was no news coverage – in contrast, the Press Herald published an article on a Planning Board meeting for a hotel near City Hall attended by just one neighbor – so I’d like to let folks know what was discussed.

Acorn Engineering and urban design firm Stantec presented alongside the applicant, Port Property. They propose 10 years of development over 9 acres on 13 adjacent parcels that cover seven city blocks.

The five-phase implementation would include seven new five- to 10-story buildings, the demolition of a popular bakery and just 28,000 square feet of ground-level retail space to serve over 800 units of housing, centered on a woonerf street, where bikes and pedestrians have right of way over vehicles.

According to the development team, a grant from one-time Maine Housing coronavirus stimulus funding makes this entire endeavor feasible (i.e., profitable) in Portland’s current regulation climate, and will require 200 units to be set aside in perpetuity for people who earn no more than 60% area median income. All low-income units will be segregated into a single building.

Public comments ranged widely, from hopeful to seriously concerned. Topics included:

• Portland’s need for very low-income housing, below the project’s income eligibility requirements.

• Parking is proposed to be diverted to the Public Market garage, blocks away from much of the housing.

• Bayside’s notoriously confusing traffic patterns and disinvested infrastructure.

• New levels of height and mass, with shadows cast across existing low buildings and homes.

• A conspicuous lack of green space within the project and surrounding neighborhood, and Bayside’s desperate need for tree canopy.

• The survival of the Bayside Community Garden, which has neither a permanent home nor municipal support.

• The demolition of Bayside’s surviving historic buildings.

• The need for a community center and amenities accessible to the entire community.

• The request for a community advisory panel, as championed by district councilors for other high-impact projects, including Maine Medical Center’s expansion, the Homeless Services Center in Riverton and the Roux Institute.

Bayside has a long, hard history – from the 1930s redlining of its immigrant residents to slum-clearing in the 1950s; the 1960s acquisition and destruction of homes and businesses by eminent domain to build Franklin Arterial, which cleaved the area, isolating Bayside as the city’s poorest neighborhood, and gerrymandered zoning that left it as the only legal place to offer social services. The outdated Oxford Street Shelter is about to relocate to a modern center, but homelessness continues to grow.

At the turn of the 21st century, the city created but failed to follow a revitalization roadmap dubbed A New Vision for Bayside. For decades, buildable land was bought up and razed. Those surface parking lots are now part of the proposed project that surrounds the few single-family homes that survived even the fire of 1866. The now-defunct nearby “midtown” project remains a blighted dirt tract. This is probably our last chance to do better for this key peninsula neighborhood.

Tuesday’s Planning Board meeting will lead to at least one workshop (hopefully more), then a hearing where the board votes with options to approve, reject or require specific conditions. The public voice – your voice – is vital to the process, especially for a project as large and multi-faceted as this one.