Cocktailhag, the blog

I’ve been working up at the mushroom building again this week, and couldn’t help but notice that dozens of dump trucks were descending a nearby road every day, carrying loads of soil and rock, so I decided it was time for CHNN to do some investigative work, especially since I was already undercover in my construction clothes.  It turns out that the final phase of a more than usually unsightly stilt-home development, which has produced, through a string of developers over the last 15 years, a dozen or so tacky but expensive McMansions mooning the city from their precarious perches.  They call it “City Lights,” and the view of the city is indeed incredible.

The earlier phases, for all their cheesiness and pretension, were clearly the easy part, requiring only a slight widening of an existing “goat trail,” some enormous augur footings, and 60 or 75 feet of spindly, scaffold-like supports, and a whole row of instant view homes was magically created.  This phase isn’t so easy.  In order to create an access road, a hillside about 40 feet high by 150 feet across had to be cut out, and hundreds of truckloads of unconsolidated basalt “left behind by the (prehistoric) Missoula Flood,” as the site engineer helpfully explained, had to be hauled away, leaving a switchback road with a gigantic, precarious-looking Gunite wall looming over the higher side.  The engineer further described the process for securing such a wall, which consists of digging out the hillside five feet at a time, inserting 20 foot rods at frequent intervals, then hydraulically torquing them and capping them with plates which are then attached to rebar and sprayed with layers of concrete averaging a foot thick, repeating this for the whole forty feet, and finally applying a finish coat that is then groomed and adorned with occasional irregular circles that are supposed to look like rocks.  They looked more like cartoonish cave drawings to me, and not very good ones at that, but I’m known for being overly critical of such things.

The “lots,” if you want to call them that, consist of a curb and a cliff, with land evidently somewhere far below for footings, lying pretty much right on top of the West Hills Fault.  Talk about real estate gold, Baby….  They’re also asking a mere $800,000 for the first one, (with lovely plans and everything, but no house..) and they told me it has not yet sold.  Knock me over with a feather.  There are also eight other similar sites, if somebody beats you to the first one.  I marveled that they were ever able, in this economic climate, to secure financing for such an audacious and thus repeatedly abandoned endeavor, and I couldn’t help but wonder who would be left holding the bag if they ended up taking many years to sell, which seems likely.  (Although the market they’ve chosen: the wealthy, pretentious,and overconfident, have shown us time and again they’ll fall for anything, so who knows?)

As an alternative to the kind of costly and wasteful urban sprawl that has blighted other cities, Portland has long encouraged infill development quite successfully, and when it means fallow industrial areas being converted to condo towers and low-rise commercial streets sprouting four-story buildings with apartments and offices above, it’s generally a good thing.  The trouble begins when it means a dozen garage-fronted chockablock row houses replacing parklike streets of old bungalows, or leafy hillsides carved up for unsightly concrete walls and stilt-supported, suburban-looking behemoths like City Lights.  The tax base blossoms, but our famed livability pays the bill.

Still, I’m glad to see any new construction going on right now, if only to know that some of these engineers and dump-truck drivers, and the other trades I’ve been working with all these years, are still gainfully employed; a recent visit to the Bureau of Development Services reminded me once again how the recession has devastated the admittedly overheated building industry.  One of my favorite plans examiners explained to me that the sudden disappearance of the dozens of cranes that dotted the skyline as recently as a year ago (I counted eighteen in the summer of 2006, and there are two now, one at a hospital on the East side and one at an abandoned site downtown…) has left the BDS scrambling for revenue, tormented by layoffs, and unsure of how they will rebuild lost staff and expertise when the eventual upturn comes.  My residential permit that might have taken all day to expedite so recently took barely an hour this time, and they were all happy to see me.  I was happy to see them, too; all the frustrating but lucrative hours I’d spent there over the boom years seem a distant memory, but in retrospect a pleasant one.  You have to take the good with the bad, I guess.

Maybe I can get a job at City Lights doing some much-needed landscape remediation.