While pursuing needed home renovations to their 1955-era house at SE 80th Avenue and Harrison Street, Ellen Flint and her husband found they would need to spend all the contingency money they had budgeted on a new sidewalk. The couple knew they would need to add that missing section of pedestrian space along their property one day. Still, they had not anticipated combining it with this current accessibility project. This needed work could have stopped before it started if not for a $12,000 padding in their budget.
The Flints moved into the corner-lot home in 2013 when most of SE 80th Avenue south of their property was a gravel road. “80th South of Harrison was still unpaved, and people would literally practice dirt bike jumps. It was a rough road there, and there was no sidewalk. It was kind of sketchy,” recalled Ellen Flint. They had a sidewalk in front of their house facing SE Harrison Street. However, 100 feet of the property just had a raised concrete curb. Their large hedge along the east side of the lot allowed just enough room for people walking to exit the sidewalk north of their home and create a worn dirt path to the corner sidewalk ramp.
The street is a critical connector for families with children at Bridger School, and it would soon play a significant role in the newly created 70s Greenway for people walking or rolling. In 2018, to improve the street’s condition, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) worked with neighbors to form a Local Improvement District (LID) on SE 80th Avenue from 100 feet north of SE Grant Street to SE Market Street. It included a section of SE Mill Street from SE 80th Avenue to SE 82nd Avenue to further help families navigate to the Portland public school. Adjacent residents in a LID pool their money with the city to build the improvements, lowering the individual costs for each property. The SE 80th and Mill LID would connect to the back of Portland Community College’s Southeast campus, where the institution constructed new sidewalks a few years prior. To the Flint’s surprise, the city did not include their home in the LID, with the project focusing on adding sidewalks to the east side of SE 80th Avenue. The LID work did reshape their sidewalk corner and added Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant curb ramps.
Ellen Flint was unsure why the city excluded her home from the LID, but she appreciated the new ADA corner curb ramps because of her mobility needs. “I’m coming up on 30 years with a variation of rheumatoid arthritis. That’s why I bought a one-level home,” explained Flint, who, on bad days, has less confidence in taking tall steps. The pedestrian connectivity added by the SE 80th and Mill LID gives her hope that she can remain in this home as the years go on. “Now I can walk to the bus, and I can walk to the grocery store, and I can walk to coffee or whatever, and stay here as long as I want to rather than have to move because I can’t function,” said Flint. However, the broken sidewalk connectivity on her property was always on her mind. “One of my priorities [when improving the house] was we need to fix the sidewalk situation.”
The Flints understood that adjacent homeowners were responsible for the sidewalk repair and installation. The LID would have also required their financial investment but with a five-year loan from the city to help pay it down over time. They are not upset about paying for the hedge removal and concrete work but felt it came at an inopportune moment. The Flints 2024 house renovations built several accessibility features for their home. They created wider hallways, allowing easier ingress and egress as they adapt to changes in mobility needs over the coming decades. “We need to be able to make it easier for us to stay here and not have an accident or be forced to sell our house and move because we can’t get into the bathroom or use the kitchen,” explained Ellen Flint.
This proactive project already had a large budget with a contingency fund for unexpected cost overruns. The project’s budget is what triggered the need for sidewalk improvements. The city code states that changes to the property that are 35 percent or greater than the assessed value of all improvements on the site will surpass the Significant Alteration threshold, and those projects have to include frontage improvements, like sidewalks. Property owners must build new infrastructure as close to city standards as possible within the existing right-of-way. For some sites, that could be curb-tight sidewalks, but in this case, there is space for a small planting strip between the existing curb and the new public walkway. The “assessed value” used in the Significant Alteration threshold calculations is less than the market value of a property. For example, a home like the Flints could have an Improvement Value of $200,000. In that case, any project with a building permit valuation over $70,000 would trigger frontage improvements.
Ellen Flint maintains a positive view of sidewalk requirements as a benefit to the community. However, she wishes the city had programs to lessen the impact on people’s finances. “I’m lucky I could pay for it,” said Flint. “I think being able to create options that don’t burden people who want to do it or who need to do it [would help].” She could see having interest-free loans for sidewalks and street repair as a way the city could help homeowners take on sidewalk installation. Regardless of how people pay for public infrastructure on their property, Flint feels investing in sidewalks is in the owner’s interest. “Anybody who’s worried about paying for [sidewalks], just take up your capitalist approach to it. They increase the value of my home. The better my neighborhood is, the more my home is worth.”
The Flints’ contractors completed home renovations and frontage improvements this summer. For the last several months, pedestrians using the Greenway have enjoyed the extended sidewalk on the west side of the street. The couple have noticed more people walking by their house and are glad they could contribute to the sidewalk connectivity in the neighborhood. With the primary work done, the Flints can now tackle the street-facing elements around the new pathway, making it even more inviting for people traveling on foot. “We’ve got this blank slate there where we can put in things like trees, and I’m really jazzed about having a little Free Library there,” said Ellen Flint. As the weather improves, look for those additions along SE 80th’s newest section of sidewalk.
Update: This article was updated to remove an inaccurate example of project cost that could trigger a frontage improvement and to replace the term “cost” with building permit valuation. Montavilla News regrets that misrepresentation.
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