Coffee, beer, and an eponymous television show may be some of Portland’s most visible cultural exports these days, but another quintessential Portland experience requires a trip to the Northwest. Portland’s food carts, formed into “pods” in parking lots throughout the city, are part of the fabric of the city, and are known to be as delicious as they are abundant. But not all is completely peachy in fair Portlandia: A proposal for a downtown real estate development has caused consternation that some of those beloved pods may be lost or relocated.
A new development proposal for downtown Portland called “Ankeny Blocks” hopes to build 11 new buildings, including five skyscrapers, in an area of roughly six square blocks. Some of the new structures would go up on the sites of three beloved food cart pods, including the city’s oldest at Southwest 5th Avenue and Stark Street, which opened more than 30 years ago.
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Downtown Development Group, the group behind Ankeny Blocks, hopes the project will bring new businesses and vitality to an area that is already home to corporate offices such as Google, Airbnb, Deloitte, and Survey Monkey. DDG, one of the city’s biggest property owners, envisions the area to become a mix of residential and office spaces, with ground-floor restaurants and retail. Greg Goodman, the co-president of DDG, hopes that he can interest other developers to buy into the vision and build out the project in the coming years.
But food vendors worry about where they will move if their lot is taken away. The website FoodCartsPortland.com estimates some 60 to 70 food carts will need to find new homes should the development proceed, displacing one of the city’s prime cultural attractions. The site issued a call to action to vendors to come together and speak up for food carts.
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“It is part of the city’s downtown cultural lore,” FoodCartsPortland.com managing editor and owner Brett Burmeister told MUNCHIES by e-mail. “Tourists come from around the nation and world just to visit the food carts.”
Portland’s food scene has been raved about in the The New York Times and The Washington Post, which recently named Portland the top food city in the country.
For displaced food cart vendors, finding a new home under current laws will mean finding a new parking lot; unlike in cities like New York or LA, food vendors can’t drive around and set up shop for the day in spots that are reserved for permit holders.
“At this time, mobile food trucks parking against the sidewalk and vending is against the law, so when the development occurs, we would displace about 70 vendors who have been feeding Portland eaters for decades,” Burmeister told MUNCHIES.
Goodman says that he understands the important role food carts play in the city’s cultural identity.
“We’ve had a longstanding relationship with the food carts,” Goodman says. “The first food cart happened on our lot at 5th and Stark.”
The DDG has invited food carts to become permanent tenants in its buildings before and plans to do so moving forward, and has turned away national chains and banks. He says taking food carts out of Portland would be like “taking away Powell’s Books.”
Goodman says the DDG will help facilitate the move for food trucks from one lot to other lots owned by the company, and the company will hook up new lots to the electrical grid at a cost of $45,000 per lot.
“When you think of little old Portland being able to compete with [Washington] DC and LA and San Francisco and Chicago and New York, that’s quite a statement,” Goodman says regarding the Washington Post‘s ranking.
And Goodman wants to assure those worried that the development isn’t going to happen overnight. The first structure is at the very least a year away, and the group still needs to attract investors and builders before anything moves forward. The proposed development could take more than a decade to come to fruition.
But that message didn’t come across to food cart vendors. The operator of one food cart, Steaks Fifth Avenue, said that the announcement came as a surprise. “One of my employees called me about it last night,” Chris Schenk, who has been at the 5th and Stark pod for 19 years, told Willamette Week. Vendors pay rent month-to-month.
Goodman says he regrets not communicating better with food cart vendors and is reaching out to clarify the development goals, and that the plan has generally been very well-received.
It seems a bit like a case of growing pains in a city that saw more than 33,000 people move to within its limits in 2014. FoodCartsPortland.com said two pods closed in the last three months, and lamented that “it is disturbing to see so many vendors displaced at once.” Goodman says that given the legal limitations on where food carts are allowed to do business, perhaps O’Bryant Park would be a great place for some food carts to relocate. Both agree that food carts are here to stay and need new spaces to operate.
“Portland will always have a great street food scene—it will just evolve,” Burmeister told MUNCHIES. “To maintain a street food culture in our city center, we need to change some parking laws or identify areas where mobile vendors can set up shop either on public or private land.”
