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Food carts take the curse off
Portland’s parking lots
On formerly barren edges of surface parking, inexpensive meals of all kinds are being dished out.
In Portland, Oregon, everyone is talking about food carts. In the past few years, more than 400 theoretically movable (but in fact mostly stationary) food stands have proliferated across Multnomah County.
From walk-up windows, the cart operators dispense extremely varied food, often of high quality. In many instances, they work with ingredients from nearby agricultural producers. In a state that’s currently suffering one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, carts make it possible for people of modest means to eat out — usually more healthfully than at fast-food chain restaurants.
Some individuals with long-term hopes of opening full-scale restaurants see diminutive food carts as a low-cost way of making a start. “What do creative unemployed young people do in a recession?” asks Ethan Seltzer, a Portland State University planning professor who is a fan of food carts. “They get a micro-loan and run a food cart. We’re losing parking lots to food cart pods.”
“The carts help to keep activity on the street” and make the edges of parking lots more appealing, observes G.B. Arrington, principal practice leader for PB PlaceMaking in Portland.
When the Congress for New Urbanism held a transportation summit in downtown Portland last November, participants were struck by the number of food carts downtown. Several lots in the central business district have not just one or two carts but whole clusters of them (see photo on page 1).
The explosive growth of food carts runs counter to the usual trend in urban regeneration. Typically when a city center becomes a place where middle- and upper-middle-class people want to spend time, the architectural code of conduct becomes more formal, more carefully constructed. Food carts, with their budget-driven, ad hoc designs, take a city in the opposite direction.
The carts are not necessarily tidy-looking. Next to some of them sit propane tanks. Carts tend to be mostly metal, but sometimes wood. Strong colors and eye-catching graphics offset their small size. Some carts are just vans or campers adapted to the food business — making a sharp contrast with the urbane downtown.
Carts could be what a downtown needs to avoid becoming too stiff and predictable. “I love them,” said Norman Garrick, a transportation expert visiting from the University of Connecticut. “It works against the center being too polished. It makes the place more ‘real.’”
An old idea reinterpreted
The virtues of simple food stands have long been recognized by urban thinkers like Christopher Alexander. A Pattern Language, the pathbreaking 1977 book by Alexander and a group of his collaborators, had this to say: “Many of our habits and institutions are bolstered by the fact that we can get simple, inexpensive food on the street, on the way to shopping, work, and friends. The food stands which make the best food, and which contribute most to city life, are the smallest shacks and carts from which individual vendors sell their wares.”
Portland and the surrounding county have taken that message to heart. “Multnomah County has 450 carts, a 20 percent jump over last year, with another 32 carts under review,” Karen Brooks reported in October in The Oregonian. “No other big city is friendlier to vendors, with affordable licenses (a mere $315) and unrivaled access to real estate (average rent $500 a month).”
“Food carts are inspected by county health authorities just as frequently as restaurants,” Peter Korn wrote in The Portland Tribune. According to the county’s environmental health supervisor, carts have fewer major health code violations per inspection than restaurants do.
Operators range from Bosnians and other immigrants to native graduates of culinary schools. It’s a highly competitive field, with operators pursuing innovative ways to attract and keep a customer base. One cart owner sends out Tweets when fried pies are about ready for eating. Mexican, Thai, Korean, Kazakh, Czech, Vietnamese, Greek, and Italian are among the varieties of food offered by Portland carts.
The cost of acquiring and outfitting a cart varies. “Some people can put them together for a couple thousand dollars,” says John Haines, director of Mercy Corps Action Center. “Some go up to $20,000.” Mercy Corps makes loans of six months to five years to help some operators get started. ”Banks are not interested,” Haines says. “They’re seen as too risky and too small.”
“The City has stayed out of the way, mostly,” Haines says. Seltzer notes that “the City is there to mediate disputes between carts and restaurants.”
“The carts were opposed by a few restaurants, but they were laughed down,” says Bill Lennertz, executive director of the Portland-based National Charrette Institute.
“The commonly heard complaint,” says Marcy McInelly of the Portland design firm SERA, “is that with lower overhead and fewer land use and building permitting requirements, carts unfairly compete with brick-and-mortar restaurants.” McInelly believes, however, that “food carts don’t replace restaurants. They cater to the takeout customer, and there will always be a place for sit-down restaurants. If anything, the food carts seem to feed the Portland food buzz and create more consumer demand.”
Not every city can expect the level of food quality and imagination that Portland’s carts offer. With its population of 558,000, Portland is a city abounding with energetic young people, and its center has added thousands of residents in recent years.
Next steps
The food-cart movement is evolving. The latest innovation is a hybrid — half food-cart pod with weather protection and half pub. For a complex called “Mississippi Marketplace,” entrepreneur Roger Goldingay converted a 115-year-old church into a pub, and last fall established what has been called “a world-class food cart pod” on the adjoining land.
Seating for about 100 food-cart customers is provided around tables, underneath canopies that shed the rain. “If the rain or wind get too strong — or the cold unbearable — cart customers can take their food inside the pub, as long as they’re willing to have a drink with their meal,” Korn reported. Such a mixed concept suggests one other fact about food carts: Their potential is greatest in places where the climate is mild.
Another variation is a food or coffee outlet inserted into a small storefront opening or a blank downtown wall. Since the mid-1980s, an espresso bar has operated from part of the exterior of the Nordstrom’s department store near Pioneer Courthouse Square. Recently a cart called the Elephant’s Deli was installed in a retrofitted display window of a Macy’s building on the 5th Avenue transit mall.
“Outside of downtown, carts are forming neighborhood-oriented clusters” on vacant parking lots, McInelly points out. “At SERA we have promoted food carts as a low-cost urban design solution” — an interim idea for locations where there is no market for buildings.
In a Best Practices Report for 10 Station Areas, for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, ”we proposed that the City create a program to support local entrepreneurs and help install food carts along the edge of the mostly vacant lots on which sit the transit agency’s utility structures,” McInelly says. “These utility structures are often sited next to the transit stations, where urban enclosure and street-level activity are crucial to creating a safe and comfortable transit environment.”
“So far the City hasn’t implemented the idea, but the concept has its fans,” McInelly reports. “So we’ll see.”
This article is available in the January/February 2010 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.
Philip Langdon
Monika Vitek at Tabor Czech Food, left. Photo by Philip Langdon.
A food vendor is tucked into the side of a building in downtown Portland, above. Photo by Marcy McInelly.
