The Beech-Failing Alley Project

"Greening and activating" alleys is a way of reclaiming neglected city infrastructure, with special focus on placemaking, pedestrian benefit, and environmental stewardship.

This renewal is accomplished through vital improvements like benches, bicycle racks, art, garden plots, plantings, surfacing, watershed management, and other features that create a park-like setting. These improvements can also bring about neighborhood retreats, bicycle throughways, ADU communities, or small business and cultural districts.

While this movement is progressing in cities across the country, the City of Portland Oregon has yet to join the effort.

Our project aims to green and activate our neglected and highly public alley, while advocating for relative policy citywide.

Since beginning our mission March 2016, we’ve gathered $4,670 in-kind assistance. We're working to raise $10,000 toward the cost of professional grantwriting, outreach and technical services for 2016. We’ve carefully identified, researched, and set our sights on five separate grant opportunities available in the next six months. Each of these grant programs focuses either on help advocating for policy change, or funding for activities in keeping with our improvements onsite.

If this crowdfunding campaign surpasses our goal, we’ll share up to $10,000 additional funds with one or more lower income residential neighborhood groups for greening and activating improvements to an alley, or similarly neglected pedestrian-shared roadway; as they meet benchmarks such as cooperative clean-up. See our project updates to learn about sister projects and new in-kind contributions.

Currently, if a group of Portland neighbors wants to green and activate an alley or similarly neglected pedestrian-shared roadway, it's prohibitively complicated and expensive: with little local precedent, no clear policy to facilitate their effort, and no city incentive for neighboring developers to assist them. Just the professional surveying of a Portland alley can cost over $3,000. The cost of grading and park-like hardscaping of a Portland alley can easily surpass $200,000. The Beech Failing Alley Project is a group of neighbors inspired by the growing movement to green and activate alleys, while facing these local challenges.