Forty years ago, Oregon leaders slammed the final nail in the coffin of the Mount Hood Freeway, a decision that ushered in a golden era of smarter growth and sent the rest of the country a clear message: The Portland region does planning differently.

Just not in Lou Fontana's backyard.

Fontana and his wife live on a quiet cul de sac off Southeast 153rd Avenue, in the path of what proponents hoped would be an eight-lane highway stretching all the way from the Willamette River to Sandy.

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A few years ago, thinking about retiring to the Oregon coast, the Fontanas put their house up for sale. They like their neighbors and their not-quite-suburban lifestyle.

Potential buyers didn't want to talk about any of that, however.

"People kept coming in, and their first question was: 'What is going on with that road out there?'" Fontana said. "They were talking about Powell Boulevard, of course."

East Portland has myriad transportation problems, small and large issues that make getting from one place to another a time-consuming hassle in the best cases and a daily mortal danger in the worst. The neighborhoods beyond 82nd Avenue host a higher percentage of the city's most vulnerable than other Stumptown zip codes; more of the population is older, poorer, disabled and less likely to own a car.

Yet the roads are also less likely to have crosswalks, sidewalks, bike lanes, even pavement, than those in other parts of the city. Nine of Portland's 10 most dangerous intersections sit east of 82nd avenue. The stretch of Powell from Interstate 205 to the Gresham line – about 50 blocks – contains eight high crash corridors.

The Mount Hood Freeway would have wiped out the neighborhoods along Powell. Instead, they've just been left to languish.

The poster child for poor planning

"This is where I bring people when I want to show them what's wrong in east Portland," said state Rep. Shemia Fagan as she stood at the corner of Powell and Southeast 136th Avenue one recent rush hour.

"Look around and what do you see?" she said. "No sidewalks, sparse crosswalks, gravel shoulders, poor lighting, unimproved TriMet stops."

East Portland voices

I am now 63 years old. I worry that after I retire and get older I will have to move so that I can walk to basic services.

-- Robin Burwell, Parkrose Heights

I don't like that me and my young children have to walk in the street instead of on sidewalks.

-- Amanda Miller, Mill Park

What the corner does have: Two strip clubs, a head shop, a bar and a pawn shop.

"This is what happens when you ignore a place," Fagan said. "You wind up with a parent knowing her kid has to has to choose between walking to school in the road and walking to school through a strip club parking lot."

This used to be an uncluttered land of orchards and fir trees. As early as the 1890s, farmers used the dirt path that would become Powell to take their wares to market. By the 1920s, when the Ross Island Bridge was built, Powell was a state road and a primary route downtown from Gresham and points east.

In the 1940s and 50s, as Americans fell in love with the idea of freeways, Portland-area leaders embraced a plan to build 14 new highways crisscrossing the region. The Mount Hood Freeway was to stretch from the river to Southeast 122nd Avenue, eventually running to the outskirts of Gresham, then Oregon's fastest-growing suburb.

Powell Boulevard has been a main drag between Gresham and Portland for generations. Here's a 1926 photo of the street, taken at the 82nd Avenue intersection.

From the start, talk of the Mount Hood Freeway involved running much of it atop or adjacent to Powell. City and state planners reasoned that replacing Powell with a superhighway would help eliminate "substandard" homes and "underused" businesses, bringing both revitalization and speedier commutes. Yet in a way, dubbing Powell's collection of farm houses and small stores "substandard" helped ensure that it would remain that way; what property owner would invest in improvements knowing that their home or shop is going to be razed in a few years?

The freeway died amid the highway revolt movement of the 1970s, as neighborhood pushback and a new generation of environmentally minded politicians – including Gov. Tom McCall and Mayor Neil Goldschmidt -- began to steer Oregon away from suburban sprawl and toward smarter growth. Portland-area leaders decided to use the $180 million saved on the Mount Hood Freeway to build the eastside Max and smaller transportation projects. Like Fontana, who gave up trying to sell his house, Marks loves living in east Portland; he loves that his wife, a Russian immigrant, can shop in businesses where proprietors speak her native language, that he can send his two daughters to David Douglas schools, that he can afford a two-bedroom apartment. He just hates Powell.

"Every time I'm out here, I feel like I'm risking my life," he said one recent afternoon, as he navigated the unpaved shoulder between his house and 136th.. Rain and erosion had left pock marks in the shoulder – "They turn into big puddles in the winter, so you have to walk in the bike lane if you want your feet to stay dry," he said. At least one business near his home uses the shoulder as an overflow parking lot.

"The people in charge allow this to happen," Marks said. "It feels very unfair, like we're stuck with this lousy road because we're not rich enough to live downtown."

Expensive answers

The people in charge know how bad Powell Boulevard is, how dangerous and poorly planned. The challenge, as in so much of east Portland, is figuring out precisely which problem to solve first and who should pay for the solution.

Last year, the Portland City Council signed off on something called the Outer Powell Boulevard Design Plan, a roadmap for remaking Powell into a safer, prettier street with buffered bike lanes, sidewalks and street trees.

This proposed transformation isn't as radical as the Mount Hood Freeway or subsequent plans that died for lack of funding and community support. Those called for Powell to be widened to up to eight lanes. This new concept would keep the basic feel of the road east of I-205, a gently curving, two-lane meander through Douglas firs that rise four stories, while adding buffered space to protect pedestrians and bicyclists.

The estimated price tag is still steep: $69 million, a figure transportation engineers call "quite conservative."

"One of the things that makes Powell such a unique challenge is that we have very, very little space to play with," said Jason Tell, who manages ODOT's Region 1, which covers the Portland area. "It developed as this country highway. Anything you do to widen for any reason – sidewalks, a continuous left turn lane, water treatment, bioswales – translates into right of way. Right of way equals lots of money and lots of lives impacted."

The city of Portland annexed the neighborhoods along Powell in the 1980s, but the boulevard still belongs to ODOT. The state's efforts at improving the highway – the agency just spent $5.5 million on new pavement, curb ramps, crosswalks and rumble-strip style dividers between bikes lanes and the road proper -- focus on in-the-moment safety. That's just the first half of the litany of woes Fagan and other east Portland advocates recite when discussing Powell, however.

"When we went out to talk about what we were going to do, we had people who were very upset," Tell said. "We had people in tears because we were not telling them what they wanted to hear."

Plans for east Portland

In the past decade, elected officials and other civic leaders have begun paying more attention to the plight of east Portlanders. Here are a few of the efforts underway:

Powell presents a chicken-and-egg style riddle: The city is probably better suited to handle the broader issue of Powell's future. But Portland leaders aren't going to take Powell from the state until the road has been improved.

In the last legislative session, Fagan and other east Portland lawmakers got $5 million for Powell. Not money to fix the street, but rather to make sure state engineers have done the appropriate prep work so that when a larger pot of cash becomes available, Powell can move to the front of the queue.

That's not the only planning effort underway: A regional coalition that includes Metro, TriMet and the city is in very early stages of talking through new transit options the Division-Powell corridor. The goal is faster, higher capacity mass transit for outer southeast – and the federal money, probably vital to any sweeping changes, that often comes with it.

Devin Carr, an 18-year-old Portland State and Portland Community College freshman, turns giddy at the prospect of 21st Century bus service in his neighborhood. He grew up between Division and Powell, and he's a serious a transit buff; as a kid, he'd carve routes through the neighborhood with a rolling cart like the kind contractors use to gather supplies at Home Depot. Now he runs a blog in which he suggests new and better TriMet routes and dreams of a career in transportation planning.

Devin Carr lives closer to Powell Boulevard than Division Street, but uses Division when he can.

"You could do so many cool things with Powell," he said.

Right now, however, he avoids the boulevard, choosing to walk the few extra blocks to Division whenever his itinerary allows. When he does have to navigate Powell – crossing the street at dusk, for example, on the last leg of a bus ride home from school– he pulls out his smart phone and opens an app that turns it into a flashing yellow caution light.

"I just hold it, wave it, and wait for someone to actually pay attention." Carr said. "Usually I have to wait a really long time."

-- Anna Griffin