A bad idea made bigger – and worse
In our previous editorial, “A bad idea made bigger” (see link below), we spoke out against the Portland City Council’s move to expand the Old Port Overlay bar-tax system into the Arts District and beyond. The Council is finally scheduled to vote on this ordinance this Wednesday night, April 4.
Now, as if that idea wasn’t dumb and unfair enough, here comes a companion measure, also up for a vote on Wednesday, that would make this bad proposal even worse.
If you value a vibrant and diverse nightlife scene that supports opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to do business downtown, we urge you to speak up against this latest scheme before it becomes law.
Here’s the deal. In the Old Port Overlay Zone, any new establishment that expects to make at least half its money from alcohol sales cannot open within 100 feet of another bar or restaurant that makes more than half its revenue from booze.
The new zoning being proposed would make this “dispersal requirement” applicable from the waterfront to Cumberland Avenue, and from State Street to India Street. But it wouldn’t be based on liquor sales. Rather, it would apply to any business, new or established, that has a liquor license and wants to offer live musical entertainment of any kind, day or night.
In other words, the Council is being asked to limit music – an art form, last I checked – in the Arts District, as well as the Old Port and various gerrymandered sections of downtown.
The “reasoning”: crowd control.
Yup, that’s what this is supposedly about – trying to keep people leaving music venues at closing time from walking near enough to one another to deliver a punch.
Absurd? You betcha. But wait, it gets crazier, and uglier.
This dispersal requirement is being backed by a neo-Prohibitionist group called 21 Reasons. The group’s coordinator, Erica Schmitz, has provided city officials with a scientific study that claims assault rates increase when the density of bars and stores that sell alcohol in an area increases.
The same study claims assault rates drop when restaurants are more closely grouped together, but the dispersal scheme under consideration this week applies to restaurants with live music, too. (Schmitz actually wants a 150-foot dispersal rule, not just 100 feet.)
The study says nothing about live music, but it has some disturbing findings about race and class.
According to the study, the big factors that drive assault rates up are the percentage of poor people and racial minorities in a community. “Assault rates were most strongly related to median household incomes and minority populations within zip code areas,” concluded Paul J. Gruenewald and Lillian Remer in their July 2006 study, “Changes in Outlet Densities Affect Violence Rates,” published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Controlling for the big factors of race and poverty, the researchers found a tiny increase in rates of violence associated with greater bar and liquor, beer and wine store density (about a 2 percent increase in incidents for every 10 percent increase in bars and stores selling alcohol). Proponents of the dispersal law hold up this study as hard evidence a 100- or 150-foot zoning buffer is necessary to keep Congress Street from becoming Wharf Street any day now.
Fine, I’ve been saying to them, but if you accept that part of the research, do you also agree with Gruenewald and Remer that the presence of poor and dark-skinned people is a much stronger factor affecting rates of violence?
“Oh, no,” they reply. “That’s not what we’re saying. There’s no evidence of that in Portland.”
Bullshit. If you endorse this study’s findings, then you endorse the research in it that says the poor and racial minorities are much more responsible for increases in violence than the walking distance between bars. All these factors were analyzed together. You can’t have it both ways.
Given that just about every would-be bar and restaurant owner hoping to serve a beer these days tells the Council their establishment will be “upscale,” one can’t help but wonder whether class issues aren’t really at the heart of this whole debate.
The dispersal requirement certainly would screw entrepreneurs of low or modest income.
That’s because at any given time, there are a limited number of commercial spaces in Portland both available and suitable to be a bar, restaurant or music venue. The 100-foot dispersal rule would make roughly 50 areas downtown off-limits to businesses offering both live music and alcohol. Some of the spaces in these areas are small enough and cheap enough for start-up businesses to occupy.
By making these affordable spaces no-music-zones, the city further reduces the few opportunities for low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs to open nightclubs, cafes and restaurants. Wealthy individuals and franchise businesses, however, can pick and choose commercial space with less regard for price. They have more options to start with, and the dispersal rule does not limit their choices very much at all. But it can kill the dreams of an entrepreneur with limited capital.
The zoning changes being proposed don’t limit the total number of bars in the Old Port and downtown. Instead, the law actually removes the limit placed on the number of bars that can operate in the Old Port (where a similar dispersal requirement has been in place, to no discernable public safety benefit, for over a decade).
Bars and restaurants with jukeboxes or in-house sound systems are unaffected by the law, provided they don’t allow dancing on the premises. (What is this, fuckin’Footloose?) Struggling local musicians would have even fewer places to play, as new venues are curtailed and existing venues that close are prohibited from hosting entertainment under new ownership.
Unlike the present Old Port Overlay system, which allows bar owners to transfer – that is, sell at a premium – their Overlay license to a new owner when they sell the business, there’s nothing in the new law that allows the transfer of entertainment licenses from one operator to another.
Here’s what can happen. Shay’s Grill Pub and David’s Restaurant are neighbors in Monument Square, and both have entertainment licenses. If, say, Shay’s closed, there could not be entertainment in that space again until David’s also closed. Plus, the commercial space Shay’s occupied would be worth less money and be more difficult to lease, thanks to this broad new restriction on its use.
As with the formula business debacle, city officials just aren’t thinking this through.
For another example, consider the classy Congress Street restaurant Five Fifty Five. It recently opened a small lounge adjoining its dining room, the Point Five Lounge. Owner Michelle Corry says she has no plans to offer live musical entertainment at present, but if she ever wanted to have a classical pianist tickle the ivories or a jazz guitarist play a few standards for her lounge clientele, this law would prohibit that.
Why? Because the front door of the Point Five Lounge is within 100 feet of the front door of The White Heart, which already has an entertainment license. The two lounge crowds might mingle after closing time, and who knows what horrible violence would erupt?
Gimmie a break.
Meanwhile, a block away on Free Street, the Dogfish Bar and Grill, a subdued eatery offering live jazz and folk music, stands opposite Mathew’s Pub, a considerably less subdued bar with an entertainment license and more than its fair share of police calls. One might think this is the type of situation the dispersal law is intended to prevent: two establishments that serve alcohol and host music within spitting distance of each other.
But the zoning change would not prevent this scenario, because the 100 feet are measured from one establishment’s entrance to another’s “along streets or public ways.” That means the line is measured from Dogfish’s front door, east to the crosswalk at Oak Street, across the crosswalk and back up the sidewalk to Mathew’s entrance – well more than 100 feet, by my eye.
As was the case with the dispersal requirement in the formula business ordinance, the city is not making a law that assumes people break the law – in this case, it does not assume people jaywalk across Free Street. So here and throughout the new zone, music venues serving alcohol can operate in most cases directly across the street from one another – just not side by side.
Crowd control, huh? Brilliant plan.
This isn’t fair zoning or effective public safety policy – which is why the Portland Planning Board unanimously rejected both the expanded bar-tax zone and the dispersal scheme last week. This is half-baked sociology applied to solve a problem that doesn’t exist outside the Old Port while, as police keep saying, the Old Port is getting safer anyway.
And it looks like it’ll have the five votes needed to pass.
It’s time to disperse this idea into oblivion. Make your voice heard before it’s too late.
— Chris Busby
Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard.
