August 9, 2014 — Change is nothing new on Portland’s waterfront. At various times the harbor has been an important hub for shipping Canadian grain, processing immigrants, fishing for cod, off-loading crude oil and shipbuilding.
Nearly 30 years ago, an ambitious condominium development sparked a city-wide campaign to protect the working waterfront from luxury development.
The referendum and the zoning that it spawned saved the historic waterfront for a while, but it could not save the fishing industry, which has since shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former size.
There is good reason that the latest announcement of a non-marine development on the waterfront has not drawn the same kind of public concern as the building of Chandler’s Wharf condominiums did in the 1980s: There’s enough room for everything, if we are careful.