Photo caption: Cherry blossoms bloom along the riverside at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Photo credit: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, 2019.
If you’ve ever visited downtown Portland, you’ve likely stopped by or at least admired the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. As a regional landmark, it’s heavily used by everyone from pedestrians to bike riders to cherry blossom lovers to Rose Festival parade goers. Recently, there has been a new focus on the park: revitalization.
In the 2025 Legislative Session, the legislature allocated funding to support the sustainability of the park, including a project which sought to “fund a study of options for the operation and maintenance of the park that would improve the livability and economy in the city and the state.” As a result, the City of Portland, Portland Metro Chamber, and Portland State University requested the support of Oregon Solutions (OS) and PSU’s Institute of Metropolitan Studies (IMS) for a collaborative project to study the activation of the Park.
Over the last few months, Oregon Solutions and IMS interviewed community members and staff across county and regional entities, state agencies, businesses, and nonprofits to better understand how people view the park and what they envision for its future.
The assessment, which was completed in June, focused on:
- Potential future operations of the park
- Public / private partnerships
- Programming and infrastructure
- User needs
- Economic stability
From these interviews, there was a clear, underlying desire to create a new vision for the park, one rooted in broad agreement and putting to use the Park’s best features. And, folks agreed on that not being the case right now.
In the assessment, one interviewee shares their perspective of the park as it is, calling it “an aesthetically pleasing ‘landing pad for Canadian geese’: not an eyesore, but not a benefit to downtown or the region.” (Though the geese may feel differently!)
This sentiment is not new, and already groups around Portland are working toward improvements of the park—including Portland Parks and Recreation’s design competition and the Human Access Project’s advocacy for river access. Yet, as the assessment describes, “Without a larger vision connecting them, [these] various efforts will be less than the sum of their parts.”
This is where a collaborative approach can be so essential. Instead of groups working ad hoc to connect to each other's work on the future of the park, a collaborative table allows for different perspectives, needs, and outcomes to come together toward a greater shared vision. Instead of competing or working within limited resources, a collaborative approach allows for shared resources and collective decisions toward the vision of a thriving park.
It’s not an uncomplicated process, but it’s one that is our best chance at building a shared, sustainable solution. The collaborative approach asks which strengths each stakeholder brings to the table and allows them to utilize those resources together. As the assessment shares, what’s been missing from the park’s revitalization is a connector. And developing that connector is the very strength that Oregon Solutions and IMS bring to the collaborative table.
The Oregon Solutions and IMS partnership is a living example of putting collaboration into practice. This project is the first time the two PSU groups have worked together, and it has already yielded opportunities for future collaborations and projects.
So, what’s next for the park? With the assessment completed, Oregon Solutions and IMS are supporting the development of committees and project teams that include many voices at the table. These groups will then work together to build a larger strategic vision for the park and how to build toward that better version.
The energy around the project is palpable. “Every person interviewed said they believed Portland can do big things,” the assessment states. Projects like these that Oregon Solutions and IMS are working on highlight in real time how collaborative solutions help to shape our cities—and state—for the better.
See the full assessment report on the Oregon Solutions website.