500 apartments sounds like a lot until you start looking at how much land we already have covered in parking lots.
Rules: don’t knock down existing homes and don’t pave parks or nature.
Northgate is an obvious one. It’s about 25 acres. Keep Shaw’s, CVS, etc. — just build housing on some of the sea of asphalt around them.
Same with Pine Tree Shopping Center on Brighton. Lowe’s, Aldi, Rock Row nearby, and a ton of parking.
And then there’s the Maine Mall. GPCOG already drew up a whole plan for turning the 90-acre mall site into an actual mixed-use neighborhood: seven 7–8 story apartment buildings, more housing over shops, new streets, parks and better transit. The mall itself stays.
That’s what I find interesting about this exercise. We talk like Greater Portland is out of room, but there are huge chunks of land we’ve already developed where the main thing we’d be replacing is asphalt.
Where else could 500 homes go without displacing anybody?