For those who were there, it will go down in the memory books as vintage Erik Sten. Alone, in front of a standing-room-only audience of skeptics, critics and outright adversaries, Sten braced against the wave of animosity and frustration with such a mix of personal convictions and political frankness that even the most pissed-off had to give pause for what was at stake.
Whether or not everyone in the audience in that crowded, hot basement at Central City Concern agreed with him, the city's housing commissioner refocused the aggression into a compelling case: the new day access center for homeless services was going to happen to the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood, and improving the appearance and efficacy of the revamped homeless programs was essential to the funding and development opportunities poised to move in. Cementing the homeless center project was a years-long score he had to settle, stewing since his early days as a housing advocate and more recently as the center became a cornerstone of the city's 10-year plan to end homelessness, of which Sten was a primary architect.
In the end, Sten gave ground, agreeing to a new location for the center, a few blocks from the proposed site, and in the process repositioned opponents into supporters and appeased the concerns of the Old Town/Chinatown Community. Equally important, the homeless are getting a day access center. Score settled, and with still two months to spare before he stepped out of the role of housing commissioner for good. The man who has been involved in every major homeless service location, strategy or decision in Portland since 1991, is moving on.
“You hear in my voice and my energy level, I'm not at all burned out but I'm ready for a different phase. It's time to have the next housing commissioner.” Sten is taking a fellowship position with Living Cities, the country's largest private funding strategist on affordable housing. It will be a part-time job, a year-long fellowship, which Sten says is perfect for his transition out of public office. Living Cities is a who's-who consortium of A-list funders; the Annie E. Casey, Bill and Melinda Gates, Kresge, Rockefeller and the Robert Wood Johnson foundations, among others. With Living Cities, he'll be taking what has been successful in Portland and applying his tactics, and the foundations' money, to creating affordable housing opportunities along the West Coast.
Defining what those successes are could easily come in a well-rehearsed checklist of accomplishments: the 10-year plan to end homelessness, more flexible funding sources for housing, the Schools Families and Housing initiative, the 30-percent set aside from urban renew funding, Project Homeless Connect, etc. There are countless projects and initiatives in his black book dating back to 1991, when he cut his political teeth as a housing expert under then-Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury. In fact, there are few city bureaucracies sustained under such length of continued leadership. But no, by Sten's measure, success isn't ticked off in individual solutions, it is the cumulative effect of changing the way people view the problem.
“People are starting to see a different possibility. They're starting to see that they're part of the solution. That's what has changed in Portland the last 10 years,” Sten says. “Policy-wise, what I'm most proud of is that we have built a mandate for affordable housing into everything the city does. Where it used to be 10, 15 years ago, we did affordable housing as charity. The city funded affordable housing after we funded everything else. Not anymore, we've got the 30 percent set aside, we're now funding most of the city's homeless programs directly out of the general fund, and that's huge because even though we need more federal money, federal money has red tape. We want results. We don't want red tape.”
It's not just about the money — although Sten is first to admit that everybody needs to pony up. Helping people get out of the extreme poverty of homelessness is as much a human issue as a money issue, he says. People can come back from just about everything imaginable, in Sten's view, so why are some unable to come back from homelessness?
“I believe that a lot of these people are really broken. A lot of what's broken is the human connection. They don't feel the full sense of self worth that one feels if you're not living moment to moment on the street. What I've noticed at Homeless Connect, is that the haircuts and the oral documentation seem to have more of an impact than getting the free glasses. I think people's spirits, their souls get broken on the streets. Giving them a chance to rejoin society that is loving and nurturing, which is about human contact, not about, ‘here's some money for some rent.’ I don't think humans can be whole if they're not part of a community.”
In his final months in office, Sten developed a partnership with the Luis Palau Association, the evangelical arm of the Christian Church, to create the Home Again mentoring project. The partnership has enrolled nearly 100 churches, each to mentor a homeless family to be identified through the local housing program Homeless Solutions. In addition to tapping into the churchs’ support network, the program aims to raise $150,000 in private donations toward rent assistance for the families.
“There are thousands of people in this community who would like to do more to help people get off the street, and probably do send in their money, but don't know how to personally help,” Sten says. “And I think the ultimate way you end homelessness is having a whole community open and available and part of bringing people who have been completely alienated back.”
The country's housing system works well, according to Sten, for about 80 percent of the population who enjoy a highly subsidized system: The government spends three times as much on mortgage deductions than it does on low-income rentals. Sten wants to see the same strategies that work for the rest of the housing market applied to the bottom 20 percent who do not have acceptable housing or are about to lose it, by building affordable housing requirements into urban renewal development, and establishing sustainable funding streams for low-income housing. Of the 5,000 new housing units established with the renovation of the Pearl District, 1,500 are dedicated affordable housing. But Sten acknowledges that the city can't build its way out of the affordable housing crisis. He supports efforts in the Oregon Legislature to establish a real estate transfer fee, which would dedicate one-half of 1 percent of home sales toward supporting affordable housing, existing and new.
“You have to treat affordable housing as basic infrastructure. It's as fundamental to the city's health as good roads and fire stations, and without it, you're going to function as well as you will without good roads and fire stations,” Sten says. “When you look at the U.S. economy and its system, there's absolutely no reason to believe that you will get affordable housing without investing in it and working at it, any more than you will get a fire station.”
In Sten's eyes, Portland has the human capacity, the heart, the brains, and the strategy to basically solve affordable housing in Portland within a generation. By his calculations, the city gains about 500 affordable units a year, when it needs to gain 2,000 a year. The difference between those figures is a matter of money, and that's a challenge his successor will face.
“The main thing that I have not been able to achieve that will stop that vision from coming true is we have to have a permanent dedicated source of affordable housing and we don't have that,” Sten says. “We don't have a source of money that's adequate.”
Whoever his successor may be, Sten takes stock in the commitment made by his fellow commissioners, each of whom visited him after he announced his departure.
“Every single one of my colleagues, all four of them, came to me independently, and said, you know what, I actually feel like you don't have anything to worry about, because we're all committed, and we all get this stuff, and we're going to step in and fill it,” he said. “And two even said that maybe in a weird way this will be good, because we rely on you to manage all this stuff but we believe in it just as well as you do and we're going to learn it.
“It will take a lot of hard work. I don't think that if we just coast it's going to get anything but worse. Because I think Portland is going to continue to get more and more expensive. But the affordable housing movement keeps fighting, and I tend to be part of it in a different capacity.”
