Street Roots editorial coming out in the May 29 edition.
The city of Portland is pushing the idea of using $42 million – mostly from Portland Urban Renewal funds — to build a minor league baseball stadium in Lents. Bad idea.
The citizens of Portland already are on the hook for $30 million from the last stadium. How can the city justify spending another $42 million on another stadium? We can’t.
The Portland Beavers play 72 home games a year. Each game lasts two to four hours. That’s an average of about 216 hours a year. That equals about one full workweek a month for five months. And most of the jobs at the stadium are low-wage jobs. Hardly an investment in the local community. It’s a slap in the face to average Portlanders to serve a man who doesn’t even live here. Urban renewal investments need a better payoff for Portland than a baseball stadium.
The city of Portland is currently considering relaxing the 30 percent set aside policy for the Lents Urban Renewal District in order to fund the stadium.
Whether or not readers support baseball in Lents, taking the funds slated for housing for families and seniors does not make sense. Considering Portland’s long history of gentrification, this deal would almost certainly drive poor and working folk out of the neighborhood.
The new light rail that will help bolster east Portland will improve Lents and many neighborhoods that traditionally have not been prioritized by Portland’s elite. Lents has the chance to become one of Portland’s coolest neighborhoods – much like the University/Portsmouth, Concordia and Mississippi neighborhoods in North and Northeast. If the Beavers move to Lents, the stadium will actually become a symbol of what is wrong with the neighborhood.
If we are investing public funds in Lents and surrounding neighborhoods, we should be investing in local affordable-housing efforts, small business start ups and improvements. Helping attract a grocery store such as New Seasons, for example, would do more in the short- and long-term for the neighborhood than a baseball stadium.
Street Roots is not against baseball being in our region. Possibly our neighbors in Vancouver or Beaverton would benefit from such a deal. We just can’t see spending $42 million on something that doesn’t pay off and isn’t really wanted by the majority of Portlanders.
Street Roots supports much of the great work that the city of Portland, the Portland Development Commission and other interest groups have done to make Portland a livable city. Saying that, we also know that the same engine that has created a livable city for some has affected poor folks and minorities over the years in a negative way. We can’t let the latter happen again, especially in a time when Portland needs long-term sustainable jobs and innovative ideas to lead us out of the economic downturn we all find ourselves in. Baseball in Lents is not one of them.