In 1996, 26-year-old Teressa Raiford left Portland with two children in tow for Dallas, Texas after her cousin died in a shooting. “I didn’t want my children to think that that was normal,” she recalls. Reiford went on to pursue a career in business and in 2006 started her own company, Intrinsic Group, which helps businesses operate more efficiently.
In August 2010, Raiford moved back to Portland, the city she was born and raised in, and has delved into the city’s civic life, revealing what she characterizes as a deep disconnect between City Hall and the citizenry. She hopes that by getting elected to City Council, she can apply her business acumen to city government and improve communications with the public. If elected, she would be only the third black person to hold a seat on City Council.
Jake Thomas: What made you want to run for City Council?
Teressa Raiford: Having a business consulting company, my job is to build solutions. So when I came home and saw that our community was changing and our attitudes were changing, even toward each other, I thought what is the problem? It looks beautiful here, and there seems to be a lot of opportunity, so why isn’t everybody happy and taking advantage of what’s here? And what I realized is that there is a lack of communication. I was like, OK, the haves are not promoting the information to the have-nots.
J.T.: Both candidates for this position are known quantities. People know who Amanda Fritz is, they know who Mary Nolan is. Why should voters pick you?
T.R.: Because I’m a businesswoman, and we need a better business service in this community. Evidently people are not happy, and that has to do with customer service. You have to be more efficient. I know Amanda is caring. She used to be a nurse. She has a compassionate heart, but she’s doing business in my neighborhood. Mary Nolan, she knows geography and politics, and that’s beautiful and everything else, but we need business in the neighborhood, and we need people who know the people in the neighborhood to do business and to show them how to get access opportunities. That’s what I’m going to do; that’s what I’ve been doing.
J.T.: What are you going to do to make the city more business-friendly and jumpstart businesses?
T.R.: Entertain global opportunities. I have a global business right now. So I want to attract some of those opportunities to come here and to do business with some of the underdeveloped opportunities here. We have a lot of minority money here that nobody’s taking advantage of. We have a lot of seed money that’s here that’s just sitting and nobody knows how to plan enough to use that. I program people on how to do that — training. I keep calling it programing because you have to develop that mindset, but basically you have to teach those skills. You have to understand the process and rules of engagement. That’s what I want to teach the city. Let’s use our education system; let’s use some of these apprenticeships that the Portland Development Commission has.
J.T.: What do you think about the new Office of Equity and Human Rights?
T.R.: (Making a thumbs down gesture) I believe that justice is equitable. I didn’t see anything in there where we’re going to start assessing fees and violations to people that discriminate openly and blatantly. You can’t legislate morality, so why would you create an Equity Office that has no sustainable justice? There’s nothing in there. It’s kind of empty. We already have a Human Right Commission. People complain and then we give them two years to figure out how to deal with it? You just apply a violation.
J.T.: So you want something more concrete?
T.R.: No. Nothing that’s not already been done with Human Rights Commission. (For example) You go in and are discriminated against and that company’s flourishing. Well, they never have to hire you if they don’t want to. How do we process things as they come so we can document it and do something about it? We don’t need training. We all know how to be humans.
J.T.: As an African American born and raised in Portland, I was wondering how having that experience might shape some policies you’d bring to City Hall.
T.R.: I’m black. I’ve never been African. I’m a black American. When I was 11 years old, the Portland police did something unreasonable to my family. We had the “possum incident,” as they like to call it.
J.T.: The well-known one? (In 1981, Portland police officers threw dead opposums on the doorstep of a black-owned business, which, in part, helped lead to the creation of the city’s first police review board.)
T.R.: Yes, that was my grandmother’s restaurant, and my dad had to call the commissioner. When you’re a kid and happy-go-lucky and something like that happens before you’re a teenager, your mindset changes. It doesn’t defeat you. It kind of makes you powerful because you get to see the world for what it is, and you become a resolver, and say, how can we make this better? Because that hurts with that type of pain. So in my life now, I’ve always been a philanthropist. I’m giving. I’m like a teacher. It turned me into a different type of person.
Being from this community, I see the issues and know the people and know what the problems are and understand that they don’t know how to vocalize them. They don’t trust the system and it defeats them even more. I can communicate that sometimes the city’s not being racist, it’s just that the laws don’t make any sense. I’ll just go in and make the process more efficient.
You have a defeated community, and not just blacks now. You see Occupy Portland. Everybody’s upset and they don’t understand that we’re the 99 percent. What they need to do is occupy City Hall. If you’re a businesswoman, get a position in there so that you can be on the inside and you can help them make decisions that make sense.
J.T.: How has Northeast Portland changed since you grew up there?
T.R.: That’s an honest question?
J.T.: Yeah.
T.R.: It’s not there. It’s despondent. It’s gone. It’s sad. Like I said, it’s a defeated city. And when I talk to people, and you say what happened? It happened so fast. When I go into businesses there that have moved in from out-of-town, they say, it’s great. You know, they told me to come out here, and we’re getting help with housing and credit. And I say, well that makes a lot of sense, but they market it to you and you were 2,000 miles away, and they didn’t give that same information to the people who actually live here? Because that would have given us a level playing field, and you wouldn’t have people feeling disgruntled or gentrified. You defeat your city that way and not allow us to get in? I have to go into City Hall at this point.
J.T.: There are old wounds in Northeast Portland. What do you do to heal those wounds?
T.R.: You resolve them. You say okay this is what we have, what can we do with it? You have to basically reprogram the people based on the opportunities that they have available instead of people not knowing that there are opportunities available. You show them how to use them. It’s so simple.
J.T.: You mentioned the Portland Development Commission earlier. What’s your assessment of the PDC and how it’s changed over the years and how it’s made efforts to be more inclusive?
T.R.: Well, I know from people like John Jackley and Steve Green, they’re wanting to be progressive. When you have people that have been on the inside for a long time, it’s hard to promote these objectives to people they don’t have a relationship with. If the people don’t know about these opportunities, then the PDC is going to seem like a criminal that comes in and knocks them out and takes things away. That’s what you get on the streets, the PDC is the bad guy. They’re not the bad guy. The messenger is probably the bad guy. The guy who’s supposed to let you know that there’s an opportunity, to let you know that there was a community planning event and should have let you know that it was in your neighborhood and invited you to that event. I’ve gone to a lot of community planning and organizing events, and I’ve known about it from a direct email or tweet, and I go, and people are looking at me like I shouldn’t be there. And I’m like, well, I need to be here. I live here. Would you call that transparency in politics?
J.T.: I want to talk to you about youth violence, an issue you’ve been personally affected by. Your nephew was shot outside an Old Town night club. What is the city doing right and what is it doing wrong to address youth violence?
T.R.: We have a police force that cannot afford to investigate crimes. We have 119 unsolved homicides, and you’re asking me what the city can do to make that better? They need to investigate the crimes. They need people to help them with their budget issues that are stopping them from investigating crimes. I think we’re spending more money on service-oriented tasks than we are on investigative tasks. An investigation will solve a crime. If you have 119 unsolved homicides that are gang related, you need to put money into investigating those crimes, because that’s a lot of murderers out there on the street. That’s seriously dangerous. We’ve got to get rid of something — whatever we need to do to get money back into investigations. Our children are not safe.
J.T.: Do you think it would be better to have money for investigations rather than money for prevention or outreach?
T.R.: Well, I don’t see it preventing anything. At that Gang Task Force meeting, they’ve been meeting for 25 years talking about prevention and control and enforcement and violence, and I guess this year we’re back to the 1990s with our numbers. They need to bring the community into the policy-making. Bring the community into some of the outreach and committees. It seems like the public doesn’t even know about these meetings. Wouldn’t you think that if prevention is something we want to do, you’d want to invite the public?
J.T.: The city’s inventory of affordable housing continues to shrink and wait lists are long. Do you have any ideas on how to increase the supply of affordable housing in Portland?
T.R.: Absolutely. I think free enterprise. I think that if we’re always contingent on what the county, state or federal funds can do for housing that we’re not looking at the big picture. Being a resident of Portland, there are a lot of houses in the community that are empty. We’re currently working on turning some of those into transitional housing to provide housing for some veterans. I think people just need to sit down in their communities and start discussing opportunities that they can bring together and make that happen because we have an abundance of opportunities out here. I feel like a kid in a candy store.
J.T.: Do you have any ideas on how the city can collaborate with the county on social services and other challenges facing the city?
T.R.: I think they need to expand their grassroots efforts. The community needs to have empowerment. They need to be empowered so that they can provide each other social services. People right now don’t want to deal with the social services. Sometimes, if there’s a social service, they won’t use it. They think everything is a scam right now.
J.T.: TriMet keeps getting more expensive each year, while cutting services and chipping away at Fareless Square, which is now the Free Rail Zone. Do you have any ideas on how to make mass transit more affordable?
T.R.: I grew up here and I used to work at the court house, and the idea of it not being free is a scary thing. I think there needs to be more community investment. If there is a cost that needs to be factored in, then they need to work with corporations to keep it free. We have to be more progressive in how we do business and form partnerships.