What would a Portland for black people look like? The Portland African American Leadership Forum wants to know
What would Portland look like if city policy were shaped with the experiences and interests of Portland’s black community in mind?
That’s the question the Portland African American Leadership Forum hopes to explore and answer with the People’s Plan. PAALF hopes the plan will be a framework for organizing and advocating to empower black Portlanders to shape city policies and development as Portland continues its rapid change.
PAALF, an organization that gathers the city’s black community leaders around public policy issues, is best known for its work in opposing a Trader Joe’s development in Northeast Portland last year. Since then, the group has been working on the People’s Plan and is now in the community involvement stage that is so crucial to what PAALF hopes will unite and amplify the interests of black Portlanders surrounding issues of equity in education, housing, health care, arts and culture, environmental sustainability and economic development.
Despite the fact that development of the plan is still in its early stages, it is already drawing comparison to the failed Albina Community Plan, adopted by the city in 1993, which promised to combat disinvestment in the Albina neighborhood and provide resources for property owners.
Today, the shadow of the Albina Plan places added pressure on the People’s Plan to transform a place recently declared the fastest gentrifying city in America by Governing magazine.
Lisa Bates, a professor of planning and urban studies as well as black studies at Portland State University, is the policy research manager and has high expectations for how the plan, if executed correctly, could make Portland a more accessible and livable city for its nearly 40,000 black residents who live with memories of repeated displacement.
Only time will reveal how the People’s Plan will shape up, but Bates sat down with Street Roots to share PAALF’s vision for Portland’s future and the progress they’ve made on the People’s Plan thus far.
Ann-Derrick Gaillot: I was hoping you could explain what the People’s Plan is in your own words to someone who has never heard of it.
Lisa Bates: The goal of the People’s Plan is to use the concepts of urban planning that we see in Portland all the time and specifically ask what would that look like if we did that with black people in mind, trying to prioritize not just the policy problems that black people face, like affordable-housing problems and educational attainment and jobs, but to actually try to create a really positive vision of the future that asks a question of what Portland would be like for black people if it really was for black people. What would it be like? What would your neighborhood be like if you felt that your neighborhood as a space, as a community, loved black people?
One of the other goals that we have in the People’s Plan is to try to lift up not just a conversation about Northeast Portland and gentrification in Northeast Portland, but also talk about where people are living now, what they’re trying to build for themselves, whether it’s out in East Portland or it’s up in North Portland, or really anywhere they live, to try to talk about those places, too.
A.G: Tell me more about the plan’s focus on black families in East Portland who have already been displaced. What do they need to be successful and hopefully not be displaced again?
L.B: There is a whole team that is specifically working on that. They’ve had two open workshops with the public in the past couple of months, and they are coming together around some concepts that have to do with the connections of health, very broadly defined, and stability — mental health, stress, depression, anxiety, the things that happen when you are in a precarious situation with your housing and you’re stressed out — trying to really tie housing stability to this whole broader set of concerns, like how are you going to be a great parent or family if you’re out of your mind with worry or very, very anxious or you’re moving schools.
You can’t have a stable situation so they’re very on this theme of replanting people with “root shock.” This amazing psychiatrist at Columbia University, Dr. Mindy Fullilove, she coined this phrase. It’s when people move involuntarily, it’s like pulling a plant up out of soil. You can’t just put it somewhere else and think it’s going to grow. You’ve damaged the roots; you’ve shocked its roots. And she has documented those impacts for individual people for families, for community at large. It’s disruptive, and you can see it in so many fields. It’s the equivalent to losing months in school if you’re a kid and you change schools in the middle of the year. There’s job loss and job disruption and income problems. There are so many pieces that wear down people psychologically, and it harms their networks. So how do you connect all that stuff up to very clear resources and programs to say actually: This housing thing? That’s a health thing. This rental deposit assistance thing? That’s an education policy. How do you build that up as official ways of doing things?
A.G: What did the background work on the plan involve?
L.B: Not directly part of the People’s Plan but something that’s been going on for a while is the Urban League’s State of Black Portland project. We’ve been connecting with them and getting information from that since last spring on what are the key data pieces that you see, what are the most persistent, severe disparities, where are the biggest gaps, what are the worst things, what are the biggest priorities? Then I had a bunch of students who looked specifically at urban planning in Portland, urban plans in Portland, a wide variety of types, to basically ask the question: Are black people here? Does this do anything for black people? We know that the black community faces certain disparities and certain issues that might relate to their ability to engage with a specific kind of plan. So if there’s a project or a proposal or a program that you really need to own your own house to participate in fully, that’s not going to affect African-Americans as much because our home-ownership rate is much lower. That’s one way of looking at it.
The other is culturally, socially. For example, there was a group that looked at the idea of crime prevention through environmental design. It’s an interesting concept. Some of it has to do with, like, don’t put shrubs up against a building because someone could hide behind it. Some of it has to do with lighting, but a lot of it has to do with the idea of eyes on the street and natural surveillance by other people. So what does that mean if you’re black youth and you want to go hang out at the park? If there are all these eyes on the street who are other people checking out what you’re doing, is that a positive thing because they’re engaging with you as a community member, or is that potentially very negative because they’re calling the cops and now you’re having a criminal-justice system encounter because you’re trying to chill out at the park? So they did a little bit of thinking analysis around that, talking to people about how they experience those things.
A.G: What is this next phase all about?
L.B: The phase we’re in right now is all about getting people who are — I’m going to use the term “experts,” — together in circles to talk about hey, here’s all the policy stuff that’s been thrown out there, which of these things sticks for you? And then just get also their general human ideas about life and the world and what’s important. So when we say experts, we don’t just mean certified smart people. We’re trying to get a mix for each topic area of people who are some kind of certified, titled person who is identified as a leader in some way, but also has people who are personally impacted by the issue, who are experts on their own lives, people who have experience and networks in the community.
A.G: I imagine that the People’s Plan will get compared to the Albina Plan of the 1990s over and over again. What went wrong with the Albina Plan, and how will the People’s Plan differ?
L.B: I think that many people in the community were pretty happy about the content of (the Albina Plan). People participated a lot; they were very engaged in it. It was a process that was certainly in response to the really bad old days of urban renewal — not that the current days of urban renewal are not bad, but it was a plan by official institutions. The content of it is perfectly fine; it’s very comprehensive; it talks about all these issues, but then the responsibility for it went (away). Every agency was kind of like, that’s not us, we don’t have the money.
It comes back to this organizing and accountability piece. The plan is not really the thing. Policies are important; programs are important. We have a lot of ideas of what those are going to be. The plan is getting people to pay attention and identify the targets that can get it done. But part of that also means it’s not only the “capital C” City of Portland that’s gonna do it, but who in the nonprofit sector is going to get this done, or what agency is going to change the way they’re working to deliver something different for people if they’re really going to serve this group.
So I think there’s more implementers; there’s an accountability structure. There’s an advocacy moment that we can put forward.
A.G: So how do everyday people enter the conversation?
L.B: We’re just getting into that part. We’ve spent some time doing background work. And there have been a couple of events in East Portland. For us, that’s a real priority area to engage in East Portland because that’s an area that’s been underserved and overlooked in the conversation about black folks in Portland. We focus a lot of our time physically on the space that is Northeast Portland and then going, “Oh no, we can’t find the black people to survey here.” Well, no kidding. So one of the things we’re trying to do is figure out what people want to do and then deliver more of that.
Public Workshop
PAALF People's Plan is hosting a public community workshop at 1:00 p.m. May 2, 2015 at Rosewood Initiative, 16126 SE Stark St, Portland Oregon 97233.
Learn more at http://www.pdxpeoplesplan.org/
