The founder of Right 2 Root talks about the impact of gentrification and how her organization brings community members into the planning process
What if black Oregonians at risk of displacement by gentrification had a say in how their neighborhoods were designed?
That’s the question at the heart of Right 2 Root , a community-health-centered, urban planning campaign created by equity policy advocate Cat Goughnour. In 2015, the same year Governing Magazine named Portland the most gentrified city in the nation, Right 2 Root began bringing members of Portland’s black communities together with architects and city planners to prioritize their needs.
In 2016, recognizing it’s role in displacing generations of black Portlanders from their neighbohoods, Portland created the Affordable Housing Preference Policy to address the displacement of people from North and Northeast Portland. Often referred to as the “Right to Return” program, the policy prioritizes households with generational ties to North and Northeast Portland for housing opportunities through the Portland Housing Bureau.
A project of Radix Consulting Group, Right 2 Root’s newly released research looks at the issue of gentrification and displacement from a public-health standpoint, and in its research calls on remaking places “to center our most at-risk community members to improve health, wealth, quality of life and community prosperity for all.” The new report is being released through the Institute for Policy Studies.
Right 2 Root’s name refers to the concept of “root shock,” which describes how serial, forced displacement keeps families and communities from being able to grow and thrive. Goughnour hopes that the Right 2 Root process and framework can help Portland and other cities create neighborhoods and spaces that promise prosperity for all, especially black Americans who are all too often left out of urban planning conversations and decisions.
A native Oregonian, Goughnour is now based in Washington, D.C., serving as the associate director of racial wealth equity for the public policy nonprofit Prosperity Now . She spoke to Street Roots about Right 2 Root, gentrification and what residents have to offer when it comes to imagining the future of our cities.
Ann-Derrick Gaillot: How is Portland doing when it comes to implementing equitable city planning policies?
Cat Goughnour: Portland is leading with the preference policy, which I was a part of that work group, really trying to figure out a right to return (and) making it legally defensible. But rent control has only just passed; the inclusionary zoning expansion was just repealed; many of those things aren’t quite as robust as other kinds of protections in other areas. The real test is not just whether we pass progressive policies, but if they live through the spirit of those policies.
We need to look at economic impact. Are we making things more affordable? Are we, through an equity process, starting to look at who’s bearing the burden? Are we prioritizing stabilizing those families? So I think we have a lot of work to do.
If you look at the State of Housing Report by Portland Housing Bureau , the one (statistic) that arrested my attention the most was that of all 24 neighborhoods in Portland, African Americans and Native Americans cannot afford to live in any of them. That, to me, becomes a fair-housing issue. So I don’t know if we’re using all the tools in our toolbox because the crisis is quite significant, and it’s growing.
Gaillot: What do you think of Right to Return’s implementation and outcomes?
Goughnour: If only nine families have been placed in four years, there’s the opportunity to make it more robust. I also think, moving beyond just affordable housing opportunities and looking at the $32 million Economic Development Fund, how do you help people to have higher incomes so that they can also access the market?
In addition to subsidizing housing so people can stay or re-enter a community, we need to be as creative as possible. I think that there’s a lot of promise in the policy, and I’ve heard that there are some new strategies to implementation that might improve how many people are served. But at this point, I don’t think we can take any solution off the table or critique it too closely. It’s the opportunity really to evaluate and iterate and make things stronger, especially starting to think about people as protected classes who do have certain rights through a civil rights approach. Women, families, people of any race – all of these are protected classes. So we do have a fundamental obligation through the dollars we receive to ensure that people are being supported.
I’m ever hopeful, but we need more. We need many more interventions, because the issue is so multifaceted. It isn’t just about the lack of affordability; it’s also about the lack of income in Oregon. It’s also that African Americans have a higher secondary education rate than the national average for African Americans but still have a much lower median income. So something in the market isn’t supporting people in the ways that it could, which from an asset-based community development perspective is a weight. Think about how much stronger our economy could be and how much more thriving people could be if they had more prosperity.
IN THIS ISSUE OF STREET ROOTS: Kent Anderson’s 1996 novel exposing racial and economic disparity in 1970s Portland has been re-released at a time when, the author says, the social and political climate has grown bleaker. Find a Street Roots vendor to buy this issue of the newspaper.
Gaillot: Could you explain for our readers what the Right 2 Root campaign is and how it came about?
Goughnour: I’m born and raised in Oregon. One of the reasons my family left rural Oregon is that there’s gentrification happening across the state. When I was living in Newport in the ’90s, (the city) created this whole aquarium that was supposed to drive tourism. It led to them tearing down all of these single-family homes and created this tourism economy which did not allow people to sustain themselves throughout the year. That’s a lot of why my family ended up migrating to Portland, which is 180 miles from where I’m from. My family lost our house in 2011, which was on Alberta, right off of the interstate, right behind a very big development that’s coming in now. My family (is now) slowly being pushed farther and farther away. And we’re one of the families that was actually able to stay in the neighborhood once we lost our primary home.
So based on my family’s experience, in 2013, I started doing some consulting work and culturally specific outreach and started having conversations with people about whether certain policies and plans that were being voted on would be supported by the community. What I kept hearing was that the issue of gentrification displacement, the loss of communities that had multiple generations, was a primary concern. People were experiencing that on a physical level, a psychological level, an emotional level, but also they just were losing so much of the progress they had made. Having that similar experience myself, I started doing some community meetings and certified community health work, really starting to think about the impact the social environment has on our well-being, in any way that we look at that.
I started to really understand the system that is driving displacement – changes in whether a neighborhood is residential, whether it becomes commercial, tearing down significant amounts of what we would call starter homes to create more apartment buildings. The prevailing narrative in Portland was that people didn’t know the value of their community and so just gave it away, which is just not true. We know there’s a lot of predatory practices that happened that actually gave people below-market value for their property and didn’t allow people to purchase it. So being able to have that popular, community education component was one of the main features of the Right 2 Root in its first iteration.
I also really wanted to bring urban planners and architects to the table without it being convened by government process because I wasn’t sure that they were hearing from the people who were bearing the brunt from decisions made through planning or development firsthand. I knew that there might be a different kind of approach that could happen if those folks all got in the same room, (if planners) heard the pain points from the community and also the beautiful solutions people had for healthy thriving communities if they were able to own the land or contribute to development. That is what I started doing in 2015, and that report was published a year ago from the Institute for Policy Studies.
(I had) the desire to really take all of that rich information and use it to create something that centered the community and was responsive to their needs. I hired an architect of the Salazar Architects, and he brought in Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design. We thought about how to engage the community as architects of our own future, using tools that are used by urban planners and architects. It was about a yearlong process, and then we were able to replicate that process in 2016 , thinking more about where people had moved to, East County, and trying to figure out what a more holistic connective network and nodal system would look like if the people who were displaced were also brought back into economic opportunity in North Portland. We know people don’t necessarily want to move there (but) we know there’s a stronger economic market there.
Through the process, I’ve also been working with African American women who had been part of all those processes who are hoping to become micro-entrepreneurs, because I wanted tangible outcomes for people. Six of them at this point have created businesses and are really committed to making their communities a healthy, holistic place through economic opportunity but also doing a more multigenerational model to try to reconnect or re-knit that social fabric. So I’ve been practicing this process for about five years.
This report captures the approach and the logic behind this work and lays out the beautiful vision the community has had. It also gives some of the context and research that shows why this is something we must pay attention to. Economic exclusion, poverty, being forced to live in less-than-habitable housing, having to travel long distances, not being in a food desert – all of these things have bigger impacts, and when we look at the health impacts for African Americans in Multnomah County, they’re staggering. So thinking about that, thinking about health as an asset and also a precursor to building wealth, we have all of this underutilized talent, skills, ability, genius that really could help us to overcome so that we have a better chance at having a better life.
There are precedents like Dudley Street Initiative in Boston, Africatown in Seattle. We can actually disrupt this displacement and disinvestment and help people to become the engines of their communities and their economies.
FURTHER READING: Self-gentrification: A South Bronx lesson for Portland
Gaillot: The report talks about North Portland being in late-stage gentrification. How do priorities for displaced and at-risk communities change in this later stage?
Goughnour: The PCRI, Portland Community Reinvestment Initiative , has statistics (showing) approximately three people a day, a thousand people a year, who are displaced from gentrifying neighborhoods in Multnomah County. Their Race and Ethnic Disparities report also has a projection that by 2024, most of the African American community will be removed from North Portland and will be sited out east in unincorporated Multnomah County, and there will be concentrations. That map was really impactful for me to see because I thought if we see a flow and a pattern, isn’t it incumbent upon us to do something to be responsive?
The framing around late-stage/early-stage gentrification comes from a report by Dr. Lisa Bates that was published for the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability in 2013, where she did an analysis of Portland. She and her team at Portland State determined that North Portland was in late-stage and dynamic gentrification. There were other communities like Cully and Lents, who at that point, if they become neighborhood prosperity initiatives or were just kind of the fringe neighborhoods, that were seeing what was happening in North Portland. But those were seen as early-stage communities. So there is a very significant push in Portland through the comprehensive plan renewal – anything that is doing transit-oriented development – to look at the prevention of gentrification in communities not yet impacted by it, and less of a focus on mitigating gentrification to the African American community.
FURTHER READING: Preparing for MAX line, SW Portland tries to get ahead of gentrification
Gaillot: What are your hopes for the next phases of the Right 2 Root campaign?
Goughnour: My goal is to get this report out there because I think that many people think the problem is so significant it’s a foregone conclusion and therefore we should do nothing. That’s just very unacceptable to me. My goal would also be to get a place. I’ve always wanted a black marketplace similar to the Portland Mercado or the Jade Night Market. I’ve always been struck by the fact that there isn’t an African-American market that stays and is held by the community. Also, this process was created and funded by me as a single black woman who has experienced her own path around this. So I would really like to see about getting funded to help see more black-women-owned micro-enterprises and help stabilize poor families.
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