Chloe Eudaly | City Council candidates on homelessness, gun violence, police oversight

The incumbent wants to give renters first right of refusal on home purchases and says she’s looking at how to move traffic enforcement from police to the transportation bureau

by Joanne Zuhl, Emily Green, and Jessica Pollard | 14 Oct 2020

Chloe Eudaly, the incumbent, went from a bookstore owner and housing activist to a city commissioner in 2017 after being propelled to office on a grassroots campaign promising to fight for better renter protections.

In seeking re-election in May, Eudaly received 31% of votes. This was more than any other candidate, but because it was fewer than 50%, it forced a runoff on Nov. 3 with Mingus Mapps, who garnered 29% of votes.

Candidate Q&As: Portland City Council

• Chloe Eudaly

• Mingus Mapps

Street Roots: During your time as a Portland city commissioner, you’ve worked to help establish a citywide anti-displacement task force and proposed creating a universal eviction defense fund, among other tenant-forward proposals. What, though, would you do to address the fundamental faults in our housing system, that it’s too expensive for many families to live in and have the needed safety net to protect them from displacement and evictions in the first place?

Chloe Eudaly: That’s a really big question. I certainly haven’t been able to do everything that I want to do for renters, because I have to work within the constraints placed upon me by state and federal law and our local resources.

I’m really excited to get that anti-displacement task force underway. I believe my directive that we adopted was two years ago. It’s extremely frustrating to me — the city has been talking about anti-displacement — but I’ve been the only one really doing anything about it. In fact, the first time I came to testify at City Council before I was elected was to support Anti-Displacement PDX and the measures that they wanted to see adopted in our (comprehensive) plan, which we adopted and then proceeded to do no work around. That’s one of the issues that I will not let go of and I will continue to fight for. I’m interested to see what comes out of that committee. I’m also not willing to wait for the committee to tell me what to do.

So, we’re advancing a program called Tenant Opportunity to Purchase that would give renters and affordable-housing providers first right of refusal when a unit goes on the market. And the idea is that renters who are more likely to be low-income would partner with nonprofit housing providers and move into homeownership opportunities. I really think that that is a critical piece of this challenge. We need to get people out of the rental racket and into homeownership opportunities where they can really put down roots in their chosen communities, and they can build wealth.

I’m involved in a national conversation about affordable housing with a group called Local Progress, which is made up of progressive local electeds around the whole country. And I’ve also been lobbying our federal delegation and contributed to Congressman (Earl) Blumenauer’s (D-Ore.) “Locked Out” housing report.

You’ve heard it before; I’m going to say it again: Our biggest housing subsidy goes to middle-class and affluent homeowners in the form of mortgage interest tax deductions. And it’s so interesting to me the many ways that we see the way that we subsidize the wealthy, or big business, or certain industries, compared to how we support people who are struggling. I don’t even know what we call this, an entitlement? But it’s charity over here, I guess. And that is wrong. And I would like to see us really reform those rules and spend those billions of dollars of forgone tax revenue on affordable housing.

The scope of the challenge is so far greater than what the city can do. We need real federal action on housing.

Street Roots: The pandemic and social distancing standards have meant an increase in the number of people living unsheltered, and businesses are increasingly unhappy by their presence. How do you balance the needs of people experiencing homelessness with the expectations of businesses and housed residents?

Eudaly: Well, I’m certainly sympathetic to both. I was briefly homeless as a teenager, so I know what it’s like to not have somewhere safe to sleep. And I was also a business owner for 22 years with 17 of those years being in the west end of downtown, and so I have years and years of experiencing, interacting with community members who are experiencing homelessness — a lot of great interactions and a lot of not-so-great interactions. So I’m sympathetic to both sides. My concern is always going to lie with vulnerable people who are suffering on our streets.

I am urging the mayor and elected leaders across our region — city, county, Metro — to really assess all of our under-utilized or unused resources in this moment. We have community centers that are empty, schools that are unused, publicly owned buildings that we could certainly reallocate for serving people who are experiencing homelessness.

Street Roots: The rubber hits the road when we have tents along a lot of these sidewalks, and there are arguments to just sweep and get these tents out of here. And whether or not we have shelters for them to go to. So that push is going to come at City Hall …

Eudaly: It’s definitely already here, the push.

One of the early things I did when I took my seat was convened some meetings with city staff, mayor staff, homeless advocates, ACLU — many different stakeholders — to examine our camp cleanup or sweeps policy. And we made a lot of improvements in that policy that I think have led to much more humane treatment of people living outside. It has reduced the number of camps that have been swept. There are situations where there is really serious concern around public safety and health concerns, and so a small number of the camps are still being swept.

We ended the use of prison labor for camp cleanups. We improved people’s ability to recover their possessions. What we didn’t do, which is something that I feel strongly about and continue to fight for, is we’re not able to guarantee a bed, or even a camp space, for everyone who gets displaced from the camps that are swept, and that is unacceptable to me.

I am concerned with the impact on small businesses in our local economy. So many of us are struggling right now. So many small businesses are closing; they’ve experienced vandalism and ongoing problems that really feel like getting kicked when they’re down and are hindering their ability to reopen. But, I want to call on that community to be compassionate in this moment, and to work with us to solve this problem and not simply demand that we move these people along to the next place that they’re not welcome.

Elected leaders are really just temporary representatives of the community. They are not wholly responsible for everything that’s wrong, nor do they have the power or ability to solve every problem. And I’m really, you know, in this moment, where it’s clear that we have massive systemic failures, and that we are all interdependent whether we are business owners, employees, landlords, renters. We really need to work together to solve both the chronic problems we were already experiencing before this crisis hit us and to get through this crisis and recover from it.

Street Roots: Gun violence is a rising concern across our community, particularly impacting younger Portlanders of color. What do you propose the City Council can do to prevent gun violence in our community?

Eudaly: Well, as you probably know, I did support the elimination of the Gun Violence Reduction Task Force, both in this budget and last year's budget. While there are certainly community-based approaches to reducing gun violence, they were never able to demonstrate to Council that that particular group was effective at reducing gun violence. They were responding to it once it happened, but not really helping to reduce.

Some people want to attribute the rise in gun violence in Portland to the elimination of that team and that is absolutely false.

Unfortunately, gun violence was on the rise in Portland back in December, even predating this crisis. And we know that this is a national epidemic during this shutdown. People are suffering, people are desperate, people are out of work, people are experiencing food insecurity, and people have nowhere to go. Community centers are closed, swimming pools are closed; businesses are closed. All these amenities that we really took for granted before COVID, I think we're realizing how critical they are to public health and safety as well.

I think one of the most important things that we can do in this moment is invest in our social infrastructure and ensure that as soon as we're able to safely do so, we get these spaces opened back up that are going to be so critical to our recovery and our resiliency.

Street Roots: You've been a vocal advocate of police reform. How will you break through the wall in Portland Police Association contract negotiations that have stopped earlier efforts to implement meaningful change if you're given a second term?

Eudaly: What I can tell you is that the police union has been, and is our biggest obstacle to police reform. Past councils have bargained away so much power to the police union that we have to pay bad cops to go away, if we can do that. It's extremely frustrating to come into office with a laundry list of concerns and progressive policy solutions to policing and realize that I could achieve virtually none of them because of how little power that we have.

I am really hopeful about this bargaining process. We have hired outside counsel. And I'm finding his input really valuable. Although they show no sign of doing so, I remain ever hopeful that the police union will recognize what this moment means, and that they really need to come to the table prepared to offer their own solutions and prepared to give up the kind of transactional process that these contract bargaining negotiations usually involve.

Like anything that we want from them, we have to pay for in some way — no, absolutely not. We're not going to pay the police union to do the right thing. We're not going to pay the police union to help us bring reforms that tens of thousands of Portlanders have demanded in the last few months, whether they are protesting in the streets, the 75,000-plus emails our offices received during the budget process, the seven hours of testimony from community members on the police budget. I'm very disappointed that I have seen no acknowledgement of past harms. And I have seen no willingness to come to the table in good faith and with a willingness to really work with us. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my opponent is endorsed by the police union, accepted a $15,000 contribution from them in the primary, was mostly silent on these issues all summer, and now has a platform that consists of things that council has either already done or are in the process of doing. We don't need another voice for the police union on City Council. We need people who are brave enough to stand up to this very powerful union. In general, I'm very pro-union and pro-worker. But as we know, police unions are rather unique in that universe. And I'm, I am ready to fight for Portland.

Street Roots: Do you see any path for correcting this power imbalance, short of dismantling and rebuilding the police bureau in order to eradicate the union?

Eudaly: I'd like to say get back to me once we've negotiated the contract. But I also would like to share with you and the public, that that's an option. We could disband the bureau and create a metropolitan police force that would no longer be under the mayor, it would actually be under the sheriff. That would require willingness from our jurisdictional partners. And I'm sure the public will have concerns about that as well. But it is a possibility. I mean, the other choice is what we're doing now — this gradual, iterative process where in every budget we look at what the police are doing for us, what we want them to do for us what we want to remove from their scope of work and what we need to invest in in the community.

As an example, I've had my team exploring removing traffic enforcement from police and putting it under PBOT (Portland Bureau of Transportation). You have diminished rights when you're behind the wheel, and that has led to tragic consequences for many people across the country, including people in our own community like Kendra James and Keaton Otis.

The power to do that is not within my scope. It is a state level decision, but it's just one of many, many possibilities for re-envisioning what public safety and policing look like. And, and my particular goal of drastically reducing interactions between community members and police.

Street Roots: What do you consider your single most important accomplishment during your first term?

Eudaly: It's funny that it's the first thing I did, and I did it in the first 30 days. My goal is always to do the most good for the most people, so it remains the relocation assistance ordinance.

Rent control is banned at the state level. No-cause evictions were the norm. For-cause evictions were also pre-empted at the state level. So we were extremely limited as to what we could do locally to stabilize renters and protect them from price gouging during a declared housing emergency. And thanks to Margot Black and PTU (Portland Tenants United) and the incredible work of my policy director Jamey Duhamel and the many community advocates and activists who helped us create and pass that ordinance. It helped stabilize tens of thousands of renters.

Roughly half of Portlanders are renters, roughly half of those renters are cost-burdened by rent, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing. And roughly half of those cost-burdened renters are extremely cost-burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing, which means we have tens of thousands of people having to make choices between paying the rent and buying groceries; paying the rent, and picking up the prescriptions. It's unacceptable. And while it did not help people who were already severely cost-burdened, it did stabilize people in their existing housing and slow down rent increases.

I will keep chipping away at strengthening renters rights, implementing anti-displacement measures, and getting people into home ownership opportunities and out of unstable living situation when you're at the kind of whim and mercy of a landlord.