Sarah Iannarone | Mayoral candidates weigh in on the crisis on our streets

The candidate wants every neighborhood engaged in helping houseless Portlanders

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

Community organizer Sarah Iannarone first ran for mayor of Portland in 2016, earning about 12% of the vote. Since then, her profile and popularity have grown among Portland’s many activist and progressive circles. In the first vote of this mayoral race, she doubled her percentage points in a crowded field of candidates. Recent polling suggests she’s a serious contender in the November runoff against incumbent Ted Wheeler.

Candidate Q&As: Portland mayor’s race

• Ted Wheeler

• Sarah Iannarone

• Teressa Raiford

Street Roots: You’re proposing community health and safety hubs throughout the city to provide shelter and safety for people experiencing homelessness. How are these any different from the shelters that currently exist, like the navigation center and the new Bybee Lakes center? And further, how will you work with neighborhoods to ensure these centers are welcomed into the neighborhoods?

Sarah Iannarone: There’s going to be a lot of people in need in coming years, especially in the wake of COVID, who need assistance for any number of reasons, housed and unhoused. It’s also about making sure that we’re shoring up critical infrastructure that we’ve been struggling to fund. So really, the thinking behind that was how can we make investments in these community safety hubs where we already have existing infrastructure that we’re struggling to maintain, where we could have located food pantries or even emergency child care services. Where are the places in the social safety net that have frayed? And how can we co-locate those alongside the arts programming and the recreation programming and the other programming that we need?

And then when you look at it from the street side, things like overdose prevention and access to restrooms and access to hygiene facilities, where there are multiple people who may need to avail themselves of those things as well.


        Sarah Iannarone.   

        Courtesy photo

That’s one way we can start to move beyond the binary of housed neighborhoods and NIMBYism, and making sure that we’re talking about the various conditions that many Portlanders may be facing, regardless of their housing status.

It’s really a rethinking of that public safety budget — and that’s why we put it in the Rethinking Public Safety Plan and not the Housing for All plan.

I would consider something like R2D2 (Right 2 Dream Too) a community safety hub, but other things could be considered community safety hubs, too. It’s really that difference between residential and what people out in the world have access to as they’re moving about outside of housing.

Street Roots: How, specifically, you would be working with neighborhoods to ensure that these types of hubs are welcomed into all neighborhoods in Portland?

Iannarone: What I hope to do, and I have tried to do this from inside my neighborhood, I am the land use and transportation chair of the Mount Scott-Arleta Neighborhood Association, and I’ve fought to actually make sure that our neighborhood has been welcoming to shelters.

So when the Laurelwood shelter was proposed, there was actually quite a bit of NIMBY backlash there. And what I did was organize our community around why we thought this was an asset to our community and try to engage my neighbors in a conversation around why we should be welcoming at this time, especially when so many Portlanders are experiencing homelessness. I also opened up an emergency shelter in the Mount Scott neighborhood that we hosted as the neighborhood association, where we used our mailing list to mobilize people. Not just so that we can have an amazing opportunity to help our neighbors in need, but we had hot food there for the duration. And we had supplies there, and clothing, almost a tiny general store that we were able to mobilize through the neighborhood.

I don’t want to see neighborhoods as oppositional by design. What we need to do is try and engage them. There’re so many people who work to help, that I believe that when we go to them and ask for them to participate in these and don’t come at them, what I would almost use the term “blindsiding” them, that we can find ways to engage them more meaningfully.

I also think there’s something to be said for universalism. I would like to say that every neighborhood in Portland needs to find a way to participate in this program. Because when you have it applying to every neighborhood equally, that doesn’t mean some neighborhoods sit out participation in prosocial behavior, whether it’s hosting mass shelters or tiny-house villages or community safety hubs or even food service in a park.

But that this is something that through leadership at the highest levels, we’re going to say, “We all need to come together. We are expecting every neighborhood association to be welcoming to these things.”

And by bringing them to the table early, getting their input and getting them resourced so that they can help, I hope that we can start to bridge the divides between historically acrimonious relations between housed and unhoused Portlanders and start to see housed Portlanders as our greatest asset in helping address our crisis in the streets.

Street Roots: You have a lot of very ambitious plans around housing and homelessness. We’re curious, of those plans, what do you think will be the hardest sell or the most challenging to bring others on board, given that you’ve been criticized for being a little adversarial and that you’ll also be working within a weak-mayor system of government?

Iannarone: I don’t take kindly to the charge of being adversarial. I actually work well with others, and everything I do is in collaboration. What I’m known for is speaking truth to power. And we actually have to look at the implicit gender bias of calling a woman with strong opinions “adversarial” time and again.

What I have called out consistently as human rights and civil rights abuses. And most of the rest of the time, I’m working with others to help people who are vulnerable to those abuses, and when I get called adversarial, that’s oftentimes why. So I actually push back on that premise.

Now, that said, what we’re going to have to do is build partnerships. And I will use the navigation center as a good example. When Homer (Williams) came to the city and wanted to give that $10 million, he found it very difficult. We need to find ways to work with our partners who want to help to guide those conversations, to build good collaborative processes, make sure the right people from the city are involved so that we can avail ourselves of things like that.

I was never adversarial to that. I was at that table and trying to work with them and connect them to community resources. So that’s a pretty limited view of how I would operate.

But what we’re going to need to do in the future is continue to build innovative new types of collaborations in a lot of unusual ways. What is the role of the community college? We’re not talking enough with our educational partners.

Our Portland public school system does not hear from the Portland Mayor’s Office right now, nor do our community colleges and higher educational institutions. Think about the impact, if we were co-locating our housing investments alongside these institutions, or even in partnership where we look at how many students now are struggling with poverty and access to housing that they can afford.

We need to build good policy relationships across not just agencies, but governments. And this is why I don’t think that that threat to pull out of the Joint Office is a good thing for us at this time. We need to be strengthening those partnerships and making sure that they’re healthy and functional, not dysfunctional.

Also, it’s about thinking about who is business differently. Do I quarrel with the PBA (Portland Business Association) sometimes? Yes, but they’re functioning as the mayor’s campaign right now, putting a lot of dark money into this race as I’m running an open and accountable election.

Meanwhile, I go outside that organization and talk to all sorts of downtown business leaders, who actually want to be a part of the solution, see me as the answer, and want to bring their business acumen or their business community to the table. And so, we have to look beyond the gatekeepers historically, who’ve had a lock on who has a say around how things unfold in the city, and bring new creative agencies and new creative partners to the table to help us in this problem solving.

I’m hoping that as mayor, I can streamline those kinds of partnerships and bring multitudes of efforts like that online a lot more quickly, and painlessly.

Street Roots: To steer back to the crux of the question: Around your policy plans, is there one that kind of just sticks out, that you think might be the most challenging to bring others on board with and get accomplished considering that it is a weak-mayor system of government?

Iannarone: I think the moratorium on the sweeps is going to face the most opposition. Because the way that we’ve framed sweeps is around cleanup. A lot of what people are seeing as the livability issue, especially housed people, has to do with debris and trash and tents and the visual of that.

What I have continuously called for is that we need to reallocate the money that we spend sweeping people experiencing homelessness to things like provision of C3PO and R2D2 (organized houseless camps) so that we can actually get those dollars spent in ways that help keep people safe and don’t just displace them.

Stopping the sweeps is about anti-displacement. Because what I witnessed — whether it was out in my neighborhood here along Foster Road and 82nd Avenue, I travel the I-205 Multi-Use Path a lot, or our office is in Central Eastside, pre-COVID — was we would watch people get swept. They would move from one end of the block to the other, only to return again, but in less good condition than they were the week before.

How I bridge that lack of efficacy and efficiency for the public that has a pretty firm frame around how they understand livability is going to be a bit of an uphill battle. But I hope that ultimately we can make the economic case, in addition to the civil and human rights case, that this is not a good idea, and that we should be spending our money more wisely.

We should be treating our neighbors more compassionately and humanely, and sweeps aren’t a good use of our public dollars. That’s going to be a heavy lift for me, but we’re putting it into the first-100-days plan. So I’m going to try and tackle it head on so that we can really get started reframing the conversation in our city around rethinking public safety through a public health lens, through making sure that people are having their needs met in a time of crisis.

And really thinking about every step between a tent on the street to permanent housing that people can stay in securely, flexibly and meeting their needs is something that we as Portlanders should all be able to get behind.

Street Roots: The mayor has come out strongly criticizing the Joint Office of Homeless Services for the continued presence of unsheltered homeless people on our streets. What is your assessment of the performance of the Joint Office of Homeless Services?

Iannarone: One thing I know is that partnership is critical, as we’re looking at potentially the most devastating winter in 100 years. We have been in that partnership, city of Portland, for the duration of Mayor Wheeler’s administration. And I do believe that if he had concerns with the performance of the Joint Office, then it would be incumbent on him to raise them in a timely fashion, to do the necessary audits or ask for the right data and correct course along the way.

What I see happening now, with his recent critiques of the Joint Office, it’s not so much an evaluation of the performance of the office, but some political gamesmanship, as he’s in an election.

What we need to do, in terms of our partnership in the Joint Office as the city of Portland is understand that we are making a commitment to work with our partners, that we need clear understanding of what we are hoping to see out of that and how we want those dollars spent.

And then make sure there’s a clear accounting in partnership with our city auditor, the Multnomah County auditor, so that we know how that office is performing over time and so that all of the parties at the table can be held accountable for performance in terms of their investments in that.

This is going to be more critical in the future, as we see that Metro money coming in for services from the HereTogether initiative that voters passed in May. We need to make sure that we’re using our dollars wisely. But you don’t wait until you’re in the middle of a crisis and threaten to pull out of a partnership to make sure that something like the Joint Office is operating at maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

Another way that I understand how and when the Joint Office is working is from people at the street level, who tell me where the gaps are. And this is something that we need to be listening to more and elevating those voices in these processes and at these tables.

Oftentimes, we have the usual suspects, in terms of decision makers and thought leaders, who are shaping policy outcomes at this table and other tables around the city and region. And so I hope that by making sure that we’re listening to people who are the direct service providers who have the lived experience that will help us inform our operations better as well.

Street Roots: What would you do to address the fundamental faults in our housing system, that it’s too expensive for many families to live and have the needed safety net to protect them from displacement and evictions in the first place?

Iannarone: There is a whole body of work when you think about the failures of capitalism, the failures of neoliberalism and how our entire society is built. But when you look at it in Portland, there are a few things that we can talk about. Wages, and why we need family wage jobs so that people can actually afford rent. Consumer protections. Renter protections are not a handout; those are consumer protections. We don’t want people on the receiving end of harm by virtue of something that they are engaged in commerce for. So this is where we have to have a clearly regulated market. Housing should not be exempt from other things that we do in terms of government regulation to protect the safety of people and (the) planet.

I understand that the current federal government is entirely deregulated. But that doesn’t mean, here in Portland, that we shouldn’t understand that the role of government is to constrain markets that may be adversarial to human wellbeing. We think about it in the terms the Highway Administration or speed limits: We put buffers in place to protect people. Renters should not be exempt from those protections. And so, framing that differently is something that we have to work on as a society. We have relegated renters to a lower tier in our society compared to homeowners. And as we look at millennials, in particular that generation, access to home ownership has been out of reach. And so what does it mean for wealth creation to not be predicated on homeownership? But that means that we still need to look at the minority homeownership gap. So that’s why I propose things like community land trusts, working more urgently with our partners like Proud (Ground) to make sure we’re finding pathways to homeownership for more people through more creative ways.

Ultimately, I’ve been tackling it through land use on the planning side. And this is one thing that I bring to the table that my opponent does not. I call it a “de facto redlining” when you think about affluent neighborhoods trying to create historic districts to keep out multi-family housing, even where there’s an abundance of infrastructure.

When hard decisions come in front of City Council, if I’m elected mayor, be able to lead on those with a greater sense of clarity, driven by best practices and data and not encumbered by Realtors and the homeowners, lobbies, the Home Builders Association, because I’ll have been powered by everyday Portlanders.

Street Roots: Your campaign emphasizes anti-displacement, anti-racism, anti-speculation and climate action approach to housing. That’s quite a lot. What are you proposing that will accomplish all of these expectations?

Iannarone: Really, you can’t disentangle them at this point. That’s what we really need to get into people’s minds, that climate action and anti-displacement, they can never be at odds because what we’re going to do is just be moving the risk further and further to the edges of whatever geography you’re thinking about.

Emplacement means that we are keeping communities stabilized. And community stabilization is a key component of climate resilience. One reason why I focus so much on more holistic thinking around, whether it’s the Green New Deal, housing for all, public safety, a lot of these silos that we’ve thought about things historically, are the reason that we’re failing. And so when you look at my Housing for All plan, the top framework there is this: We need a strategic plan to deal with the housing state of emergency that Mayor Charlie Hales declared back in 2015.

At no point has there been a strategic plan developed to look at what numbers of housing we need at what income levels and in what parts of the city from a workforce development and community investment perspective, that should we be investing in, as we’re making critical investments in both deeply affordable housing, workforce housing, and even market-rate housing and how these can be co-located and part of our comprehensive plans for the city.

Now, the second part of that has to do with progressive revenue, and how are we going to pay for this in the future? We the voters agreed to tax ourselves in Portland to the tune of $260 million. Metro, there was another $750 million that we tax ourselves for affordable housing. I want us to use these dollars wisely. And I also want us to look at all the various revenue mechanisms and making sure that they’re as progressive as possible. We know right now in the United States of America, that the top 1% controls the majority of wealth in this country, and it still holds for Portland as well. Progressive taxation is going to be the key. So without a strategic plan, and a progressive revenue, look, we’re not able to align our resources with our goals.

And then the third part of that is really having the community lead on these planning processes. I think about Living Cully and investments in community energy co-located with affordable housing, or the Jade District and how when you look at even APANO ( Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon), the orchards, and the co-location of community investments, with affordable housing investments, we can begin to make, we can have synergies in terms of where we’re investing. I’d like to see us take those winning models and do more of them. But it needs to be strategic. And so that’s how you pull together those big vision items when you’re thinking about this through the lens of trying to end a crisis situation. Of course, we have to act ad hoc and in the moment when there is an emergency, but unless you have a broad picture of what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s almost like we’re playing whack-a mole constantly, and I don’t know how we’re going to get ourselves out of the hole.

Street Roots: This really drills down specifically to the fact that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by high rents, homelessness and displacement due to gentrification. So what are you proposing to specifically address those inequities?

Iannarone: So by foregrounding anti-displacement across our urban development regime, across all of the urban development activities, that is one way for us to keep communities stabilized and not allow gentrification and displacement to continue.

But there are some other more concrete solutions that we can look at. The Right to Return, a policy that was done in North-Northeast Portland, we can continue looking at that fine-tune it, and potentially expand it.

I’m exploring a universal basic income policy for Black mothers, looking at the demographic there, and what would it mean for us to infuse those households with cash that had no strings attached, to make sure that they were stabilized over the long term. Looking at things like school districts with high turnover, and if we have limited dollars toward renter support, could we even set geographies when we’re talking about if we only have a limited amount of emergency rental assistance? Should we be trying to concentrate that near schools that have higher turnovers, that we’re stabilizing upstream?

These things that tend to cascade for our Black Portlanders and communities of color, as they are increasingly on the receiving end of many intersecting sets of disadvantages due to race in particular. That’s where it’s the comprehensive thinking about anti-displacement.

In my gun violence prevention plan, there’s actually a renter stabilization element around these schools because we can actually then look at how we’ve drawn down things like school resource officers, or even the Gun Violence Reduction Team, and start to think about (how) perhaps stabilizing families would do as much to reduce gun violence as a militarized police response in those spaces.

It’s pretty comprehensive but ultimately is informed through trauma and community-informed solutions — and then really thinking about it spatially so that communities aren’t moved around the city, but that they’re kept in place and can be part of a healthy and connected society. That’s ultimately going to be what we need to be healthy and prospering for the future.