MOVING FORWARD | Voting yes on Portland's parks levy is a first step, but what if we borrowed ideas from around the world and built playgrounds for everyone?
If summer 2020 had a stage, it was Portland’s parks. They were the first places many of us went to when we finally felt comfortable leaving our homes to see friends and family. For many, parks replaced closed gyms, bars, restaurants, schoolyards, backyards and more.
The pandemic has reminded Portlanders of how essential parks are — and what it feels like when many of their services are suddenly gone.
Yet during this time, it also became clear that many of our parks’ uses and facilities are outdated. Too many of Portland’s older parks are beautiful aesthetically — filled with lush landscaping and endless benches but few activity options — while many of the more engaging parks with facilities are designed primarily for kids and young adults. What would it look like if we reimagined our parks, making them more exciting for the young, old and in-between?
In New York, waterfront parks have recently introduced public hammocks, outdoor gyms, slides big enough for adults, and massive interactive sculptures, including a “floating” terraced island that will soon be filled with winding trails that can be explored by New Yorkers of all ages.
Not everything has to be big and spendy. Rather than line their waterfront with benches and conservative playgrounds, Parisians installed bouldering walls, a soccer cage, bocce courts and obstacle courses for children and adults alike to navigate, many of which double as works of public art.
For decades, Chinese cities have offered exercise playgrounds for seniors, a tradition that has spread to cities such as Barcelona, London, Toronto and Cleveland. Closer to home, beaches in Southern California are lined with more than just the traditional calisthenic bars, but an array of weight-resistance exercise equipment and parkour courses, which bodybuilders of all ages can enjoy.
New active facilities can also be designed to strengthen community connections. In Copenhagen, the Superkilen park combined community input and bold architecture to create a space that brings together one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in the city. While many of the facilities will look familiar, the architects sourced them from around the world, giving the park a sculpture-garden vibe with basketball hoops from Mogadishu, exercise equipment from Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, Calif. and a playground from India.
Portland’s park system has a spattering of these perks, but we need more of them — more exercise equipment, interactive sculptures, disc golf and putt-putt holes, chess tables, Ping-Pong tables and bocce ball courts — many of which can be cheap to install and enjoyed by a broad range of people.
And even these can be improved upon with a little creativity: A chessboard can double as a go board, a Ping-Pong table can become a workbench, a rock-climbing wall could serve as the backdrop for an outdoor theater and basketball courts can be outfitted to support volleyball, handball and more.
Individually, none of these perks are radical or unprecedented, but if we invest enough to bring them to every existing and proposed park in the city, they could trigger a new era for Portland’s parks. If we choose to pay for them, these new active structures would also provide an opportunity not seen since the founding of our century-old parks system for our communities to express who we are and who we want to be.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in May, our parks have also served as stages for Portlanders to protest police violence and systemic racism.
Unsurprisingly, one of the products of the late 19th century park design tradition has become a focus point of many Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Statues of slave owners, racists and colonial imperialists can be found in public parks that simultaneously erased Indigenous ties to the landscape throughout the country, including in Portland.
If we choose to invest more in our parks than the bare minimum to keep them running, we can also choose to not only tear down the statues that no longer represent us, but also replace them with works of art that could transform our parks into places for healing multigenerational traumas and inspiring new generations of Portlanders. Our city has plenty of artists who would jump at the chance to meet this challenge.
A good example is Beech Park. In 2017, the 16-acre park in East Portland was reopened with a new layout that included Ping-Pong tables, a bouldering feature and xylophones. To honor the Indigenous people of the region, the park was renamed Luuwit View Park, after the Cowlitz name for Mt. St. Helens.
Every Portlander deserves a park that serves and inspires them, and a park filled with the uses they dream of in a system rebuilt upon the foundation of justice accomplishes both.
While other recent park additions and improvements may not have had the same mission to recognize tribal history, they demonstrate what it would look like to bring innovation to our parks. Whether it is the new ADA-accessible playground at Couch Park or the new 580-foot long bike pump track planned for Gateway Green, Portland Parks & Recreation has shown an interest in and capacity to deliver new uses for our parks.
But the agency is in dire financial straits. When the pandemic struck, closures made it impossible for the bureau to collect the user fees that fund nearly half of the Recreation Division’s $35 million budget. Despite this unprecedented disruption, the bureau provided nearly 100,000 free meals to Portlanders this past summer.
In November, Portlanders will vote to decide whether to provide the ailing parks bureau with an additional $48 million each year for five years through an operating tax levy. If voters pass Measure 26-213, it would cost the average Portland homeowner about $11 per month.
Without the levy, the parks bureau would not only have to make cuts to programs many Portlanders love and even depend on, but also to basic services like trash pickups and bathroom cleanups.
With passage of the levy, the bureau would be able to maintain our parks, reopen our community centers and continue to make the parks more accessible to low-income Portlanders by reducing fees and providing free programs. Portland parks bureau director Adena Long has also promised that improving equity in our parks system would remain a priority if the levy passes.
The events that have taken place in Portland’s parks since March should serve as a reminder that racial equity must be a top priority for this city. Considering our city’s history of building racism into the physical landscape, the parks bureau is right to commit to improving access to quality green spaces and park programs for BIPOC and low-income Portlanders, even in the face of a budget shortfall.
Portlanders like parks, and with the backing of the Mayor, the Portland Business Alliance, several editorial boards, and community organizations like Latino Network and APANO, it seems likely that Portland will vote to pass the levy to keep our parks open — at least for the next five years.
Voters should pass this levy, which comes at a time when they’ve never relied on parks so heavily.
But, our parks deserve more than to be kept on a lifeline. Fortunately, there are ways to support our parks beyond voting for the levy.
As recently as May, Portland Parks & Recreation considered presenting voters with a capital bond, which could have been used to start to address a half-billion-dollar deferred maintenance backlog. However, the bureau felt voters would not want to pay for a bond and an operating levy at the same time. If Portlanders want new activities and facilities, they must first demand a bond be presented in the next election, and then organize their community to provide voter support. However, even if a bond and the proposed levy came to fruition, it would not be enough to improve parks spanning the entire system. According to parks bureau spokesperson Mark Ross, this will require a new permanent funding model for the agency to keep up with the growing costs of providing better park access for all Portland residents.
But in the meantime, Portlanders can provide support at the community level. Anyone interested in volunteering can do so through more than 200 organizations that support the maintenance and development of our parks through crowdfunding, volunteering and building community partnerships.
Public support has been instrumental in several more recent projects, including the Barbara Walker Crossing and Cully Park’s Native Gathering Garden, both of which were spearheaded by the Portland Parks Foundation.
Some will be tempted to ask that their dollars and time goes to their favorite park, but if this new era of Portland parks is going to be different, it is critical it begins with a commitment to equity — not just within Portland Parks & Recreation, but also among the Portlanders supporting the growth of our parks system.
Every Portlander deserves a park that serves and inspires them, and a park filled with the uses they dream of in a system rebuilt upon the foundation of justice accomplishes both.
Many Portlanders are now painfully aware of how critical it will be to keep our parks operational through the pandemic, but we must apply all of the lessons of 2020 and commit to reshaping and rebuilding our parks so that they boost the health, creativity, sense of belonging and joy for all users across the city.
Henry L. Miller has a master’s in urban and regional planning from Portland State University and a bachelor’s in literary studies: journalism from Eugene Lang College. He has worked as a journalist since 2013, covering topics ranging from sex work to British politics, and in transportation planning since 2018. He also co-hosted the “Small Town America” podcast and co-wrote a preparedness guidebook for young Portlanders.
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