Dan Ryan is among three new faces on the Portland City Council this year, but his first few months in office are unquestionably the most challenging of the bunch.
But then, having taken office in September, he’s had a little more time than the others to ruffle feathers. Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps started their terms on Jan. 1. Ryan’s election fills the seat left by Nick Fish, who died at the start of 2020, and his term will end in 2022.
After voting against the publicly popular push to cut the Portland Police Bureau’s budget, Ryan was targeted by protesters and his home was vandalized multiple times with paint, rocks and graffiti. Given the sustained urgency to address police funding in Portland and the country, Ryan’s vote was a decision that angered many who had endured tear gas and violence at the hands of police all summer.
This month, Street Roots will speak with all three of the new city commissioners to discuss their top priorities for the coming year. We start here with Ryan, whose commissioner portfolio includes the Joint Office of Homeless Services and the Bureau of Development Services. We also interviewed Rubio and Mapps .
Joe Opaleski: What is your biggest policy priority for the year?
Dan Ryan: We had a meeting last week, the entire City Council, and we (were) talking about our top three priorities.
I really pushed for this meeting, and I didn’t want to dive into the details of the budget until we had a chance as a team to see if we actually are on the same page about what those top three priorities are. I was really happy that we all landed on the same top three at this moment, which were houselessness, economic recovery and community safety.
No matter what my bureau assignments would be, I would always, as a person representing the community, focus on the three top priorities that are gripping our city at this time.
Opaleski: For you and your office, what are the steps that you have taken, or will take, to ensure that you meet these goals?
Ryan: When I was getting my assignments, all I asked the mayor was: I would love it if my assignments had some connectivity to one another, that they were interconnected. So the three that I’m responsible to steward for the city is the Joint Office for Houselessness, the Bureau of Development Services and then the Housing Bureau.
Those three really do have some great systemic overlap, so I’m going to focus on houselessness, especially, with my partners with the county. That’s the one that will take up the biggest amount of time. I convened a meeting with the Chair Kafoury, with Commissioner Meieran and with the mayor, and it was on the topic of alternative shelters.
It took four or five meetings, and we got to an agreement about alternative shelters, and now we’re asking the community to provide their proposals — and we will start to put more of those in the continuum. And when I say continuum, I mean a continuum from the streets to stability. It definitely includes one that has been a big focus for some time, which is permanent housing. And yet the pathway to get from the streets to the stability of permanent housing often isn’t a direct shot. So it’s important for me that we have a continuum that includes alternative shelters.
One of those, that I just was thinking about, is safe park. As you’ve probably seen around town, there are people that live in their cars, their RVs, and imagine if we had a place where they all could park, and we can provide some general services and also, most importantly, have people there that are part of the provider community, social workers, if you will, so that we can start to really know everybody that’s houseless by name.
You can have 1,000 houseless residents and they all could have 1,000 different complex stories, so how do we help build their resistance so they can move towards stability?
OPINION: Without parking, car and RV dwellers have nowhere to go
Opaleski: Ensuring these types of communities (permanent and impermanent shelters), is that the main priority for the Joint Office?
Ryan: Why I wanted to have meetings that included people from the county and the city is — and I’ve noticed this from dialogue with other bureaus, and this happens (in) every large organization — we have a lot of silos. We have to bust out of those silos to get to a systemic solution, which starts to impact real population-level change.
I think it’s important to know that over the last several decades the houselessness services community was built in a very scrappy manner, with some private donations, (and) gradually some government support, but it really wasn’t until the last five years that we’ve seen more stability and revenue streams with two housing bonds passed, and also now the Here Together Measure that was passed last spring. So this is a moment in time that we have to seize. We have to take all the wisdom from those great organizations that have been working on the ground, and make sure that we really build a continuum where we can all get on the same page about what success can look like, (and) what those shared goals are.
I noticed even within the city, how this houselessness crisis is really impacting a lot of bureaus in different ways, but we don’t always talk about it. So instead of it being the houselessness problem for the joint office, it’s an entire city and county all-in effort. And so we have to pop it out of those silos.
We need better real-time data on identifying all of our houseless community by name, and have a better insight into where they’re at, at this moment. Then when we look at the continuum, we can say, at any given time, and it doesn’t have to be perfect — don’t let perfection get in the way of good — but at any given time we want to know what the count is of those that are chronically unhoused on the streets. We want to know how many people are on the streets that aren’t connected to any services, whatsoever. Then, when we have people in shelters, we want to know how long they’ve been in those shelters. Are they making any progress in terms of building more resilience?
Because so many people that are chronically unhoused are, actually, like my brother who passed away on the street six years ago. My brother Tim had chronic and, sadly, untreated — especially the last 10 years of his life — mental health and substance abuse addiction issues. Sadly, people with that type of diagnosis, then you add a physical diagnosis onto it, are the most fragile on our streets, and often, like my brother, die on the streets. You couldn’t move my brother from the streets in that condition into an apartment. It just didn’t work. We tried to house him.
I lived this experience, and that’s why I’m such an advocate for having the services meet those folks where they are on the streets and letting them build their resilience. It’s going to take more time and money, but it’s worth it. What’s the alternative? Just to continue to see that number grow, and not be treated and not allow our services to meet them? I think my voice is really bringing that into the picture with people from the county, and it really is a shared office; that’s why it’s called a joint office.
Opaleski: But it’s safe to say the first priority to deal with this issue is, in your eyes, alternative housing, emergency shelter and doing a better job of collecting data on this population?
Ryan: I think it’s really important that I’ve directed my staff to convene a City Council task force and homelessness task force, so it’s not just Commissioner Ryan and the joint office that’s focused on this, but it’s an all-in effort. I’ve heard from other bureaus where they’re impacted by the houselessness crisis, but they’re not part of the strategy of improving it. It can turn into a blame game, and we’ve got to knock that off, where we’re all aligned to focus on this, and it takes multiple bureaus and multiple departments in the county to come together with that alignment.
It’s just important that we have a focus on housing as the goal, because we want permanent housing, but to know that there’s quite a journey to get to that place, especially stability. My brother wouldn’t have been able to stay in an apartment, unless he had some resilience built and started seeing a mental health therapist and also doing peer-to-peer sobriety work, one day at a time.
Opaleski: You’ve agreed that a FEMA-type response is needed to combat this crisis. What do you mean by that?
Ryan: What I want to say about that is that we need to treat it as an emergency. It’s unbearable for Portlanders to accept the amount of the heartache that we see visibly on the streets, and how can we explore the options that are necessary to move somebody from the streets to stability. We can’t keep taking one step forward and two steps back. We have to keep plugging away, and building more of these alternative sites, like safe parking is an example where it’s more like a FEMA response. Instead of me driving out by Delta Park, and seeing all these cars along the street that are kind of an organic village that’s formed, what if we could bring that village together with services, with community?
COVID has been a reminder that isolation is hard on mental health, and the houseless community needs more resilience to be built with community. I think sometimes we want a slogan or something simple to solve something that’s incredibly complex, and so I always like to remind everybody these are complex solutions as well.
Opaleski: Some of these communities and camps are being moved, currently. How do you respond to criticism toward this?
Ryan: My focus is always on building the alternative shelters, so there’s actually a big mass of places where people could go. When someone is asked to move without any solutions, that’s not OK under my watch. We must build more of these alternative shelter opportunities, so that the person can make an individualized choice — they have their own agency to decide — moving forward with dignity, and with their community, to another place. When I’ve stepped in, I’ve been on point to always remind us that it’s about building these alternative shelters, and that’s the goal.
Opaleski: Are there more of those in the pipeline?
Ryan: There are. We’ve agreed to putting together five, which is a step in the right direction, and there’s a request for proposals from the community.
Opaleski: Moving on to the Bureau of Development Services, what is your main priority for that bureau in 2021?
Ryan: There’s the audit that comes out, I think there’s been quite a few over the last 30 years that say, the Bureau of Development Services is taking too long to get permits issued to keep business and development moving along. So I’m working with my team right now to build, I guess it’d be another task force, that’s not just the Bureau of Development Services.
We impact with six other bureaus, whether it’s the parks department, whether it’s transportation, whether it’s fire, and so as a collective we need to come together and look at our run chart of how long it takes to move something along, how long it might camp out in one bureau. I’m kind of a geek when it comes to this type of continuous improvement work. Use data to look at this information and have a goal to shorten that duration of time.
Being more nimble and improving the way we do services with those who want to invest in Portland is going to be really important to keep jobs flowing into our market, as we’re trying to get out of COVID and survive.
Opaleski: You’ve proposed increasing the housing stock in areas where schoolchildren are living in unstable or inadequate housing to complete schoolwork, and even to live comfortably. Do you have a plan for solving this issue?
Ryan: I think the blueprints have been put together with various groups over the years, and I am an advocate for having family (suited) affordable housing — key word is family. I think we need more housing stock that has multiple bedrooms, and near safe, frequently running transit, and then pedestrian safety, so that they can walk their children to school on a sidewalk and not on a side of a dirt road on 154th and Stark.
I do believe it is mostly in East Portland where we have a lot of those scenarios that need a lot of attention, but I’m a North Portlander and I’ve lived here most of my life, and we have some of those same scenarios in our neighborhoods out here. It’s really important to build multifamily housing that’s close to schools, close to transit and close to a very decent supermarket as well.
Opaleski: Are there any proposals in the pipeline that may help this issue?
Ryan: We actually have a lot of proposals that we’ve passed, a couple housing bonds, and we’re moving on those, to not just meet, but exceed goals. I’m also noticing a real push from the Council to design more family-sized units. The Housing Bureau is actually moving along in good speed with taking the investments from the voters about the city, and the metro bond, to break ground and get those units up and running. We’re actually ahead of goal on a couple of those.
Opaleski: Do you have a timeline?
Ryan: I think it will take the next five years to complete the projects.
When we talk about a continuum from streets to stability, we also have a continuum before that, if you will, those that are on the margins every month to being homeless, so we have to invest in more preventative housing to avoid the number growing.
We have to get away from either net zero, or even stepping back, and so the combination of rental assistance investments that are coming into the market from the Here Together measure, coupled with the housing bonds have passed. There is, like never before in Portland, more focus on rental assistance, and I’d say houselessness prevention. You always have to stay focused on houselessness prevention. Otherwise, everything we were talking about 10 minutes ago is just going to keep growing in magnitudes that are overwhelming.
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