Opinion | Street Roots invests in building on Northwest Third Avenue and West Burnside Street, plans to renovate
A man walked to the corner of Northwest Third Avenue and West Burnside Street, moving slowly, likely worn from weathering nights outside. I gestured for him to look up at the banner we just dropped over the face of our building on Northwest 3rd Avenue and West Burnside.
HOPE.
He saw it and smiled a big, big smile.
“We need a little of that for our neighborhood,” I suggested.
“We sure do,” he said, still smiling as he continued to gaze at the bright, hand-painted 30-foot by 20-foot banner that Street Roots staff, vendors and supporters dropped from a building on the prominent Portland corner Friday morning.
“We sure do,” he repeated.
Again and again, as people experiencing homelessness wandered up, they had that reaction. A big smile.
Actually, not every time. One man staggered into our group of Street Roots onlookers, gesticulating with fury. He jumped on a table, lying down as if napping, glancing around a bit, like a dare. Staff and vendors exchanged looks: don’t engage, maintain calm. We continued as we were, and soon, he jumped off the table and moved on.
Even that moment was hopeful to me. I couldn’t help but appreciate his fury as a fighting spirit under difficult circumstances. And I’m proud of how Street Roots staff and vendors manage tense moments collectively with calmness and consistency.
Soulful, lively Old Town — where so many people live their lives in public — is a neighborhood that we at Street Roots love.
Cody McGraw, capital campaign director, dreamed up his vision for the banner as he began talking with vendors about acts of hope we could enact for Old Town.
Over the summer and inside the building where we draped the banner, Raven Drake, ambassador program manager, stitched together bedsheets on a sewing machine, looking like she was playing a role in a fairy tale.
Street Roots staff members Carly Ng, Kodee Zarnke and Kanani Cortez projected the image — the hand and heart created by Portland artist Rob Lewis, the rays of sunshine added by Mallory Smith — onto the bedsheets and climbed up on a ladder, painting — all after they worked shifts in the vendor program and on the newspaper, respectively.
Raven, Cody and Robin “Shaggy” Douglas all dropped the banner from the rooftop, rehearsing several times until they were able to level its suspension.
And even after they dropped the banner Friday morning, people kept pitching in, stepping up. When a corner of the banner caught on the building, Nettie Johnson, vendor coach, raced up to the second floor to lift out a window screen and tug the corner free. Charlie, a Street Roots vendor, tightened a rope from the lower corners so it wouldn’t flop freely.
And many more people stood and cheered. Marla Duby led us in a cheer using American sign language: “Street Roots! Yay! Street Roots! Yay!”
Ultimately, suspending this banner is a symbolic action we could take in what often feels like a suspended space of desired — but hard-to-reach — outcomes. Wealth clots rather than flows. Some of us are well-housed while others are living in horrible conditions with traumas piling up. People all over our city pitch solutions, emotionally flail, and we are in this fraught, suspended space.
What we do at Street Roots is act constructively — creating income opportunities, stability and community for people on the streets as well as people experiencing housing insecurity. We investigate systemic injustices through our newspaper. We advocate for systemic change through our advocacy wing.
And we can choose hope — an informed, hard-working, eyes-wide-open kind of hope.
By the way, the building we dropped the banner from isn’t any building. It’s our future home, and we’re now raising money to renovate it. I’ll write much more about it, but for now, if you are curious where it is, well, we marked it clearly with a banner. Head east on West Burnside Street and look to your left at Northwest Third Avenue — you’ll see the banner and our future home. Visit our website at streetroots.org/hope to learn more, and contact Cody McGraw at cody@streetroots.org if you want to help.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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