“Want to hear a joke?” Melissa hollered to me across the street.
“Sure,” I hollered back. The light changed, and she began to cross the street, leaning on a walker that was heavy with belongings, including a bundle of Street Roots newspapers swaying from the handle in a clear plastic bag. I stayed put so we could meet on the corner.
“Did you hear my hamster died?” she said as she reached me. I stopped, fearing it wasn’t a joke.
“He died at the wheel,” she said, smiling so that her whole face showed her amusement, her blue eyes gleaming like a mirror in the winter sun. I was a little slow on the uptake, but glad to receive her gift of a joke. Jokes, stories, hellos — these are given freely on the streets of Old Town and downtown.
We said our parting words, and then I crossed at the next light. Walking west on West Burnside Street, I passed people sitting up in sleeping bags, others, barely discernible underneath blankets and tarps, past the Big Pink tower. I wondered how many rooms were vacant in the tower, thinking about the obvious uneven distribution of housing in this city.
Then I turned left on Southwest Sixth Avenue for my errand at the Wells Fargo building. At 12 stories, built in 1902, it was once the tallest building in the city. The lobby was quiet, just the security guard and me. I imagined instead a bustling lobby where people of many income levels would pass each other, where Melissa might step off the elevator alongside many others.
This shouldn’t be a farfetched thought.
Downtowns across the country now have too much office space since work patterns shifted during the pandemic.
“Mayors and city lawmakers have reason to be bold in seizing this opportunity,” the Washington Post Editorial Board argued, responding to the national gathering of mayors.
Developers “are already eyeing the easiest buildings to convert: The ones with elevators in the middle, windows and light on all sides, and the right length and width. The challenge for city leaders is to generate interest in the buildings that are ‘maybe’ candidates for conversion.”
I understand that there are a lot of challenges to converting offices to residences, and expect my inbox to fill up with cautionary emails about zoning, permits, retrofitting for infrastructure like plumbing and more (to be clear, I appreciate learning from these emails).
But the city can pull more levers than it does and indicated such an approach in the housing production resolution in November, calling for various bureaus (many of which are now under Commissioner Carmen Rubio’s leadership) to create a list of 400 parcels of public land suitable for housing, speed up permitting, address zoning and identify vacant private property. City Council needs to make sure the bureaus have the tools necessary to commit to this work and come up with other creative approaches, even buying up floors of buildings as condominiums the way it did, for example, to site the city archives in a Portland State University building.
Mayor Ted Wheeler, help us make meaning from and build upon individual policies by creating a strong vision for a housing-rich future. We could call it something like “Let’s Live Together” (okay, I’m spitballing here) — holding in sustained focus a vision of a downtown vibrant with residents.
This has to be about housing, not speculative purchases. And while I certainly get the fact that we need housing at various levels to meet our housing crisis, the problem is that too often, all levels of housing are built except ones for people who can’t afford housing.
So this downtown needs to include real public housing mixed in, whether by means of public ownership or rental assistance like Federal Housing Choice vouchers and the Long Term Rent Vouchers created through the Metro Supportive Housing Services tax.
If we are going to live together downtown as neighbors, it has to be a downtown that includes Melissa and others alongside people with other income levels.
Then, maybe, Melissa will be sharing her joke with a neighbor in a downtown lobby, waiting for an elevator to an eighth-floor apartment. That’s a future I will not stop imagining.
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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