The Portland City Council voted unanimously to approve the Central Eastside Enhanced Services District Wednesday after an all hands-on-deck effort by the staffs of Commissioners Jo Ann Hardesty, Chloe Eudaly and Amanda Fritz to include concerns from people struggling with homelessness. There were significant gains – a bigger voice for residents who are homeless, better training and protocols for security and a stated opposition to sweeps.
And there are promises that will take vigilance to see through – in particular, a commitment to locating city land for a safe, legal place for people to sleep in the Central Eastside Industrial District, a wide swath of land that spans the Willamette River to Southeast 12th Avenue, from I-84 to Powell Boulevard.
It’s time to push for a legal, safe place to sleep for unhoused people on city property in the Central Eastside.
Why? The effort to create this enhanced service district meant addressing a failed attempt to site Right 2 Dream Too in that area in 2016. Peer-led with 24-hour security, Right 2 Dream Too is a rest area for people who are homeless to have protected sleep. When R2DToo existed in Old Town from 2011 to 2016, more than 100 people frequently slept there each night. When the organization's lease on that land was set to expire, Fritz sought a piece of city property for its new home. Fritz thought she had found that land in a triangle at the eastern base of the Tilikum Bridge, emphasizing that this camp would be close to meet the needs of unhoused people in this area.
The Central Eastside Industrial Council (CEIC), which represents businesses and property owners, opposed this effort, and in June 2017, R2DToo moved to the Lloyd District temporarily until a more premanent home could be located.
Now Brad Malsin, president of the Central Eastside Industrial Council, sees R2DToo as a “very worthwhile model.”
Would the Central Eastside Industrial Council now host a safe space for unhoused people to sleep?
“Yes, I want to dig in with PBOT (Portland Bureau of Transportation) to identify a place and provide for people on the street,” Malsin told me.
There’s reason to believe the city can find that land. Now that Eudaly is in charge of PBOT, her Director of Policy, Jamey Duhamel, told me her office will evaluate PBOT right-away land where unhoused people could legally sleep.
“I feel comfortable saying that there are a couple of locations,” said Duhamel.
The service district proposal states the Central Eastside “commits to being a partner to the City in the process of identifying a peer-run, self-governed, safe sleeping area in the Central Eastside. When a mutually agreed upon site is identified by the City and the CEIC for a safe camping area, the CEIC commits to being a partner in its establishment.”
Fritz will be watching.
“Acknowledging that the Central Eastside did push back on R2DToo joining the district in 2016,” Claire Adamsick, policy director for Fritz told me, “she’s holding out hope that they will make good on a promise to a explore possible site in Central Eastside.”
The Central Eastside Enhanced Service District allows businesses and property owners to fund services that go beyond what the city provides by raising revenue through a property management license fee. The Central Eastside is the third enhanced service district in Portland, joining the Clean and Safe District downtown and the Lloyd District.
The service district concept – known in most cities as business improvement districts, or BIDs – is well-known to people keeping an eye out for unhoused and unpropertied people, concerned with the privatization of public space when property owners exert undo influence on public space.
When the CEIC put forth its plan for its enhanced service district, it entered a perfect storm of attention. The Oregonian had just reported that 52 percent of all arrests in 2017 targeted unhoused people.
And in 2018, the University of California Berkeley School of Law Public Advocacy Clinic published a report titled “Homeless Exclusion Zones” for the Western Regional Advocacy Project, of which Street Roots is a member. The report argued that business improvement districts in California cities “exclude homeless people from public spaces in their districts through policy advocacy and policing practices.”
Opposition to the orginal Central Eastside district coalesced into a coaltion of unhoused people, advocates and organizations called the Compassionate Change District. Bolstered by extensive research, the organized opposition put forth an alternative vision for the Central Eastside, demanding that unhoused people be centered in the conversation. How, they argued, might a model that has proven dangerous to unhoused people be transformed?
Hardesty listened. Drawing on her years as an organizer – she worked with Ibrahim Mubarak when he helped found Dignity Village in 2000 – she turned to her relationships. Ibrahim Mubarak is the executive director of Right 2 Survive, a key coaltion member of the Compassionate Change District.
“And because of those relationships, Right 2 Survive said yes, they would come. And CEIC said yes, they would come, and I actually thought it was a productive meeting,” Hardesty told me. “We walked out of that meeting with some good compromises and some good agreements.”
“I appreciate the work of the Compassionate Change people did informing everyone,” Fritz said at the hearing.
A big gain was the tempering and revision of the role of privatized security, the so-called safety ambassadors, so they have significant training from unhoused people. The safety ambassadors will receive 12 hours of training when hired and four hours every month “co-facilitated by a housed and houseless trainer.” The training will be “trauma-informed, provided by experts in the field and contain, at a minimum, first aid, conflict resolution and de-escalation techniques, mental health crisis response, trauma-informed interventions, social-service safety net referrals and ‘Central Eastside Cleaning Certification.” Crisis workers will also work some shifts with the safety ambassadors.
Another important addition directly addresses concerns about the high arrest rates of unhoused people. Duhamel, with Eudaly's office, helped design the Central Eastside Situational Protocol, which outlines the options that the safety ambassador has in various situations, encouraging de-escalation strategies for many of them, from loitering to “verbal inference.”
“It’s an outcropping of my social work background,” Duhamel explained.
Police contacts are limited to threats of harm and result in a report that the Safety for All Oversight committee reviews.
Unhoused people in the Central Eastside potentially have a larger voice. The district's board of directors will include people with “lived experience of houselessness/housing insecurity” because of the advocacy of the Compassionate Change District. The terms are still vague, though, because these members must be “appointed by organizations, with a location in the Central Eastside,”
The CEIC has acknowledged that camp sweeps are a bad idea. While the service district can take a stand against sweeps, this will take consistent support, because sweeps are in many ways launched by over-zealous neighbors that bombard authorities with complaints.
Other infrastructure for unhoused people — from showers and porta-potties to funding and land for a camp – were pushed back to the public realm. These all still need to be supported.
“This is an example of how the old scripts can be turned on their heads," Duhamel said. "Businesses with good intentions in coaltion of folks with lived experiences.”
What is clear is that the plan City Council approved emerged from an extraordinary feat of organizing and collaborating. The goal, Hardesty told me, is to create a model of how an enhanced service district “can be inclusive of all community members.”
She addressed activists in the audience at the City Council hearing, encouraging them to recognize the wins for unhoused people in the new ESD model. When Mubarak voiced concerns that the promises from the service district might not be met, Hardesty suggested that the City Council convene a review later in the year, for which Fritz also voiced support.
“We’ve got your back,” Hardesty said.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.