Remarks to the Eastside Democratic Club
Michael Mehaffy * November 6, 2018
Thank you very much for the invitation. I am an urban researcher, sometimes professor and consultant, focused mostly on city growth and its characteristics – and on the human side of growth, the issues of livability and vitality for all. And lately I’ve decided to get more involved in practicing what I preach, and giving back in my own back yard, in the Goose Hollow neighborhood association. So I’m delighted to be here, talking about neighborhood-based democracy, at the Eastside Democratic Club -- and on Election Day no less!
Today I do want to talk about democracy in our city, and something that’s happening here, that has to do with the ways we govern, and the ways we engage, and the way we work together to address problems like inequality and injustice. And in some cases, the ways we work against each other, and create a kind of paralysis – but a paralysis that is very profitable for some other people, whose interests may be hidden from view. And those interests may well be very much aligned with this paralysis – representing a kind of dividing and conquering. There’s a lot of that going on today in our political processes, and not just in Portland as we all know.
And here I want to acknowledge my colleague Suzanne Lennard of International Making Cities Livable, who has collaborated with me to contribute some of the commentary that I’m going to share.
You know, we here in Portland are rightly proud of our urban achievements – among them revitalized buildings and neighborhoods, parks and squares replacing freeways and parking lots, transit-served, walkable and bikable streets, and livable neighborhoods that are mostly unspoiled by the mega-projects that blight other cities. In all of these achievements, our city’s neighborhood association system has played a central role. Even today, the City’s website crows that “Portland's neighborhood system and commitment to public participation has been nationally recognized for many years.”
In that context, it’s odd that the City agency responsible for Portland’s neighborhood system has just changed its name, removing the word “neighborhood” and making it clear that more drastic changes are under way. The clear indication is that the agency intends to sideline or even dismantle the system altogether.
So what changed?
The City’s most recent actions began in response to a scathing 2016 audit of the Office of Neighborhood Involvement (ONI). The City Auditor found what The Oregonian newspaper called a “trifecta” of serious problems, including a failure to effectively involve stakeholders (including neighborhood representatives), a confusion of missions, and deficiencies in financial transparency and accountability. Clearly there were real issues of governance to address.
How did ONI react? By hiring a marketing company to rebrand and change its name, to the Office of Community and Civic life (OCCL). Especially telling is the agency’s emphasis, in the new materials, on representing “communities of identity” – not neighborhoods – as the focus of future public involvement.
Portland’s leaders are certainly right to take affirmative steps to involve groups that have been excluded historically, and too often are still excluded. The city has a shameful legacy, and much more needs to be done now. But the way to do that is not to further sideline the grass-roots system that has done so much to revitalize the city, and make it a much-copied national success story. In fact Portland’s citizens ought to demand more of this system, not less – for there are fundamental issues of grass-roots democracy at stake.
Now here’s the problem. By definition “communities of identity” are not open to all, as neighborhood associations must be. They are not required to maintain open meetings, public records, or standards against conflicts of interest. Their lack of transparency means they are prey to relatively easy manipulation by unaccountable vested interests.
By contrast, neighborhood associations are geographically representative of all the residents within their boundaries – a form of representation that could not be more important in a city that elects its council at large, and leaves large sections of the city otherwise poorly represented.
More troubling, who decides which groups will be recognized? The City, it appears. What kind of influence will these participants really have over the process? Only what the City deems suitable, since they control the process. This is top-down, thumb-on-scales tokenism – the antithesis of the original grass-roots system.
I’ve met with the Director of the new Office of Community and Civic Life, Suk Rhee, and I think she is genuinely motivated by altruistic goals to promote inclusiveness in Portland. She’s right that more needs to be done to find ways to truly involve marginalized groups – especially so, given the perpetuation of structural segregation from the City’s shocking past. Yet it’s hard for many to understand why this should come at the expense of the neighborhood association system, or why it’s appropriate to create new marginalized groups – this time of elderly retirees, long-time residents and neighborhood activists.
Recently Ms. Rhee even suggested that neighborhood associations should have less accountability, and fewer requirements for disclosure of public records, open meetings and potential conflicts of interest. This is a remarkable disregard of the values of transparency and accountability in government and governance, reversing Mayor Ted Wheeler’s central campaign pledge. (Ms. Rhee is an appointee of the mayor.) Moreover, it evidences a dismissal of the legitimacy of neighborhood associations as long-time constituents of civic governance in Portland.
On the contrary, I and others believe that Portland urgently needs a revitalized, accountable, effective neighborhood-based governance system, with better grass-roots representation of all residents. Along with that – and far from at odds with it – the city does need effective tools to address shared challenges, including displacement, loss of affordability, inequity, homelessness, and other growing problems.
Other cities do show that there are good solutions available, if citizens work together – community land trusts, progressive land policies, taxes on speculative gains, taxes on empty investor-owned units, and other tools. When developers build luxury condos for foreign investors who never intend to live there, or for wealthy residents with two, three or four other homes, then a building to house local residents does not get built. The price of all property increases when housing is treated as a commodity, instead of a right.
But perhaps there’s a more basic reason for the transformation, and a more base one. Perhaps those in control of city development are simply sick and tired of having to listen to grass-roots interference in their business plan, to put it bluntly. They want to maximize profits (and city fees and campaign donations) on investments, failing to see that this strategy is not making the city more affordable, but less so. A strategy of “dividing and conquering” – whether conscious on their part or not – is a very effective way to achieve their goals. With this “dividing and conquering” – fragmenting community voices into factional, squabbling communities of identity – they can effectively ignore all protests, and questionable forms of development can proceed unquestioned.
Activists of all stripes in Portland should come together and resist this Trojan Horse. The city’s neighborhood associations should certainly step up to the plate to be vital partners in getting better-quality and truly equitable development across the city. In part that means increasing economic and ethnic diversity in existing inner neighborhoods. But in part that also means ensuring economic stability in poorer neighborhoods, in order to resist displacement through gentrification, and providing more employment opportunities while improving services and quality of life.
This is a more “polycentric” approach to urbanization – not trying to jam everyone into the core, but recognizing that we need to meet market demand with many local centers of good quality, livable urbanism. Poorer neighborhoods must not be less healthy places to live, so after economically stabilizing the long-term residents they must also have better walkability, access to healthy food, community gathering places, green places, and good public transit. These improvements can only be achieved through a community-led, neighborhood-based participation process – not by demonizing neighborhoods.
Some of the opposition to neighborhoods and their perspectives in Portland is coming from architects and developers, and from some of their more fanatical boosters. They seem to believe the city can build its way out of its current problems, by creating high-rise luxury condos in the core. They are entranced with “the Vancouver model” - even though Vancouver remains one of the most expensive and over-gentrified cities in the world.
There are signs we are headed down that same path. A large number of new high rise units in the core, and many other high-density mid-rise condos in close-in neighborhoods, are used as second or third homes, or are owned as investments, notably for AirBnB rentals. In one such project of 162 units now in construction in Northeast Portland, half are expected to be investments, rather than housing for local residents, and one quarter of the condos will be marketed exclusively to overseas investors who can afford higher prices than the current Northeast Portland residents. Recently, a tech startup announced a plan to sell granular shares of real estate to international investors, suggesting the returns could be as high as 35 percent. Where would these eye-popping profits come from, if not higher rents and more expensive real estate?
I see how this kind of approach helps international investors who want to speculate in American real estate. It’s harder to see how it helps to solve Portlanders’ housing affordability challenges.
There are also fundamental problems with the cost of the high rise form, which is inherently more expensive than lower building forms. That creates a kind of “tail-chasing” spiral of costs, and a strong incentive to sell to the wealthy – who are perfectly happy to pay high prices for the views.
Not all of the new buildings are tall, of course, and some of the most intense battles are over existing neighborhoods, where the new projects are often seen by residents as intrusive, degrading of character and livability, and often downright ugly. This is particularly sensitive for many in beautiful older neighborhoods with historic landscapes.
How do we deal with this challenge? One strategy might be to work out a win-win approach, collaborating with neighborhood associations to find a path to “gentle densification” – and to achieve compatible infill that is truly more affordable.
But this is unfortunately not what is happening. Instead, the City and its more fanatical supporters are pushing hard on a “build, baby build” approach, and sometimes slandering opponents (without evidence) as selfish NIMBYs who don’t believe in racial justice. (This was the case with one of our Historic Landmarks Commission members, herself an Asian-American.) Ironically, there is not a little ageism in these attacks – targeting neighborhood association activists (who are often retired) as elderly obstructionists who ought to just get out of the way.
Meanwhile, there is zero evidence that the actual projects promote racial justice, or even affordability (in a number of cases, $300,000 houses have been demolished to allow $600,000 duplexes – that’s progress?) On the other hand, there is abundant evidence that the new buildings are often out of scale and context, damaging to the fabric of historic neighborhoods, and again, downright ugly to many. Do we have the right, in a democracy, to weigh in on impacts to our public realm, and our common civic heritage? Do we have the right and duty to protect our common civic assets? You bet we do.
But a disturbing new breed of activist doesn’t much care for facts, or democratic process, it seems. They prefer instead their own wrecking-ball formulas for promoting justice: accusations of NIMBYism, “us-against-them”, name-calling, anger, and outright bullying.
At its heart this is just another bitter, irrational attack on a new “other” that will result in some kind of eye-for-an-eye justice. This is the worst form of zero-sum thinking, of dividing and conquering – and it plays perfectly into the hands of those who would like nothing more than to make a few people wealthier, while problems go mostly unresolved, and conditions get worse for all. This picture is not a flattering one for Portland’s progressive image.
Closely related is the irrational belief that equity and sustainability require jamming everyone into the core, and greatly raising the density of existing neighborhoods. That includes neighborhoods like Goose Hollow and the Alphabet District, already two of the densest urban areas in all of Oregon. Meanwhile, the 90% or so of the region that is outside the core, and that is where most of the region’s residents live, goes largely ignored, and largely unimproved.
This belief in the benefits of concentration at the core amounts to a kind of “voodoo urbanism” – a magical faith in the powers of hypertrophic growth at the top, and at the center. Surely the benefits of wealth created there will trickle down to all? But the evidence is very much against it, and the actual sad result, in Portland and other cities, is an increase in inequality, displacement and further decline at the edges. For Portland, “voodoo urbanism” means too much attention to a relatively small, increasingly expensive core, and not enough attention to improving the places where most people live.
Instead we need a more even-handed, diverse approach – including geographic diversity, in the form of healthy polycentric regions, cities and neighborhoods, as I said before. This was a point made by the urbanist Jane Jacobs – a hero for some Portland planners. She argued for city diversity above all else – diversity of people, and of uses and activities, yes – but also of building ages and conditions, and geographic diversity too. She was opposed to rushing monoculture of the new, and to the idea that always making things bigger was a magical solution to much of anything. She saw no replacement for the fine-grained actions of citizens and their partners working at all levels – what amounts to a kind of “polycentric governance.”
As part of that polycentric governance, Portland urgently needs to strengthen civic engagement of communities of identity, within the neighborhood association system, as well as with other affirmative policies. As it did in the era of its urban renaissance, the city needs to recognize and build on its most important civic assets, at the same time using effective, evidence-based tools to promote greater equity.
Now I know I’ve spent a fair amount of time criticizing those who seek to dismantle our neighborhood system, but let me close with a positive vision of where I think we need to go as a city.
First, I think we need a new sensibility about development, not “Not in my back yard,” or “Yes in my Back Yard,” but “quality in my back yard” – QUIMBY if you will. (And that’s a nice name for something in Portland!) If I am part of a process, convened by the city, that assures the quality of development, the compatibility with my existing neighborhood and its liability, then I will support that – but I have every right to insist that is the case.
On the other hand, I have every right, and even a duty, in a democracy, to oppose bad development in my neighborhood, and anyone who undermines my right is attacking democracy, plain and simple.
Second, the City leadership needs to help to revitalize, not dismantle, the neighborhood system, with accountable support and participatory budgeting, and through a standalone, truly empowering city office.
Third, the City needs to give a proper voice to neighborhoods and their properly elected, accountable representatives – perhaps a “Council of Neighborhoods” to advise and consent on City policies. If you don’t like frustrated and angry people who are protesting your suppression of their democracy, perhaps the answer is not to suppress them even more – but to engage them, and empower them. Indeed, other cities have shown the way. (And I have seen a similar dynamic in my own consulting for public involvement projects.)
Fourth, I think we need to look very hard at some of the other aspects of the current system, and the ways that boundaries are drawn and power is diluted and gerrymandered. I think we need something closer to a “one person, one vote” system, in terms of neighborhood size and influence. I also think the coalition system, which started as a way of caucusing influence by geographic region, has become highly dysfunctional, and a way for the City to put its thumb on neighborhoods and their interests. I think the system needs to be re-structured from top to bottom, and moreover from bottom to top. Subsidiarity, as they call it!
Lastly, none of this is to say that we’re all going to agree with each other, or that I for one agree with the policies and positions of various other neighborhood associations. Often I disagree strongly with them, in fact. But that’s what we do in a democracy. It’s one thing to disagree, often profoundly, with my neighbors, and neighboring associations, but it’s a far different thing to suppose that we should strip them of their equal rights of representation, and impose our own judgments over theirs. The right way to proceed, I think, is to have an open and fair process, where information can be shared and debated, correcting distortion and manipulation, correcting fake news and the corrosive influence of vested interests. This is the other essential component of democracy, where we learn from each other, and grow wiser. I think that is best done with a lively, diverse, grass-roots democratic process.
In a troubling time of divisive assaults on democracy, I think it’s time for more democracy – not less. Thank you!
- KBOO