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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 23, 2011)
4 street roots Dec. 23, 2011 Jefferson Smith Eastside’s legislator hits the citywide circuit with his own style o f grassroots campaigning BY JAKE THOMAS avoidance. And the last one I want to say is schools. efferson Smith hopes to make history Schools are not directly within the ambit of next year by becoming the first mayor to the mayor, but nor do I think a mayor or a come from east of 82nd Avenue. city can abdicate its responsibility. We have to be looking at routes to increase school pince 2008, Smith has represented part capacity. When I was at Grant High School, of East Portland in the Oregon House of it was about 1,600 students. David Douglas Representatives and has been a champion is about the same size. Grant is still about for a part of town that has often been that size. David Douglas is now about 3,200 overlooked by City Hall and faces challenges students. Eighty percent of those students in education, transportation and poverty. are on free or reduced-price lunch, and 73 Smith grew up in Portland where he languages are spoken in the school district attended Grant High School. He went on to We haven’t kept up with school capacity in graduate from Harvard Law School. After taking a high-paying job at a law firm, he left some of our poorest schools as population has increased. to start the Oregon Bus Project, a nonprofit In addition, another thing we can do with venture that seeks to increase civic schools is set an objective to have the most participation through get-out-the-vote and robust set of summer programs of any city voter-registration initiatives. While serving in the House, Smith, 38, in the nation. We can do that without has worked on how the state manages spending too much because we can stitch water, helped upgrade schools, made together existing nonprofits as well as SUN budgets more schools and the parks department and see transparent, made it where the gaps are and help address what easier to register to Street Roots is we’re learning to be one of biggest drivers vote and even made conducting a in the achievement gap between upper- series of interviews national headlines by income and lower-income students: the summer gap. This is particularly important with the candidates rickrolling the Legislature to the for kids who are making critical choices on for mayor and City tune of Rick Astley’s whether they’re going to end up like Council. If you “Never GonnaGive someone who puts a microphone in niy facF' missed an edition, you Up.” or like the 13-year-old kid who was beaten you can catch up and shot to death 10 blocks from my house. at www.streetroots. Jake Thomas: I skipped parks and sidewalks and streets. wordpress.com You’ve long I applaud Commissioner Fish’s efforts at the campaigned for greater E205 initiative to get more parks in the reinvestment in East area. We have an objective in the city for Portland, home to a everyone to be within a 20-minute walk of a large population of park. There are various parts of the city that immigrants, families in poverty and working- aren’t. One of the biggest swaths of those class communities. What are some concrete areas is in East Portland. things you are going to do for this part of town We have 59 miles of unpaved road not just as mayor? in East Portland, but in Southwest We’re not going to pave all of them, but we should Jefferson Smith: [Scribbles down points pave some of them. We should see if we on a legal pad.] Six things. One: Using can’t find other funding options to add some economic diversify as a lens through which more sidewalks to areas that could use we make planning decisions. When we have them. built developments in inner Portland we have often not done enough to avoid J.T.: You’ve talked about the need to address displacing housing that’s displaced by that the foreclosure crisis on the local level. I was development elsewhere, including largely in hoping you could talk more about that and East Portland. how this would work. Two: As we make affordable housing investments, making sure that our design J.S.: According to a joint congressional review process, while not making it more committee, the economic cost of a cumbersome, makes sure to improve the foreclosure is about $77,000. The estimated flavor of the neighborhoods. cost of avoiding a foreclosure is about Third: Looking for some centers of $3,000. One thing the city can do to help excellence in the area, including the plan for families facing foreclosure is actually buying the Gateway Education Center. their house and working out a deal so that Fourth: The safety on the MAX line is they can stay in it Banks are not moving something I’ve been working on for the past money aggressively and aren’t terrifically year and a half with a bunch of people to try motivated to help with some of those and find low-cost alternatives to improve purchases. safety on the MAX line. Crime on TriMet is The key question is, will the economics down everywhere in the city except for east work? You can buy the properties for 50 of 82nd Avenue. percent to 80 percent market value and get One thing we can do is link to my fifth sufficient leverage to do th at So even point, which is community policing with a without that many millions of dollars you strategy. The plan we’re working towards is can get a lot of properties. If you do it at 50 an “adopt a station” plan. The easiest way to percent, the risk per unit is higher; if you do think about it is combining neighborhood it at 80 percent the risk is lower. We can watch with Adopt A Highway and doing it use some of our leverage with local banking around MAX platforms. institutions to also get in the mix. The Sixth! Do what we can around question remains, how should the public- foreclosures. That part of town is hit harder private partnerships be set up? What pots of , ^ re forecl°sures than other parts of money are we talking about? The one that xxi sure we don t lose the seems most obvious is the trying to dedicate settlement money from the attorney a meaningful portion of the bank settlement general’s lawsuit against the big banks, we money should it come so it can kickstart can dedicate that toward foreclosure this. STAFF WRITER J P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F JEFFER SO N S M IT H F O R M A Y O R J.T. What if the bank settlement money doesn’t come? J.S.: Yeah. Then I don’t think we can set aside the priority merely because of that, but I can’t promise to defund current city obligations in order to do i t So we’re looking for other pots. So it could be displacement mitigation funds out of urban renewal zones or certain city deposits that we have. We need to prove this up as a meaningful investment so it’s fiscally responsible, but doesn’t take money out of the general fund. So there’s a couple routes we’re looking a t We’re also looking at what remains from potentially other federal monies. J.T. Wew previously neglected parts of town see a renewal in investment, it often leads to properties rising in value and people being displaced. Do you worry that if we get all this renewed investment in East Portland, it will just lead to gentrification? J.S.: Yes. We’re trying to make a hallmark of how we’re approaching the race by trying to get to the hard part of questions facing the city. First of all, it’s not a bad thing to invest in neighborhoods to make them safer and better. That’s a necessary and good thing. It is a bad thing not to do more to avoid undue displacement So what are some answers? One, looking at the kind of development that we do so it’s culturally relevant so we don’t turn it into Bridgeport Village, but we look to support things like Lily Market, which is a really great Asian food market near my house. Two, look at aggressive minorify-women- emergmg-smaH-business contracting and local-source'contracting arrangements so that it’s more likely to help with jobs. Because both homeowners and renters need jobs. Third, if, for instance, we enter into a no-net loss-housing, working hard so that housing is nearby. Fourth, looking holistically at how we do our city investments. It wasn’t merely the investment and no net-loss of housing arrangements in inner Northeast Portland along Interstate that led to displacement, it was also simultaneous under-investment in East Portland. It wasn’t just that housing prices in one part of Portland were going up, it was that they were going up disproportionately to other places. Another is to look at a displacement mitigation fund. When we make urban renewal investments, we need to look for how to make sure that if we break it we buv it. J.T.: You’ve called the requirement that 30-percent of urban renewal funds go toward affordable housing an imperfect tool. I was hoping you could talk more about that. J.S.: We have too few funding streams for affordable and public housing. The 30-percent set-aside ought to be a floor not a filin g . But, for instance, with the significant reduction in national or federal See SMITH, page 5
