News
Page 8
Street Roots • May 1-7, 2015
PUBLIC
WORKSHOP
PAALF People’s
Plan is hosting a
public community
workshop at 1 p.m.
May 2 at
Rosewood
Initiative. Learn
PH O TO S BY S H A N E VALLE
Portland residents attend a public workshop March 28 at the Rosewood Initiative to discuss challenges facing the black community and develop
a framework for the future of East Portland. A similar workshop is scheduled for Saturday.
more at www.
pdxpeoplesplan.
org.
Creating a livable city
for black residents
Lisa Bates, o f the Portland African American Leadership
Forum, has high expectations fo r the People’s Plan
BY ANN-DERRICK GAILLOT
S T A F F W R IT E R
T T T h at would Portland look like if city
l / l / policy were shaped with the
T Y experiences and interests of
Portland’s black community in mind?
That’s the question the Portland African
American Leadership Forum hopes to
explore and answer with the People’s Plan.
PAALF hopes the plan will be a framework
for organizing and advocating to empower
black Portlanders to shape city policies and
development as Portland continues its rapid
change.
PAALF, an organization that gathers the
city’s black community leaders around
public policy issues, is best known for its
work in opposing a Trader Joe’s
development in Northeast Portland last
year. Since then, the group has been
working on the People’s Plan and is now in
the community involvement stage that is so
crucial to what PAALF hopes will unite and
amplify the interests of black Portlanders
surrounding issues of equity in education,
housing, health care, arts and culture,
environmental sustainability and economic
development,
Despite the fact that development of the
plan is still in. its early stages, it is already
drawing comparison to the failed Albina
Community Plan, adopted by the city in
1993, which promised to combat
disinvestment in the Albina neighborhood
and provide resources for property owners.
Today, the shadow of the Albina Plan
places added pressure on the People’s Plan
to transform a place recently declared the
fastest gentrifying city in America by
Governing magazine.
Lisa Bates, a professor of planning and
urban studies as well as black studies at
Portland State University, is the policy
research manager and has high expectations
for how the plan, if executed correctly, could
make Portland a more accessible and livable
city for its nearly 40,000 black residents
who live with memories of repeated
displacement.
Only time will reveal how the People’s
Plan will shape up, but Bates sat down with
Street Roots to share PAALF’s vision for
Portland’s future and the progress they’ve
Participants at the March 28 workshop shared their thoughts about
the meaning o f community.
made on the People’s Plan thus far.
Ann-Derrick Gaillot: I was hoping you
could explain what the People’s Plan is in your
own words to someone who has never heard o f
it.
Lisa Bates: The goal of the People’s
Plan is to use the concepts of urban
planning that we see in Portland all the time
and specifically ask what would that look
like if we did that with black people in m in d,
trying to prioritize not just the policy
problems that black people face, like
affordable-housing problems and educational
attainment and jobs, but to actually try to
create a really positive vision of the future
that asks a question of what Portland would
be like for black people if it really was for
black people. What would it be like? What
would your neighborhood be like if you felt
that your neighborhood as a space, as a
community, loved black people?
One of the other goals that we have in
the People’s Plan is to try to lift up not just
a conversation about Northeast Portland
and gentrification in Northeast Portland, but