Street Roots • Oct. 21-27, 2016
Election 2016
Meet the candidates
Page 7
Portland City Council and Multnomah County
Commission hopefuls on social justice issues,
policy priorities and why they're best for the job
5. In addition to the issues
addressed above, what do you want
to fix in the city?
Portland City Council
POSITION 4
Chloe Eudaly
1. What is your plan to
end the trend of
economic segregation
and make housing
affordable to all
Portlanders?
Rent stabilization:
More than 75,000
Portlanders live in households that are •
spending over 50 percent of their income
on housing. If we cannot institute an
emergency rent freeze, we must bring
pressure to bear on the Legislature to
give us back the regulatory tools we need
to manage our housing crisis.
Investing in affordable housing: I support
the Yes for Affordable Homes campaign as
well as putting as many of our housing
dollars toward permanent affordable housing
as possible. We must treat affordable housing
for extremely low-income households as part
of our essential infrastructure. We have an
obligation to provide for our most vulnerable
and marginalized residents, and it makes
good fiscal sense as well. We spend three to
five times more serving people who are in
crisis and homeless than we do serving them
in supported housing.
Smart planning: A well-planned
residential infill policy will help increase our
housing supply and take pressure off of our
rental market while allowing us to preserve
many of our good old homes and maintain
neighborhood character while increasing
density.
Creative financing: I’d like to invite
ordinary Portlanders to have a hand in
solving our housing crisis. By enabling at
least one homeowner on every residential
block in the city to build an accessory
dwelling unit (ADU), with special incentives
for the creation of affordable units, we could
add tens of thousands of units to our
housing stock.
2. Oversight of short-term rental operations
such as Airbnb is abysmal and undermines
housing affordability. What are you going to
do to enforce current laws, and what laws do
you want to see put in place to prevent abuses?
Before adding new laws, I’d like to see
the city enforce the existing regulations and
compel short-term rental platforms, such as
Airbnb, to be partners in enforcement
rather than continuing to allow hosts to
violate the rules we put in place to protect
our housing stock and rental market
So-called “commercial” Airbnb units that are
not owner occupied and are rented out.
year-round do the most
damage to our housing
inventory, which puts
upward pressure on rents.
This is where the city and
these short-term rental
companies need to focus
their enforcement efforts.
3. We know you care about
housing. But what other policy expertise would
you bring to this job?
The expertise I bring is rooted in my
lived experience. I’m a community activist
who has worked on a variety of social,
economic and environmental justice issues
for over 25 years. I’ve been a small business
owner since 1994.1 have several years of
nonprofit administration experience,
including the co-founding of two nonprofit
organizations. And I’ve been active in
disability advocacy for over a decade.
I have a lot to contribute
to many vital conversations
MOFG
Portland should be having
right now. Our small
0311010316
businesses are the
Q& As
backbone of our local
on Pages
economy, and our arts and
culture community is
8-9,12-13
essential to our very
identity, yet I’ve seen the
city do little to protect either from the tide
of displacement sweeping the city. In fact,
Portland is poised to continue displacing
artists, makers, small businesses and
nonprofits through upcoming zoning
changes in our Comprehensive Plan.
I’ve also devoted a lot of effort to helping
create a more accessible and inclusive city
for people experiencing disabilities, but I’ve
often felt thwarted when my work has
intersected with city bureaucracies. When
stakeholders are paid lip service but given
no real power, we end up with policies that
don’t serve anyone well.
I look forward to harnessing the
incredible creativity, ingenuity and expertise
that is already right here in our city to help
tackle our most urgent issues and make
Portland a more inclusive, equitable,
prosperous, vibrant and just city for all of us.
4. By nearly every metric, people of color are
overrepresented throughout the criminal
justice system. What are you going to do to
correct that?
This is a complex issue with no single
answer, but a top priority must be repairing
the relationship between communities of
color and law enforcement. The issues of
transparency and accountability have
become a flashpoint in our city after
multiple officer-involved fatalities, a process
to address our Settlement Agreement with
the DOJ that both the police and the
community have lost faith in, and recent
actions by our mayor and council. To that
end, I strongly support Campaign Zero
(joincampaignzero.org), a set of policy
solutions and best practices developed by
activists associated with Black Lives Matter
aimed at “limiting police interventions,
improving community interactions and
ensuring accountability.” Whatever course
we take, communities of color must be
meaningfully represented and involved in
the crafting, implementation and oversight
of these new policies.
I’m also a great admirer of the work of
the Partnership for Safety and Justice, Unite
Oregon and other advocacy organizations
working from a “whole-system perspective.”
Their work to improve public safety and
reform our justice system runs the gamut
from crime prevention to diversion
programs, to ending racial profiling, to the
Family Sentencing Alternative Pilot
Program, to youth justice reform.
Finally, the city also has a big role to play
in righting historic wrongs and creating
economic opportunities for people of color
through how we invest and spend our public
dollars. I’ll be a strong
advocate for
implementing
Community Benefits
Agreements for all
publicly funded
projects to increase
utilization rates of
women and minority
contractors.
In 1920, the 19th Amendment granted American women the right to vote.
Only seven women and two
people of color have ever'been
elected to Portland City Council in
its over-100-year history. Currently
and historically, our council has
vastly overrepresented a small and
privileged segment of our
population. The barriers to running
for office in Portland are
unnecessarily high, maintained by
an entirely at-large system that
entrenches incumbents and favors
the politically connected and well-
funded. In addition to being the
eighth woman to ever be elected, I
stand to be the only renter, the only
small-business owner and the only
Eastside resident on City Council.
While that would represent some
progress, it’s not enough. Portland
clearly needs election reform and an
overhaul to its current form of government
I support Commissioner Fritz’s Open and
Accountable Elections initiative, and I’d like
to begin a community dialogue about how
we can make our city government better
reflect and serve our community, whether
that’s adding seats, creating district
representation or implementing a
p ro p o rtio n al voting system . V/e can n o t b e
an inclusive, equitable or just city without
representation that reflects our whole
community.
6. Why should people vote for you and not the
other guy?
It’s not difficult to distinguish between
me from the other guy. My opponent is a
political insider who has raised hundreds of
thousands of dollars for his campaign from
many of the people, businesses and interest
groups that are making Portland a tough
place for the rest of us to live. From
Potentially Responsible Parties in the
Portland Harbor Superfund site, to wealthy
developers that profit from doing business
with the city at the expense of affordability
and displacement, to a long list of political
action committees with misleading names,
while I have raised tens of thousands of
dollars from everyday Portlanders. If
elected, I’ll be headed to City Hall without
any political baggage, beholden to no one
but the people of Portland, and ready to
listen, learn and work together with my
colleagues and community to make Portland
work for all of us.
Steve Novick
1. What is your plan to end the trend of
economic segregation and make housing
affordable to all Portlanders?
I am deeply troubled
by the history of the
city’s development
policies contributing to
the economic and racial
segregation of our
community and the
displacement of people
See NOVICK, page 8