Street roots., October 28, 2016, Page 8, Image 8

Commentary
Page 8
Street Roots • Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2016
Street Roots • Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2016
Commentary
and her beautiful career
BY MARTHA GIES
Portland’s leading
advocate fo r affordable
housing is retiring from
her role as executive
director o f Northwest
Pilot Project
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
ortland is losing one of its most
treasured and unique assets as
Executive Director Susan Emmons
retires from Northwest Pilot P roject Over
her career of 31 years, she has provided the
moral compass that points the way to keep
our poor and elderly housed.
When the downtown Department of
Housing and Urban Development contracts
began expiring in the mid-’90s, Susan was
indignant and vocal as owners and
developers proposed conversion to high-end
rents, just as she raised the alarm when the
old traditional low-rent buildings - the
Governor, the Hamilton and Lownsdale -
were either demolished or transformed and
the elderly were pushed aside.
By using her own voice to amplify the
frail voices of gentrification’s victims, voices
otherwise drowned out by the racket of
demolition and construction, Susan has had,
over the decades, remarkable success at
saving buildings or replacing the units lost.
Now that our housing crisis has reached
new and unmanageable proportions, some
of us look back and remember that Susan
figured out years ago that what we need is a
local Housing Trust Fund. She was out
giving talks to the community about it as
early as 1993, when people found the price
tag staggering: She knew we were probably
looking at half a billion dollars. But for most
of the politicians who came and went, it was
never the priority as it was for Susan, who
arrived in the early morning to see the
Over the years, author Martha Gies has contracted
desperation of the unhoused in front of her
with N W P P in various capacities: to research and
office door.
produce the annual Downtown Portland Affordable
She persevered for three decades,
Housing Inventory; to manage relocations as H UD
impatiently watching the city manage to find buildings went off-line; and once, at the request o f
funds for other projects: $30 million for the
Susan Emmons, to probate the estate o f a deceased
client. Gies has seen up close the special
Eastbank Esplanade, a great hit with
combination o f kindness and respect with which
tourists and people walking their dogs; $57
Susan Emm ons meets the world.
million for the aerial tram that ferries
physicians to work on Pill Hill; $613 million
to fund the Portland Bicycle Plan for 2030.
By putting these projects ahead of low-
opportunity of this nation.” Dr. King said
income housing, we have created a
that, too.
metropolis convenient for doctors and
This is the story, as briefly told as
cyclists, while the poor wait anxiously for
possible, of how that beautiful career began,
their rent to double or their building to go
took shape and finally rose to meet the old
to condos. And if they have already collided
Quaker mandate: “Speak truth to power.”
with that emergency, chances are they lie
sleepless in doorways, trying to keep their
single blanket from wicking in the rain.
orn and raised on suburban Chicago’s
Susan loves that quote of Dr. Martin
North Shore, where her Realtor father
Luther King Jr.: “We must accept finite
helped integrate their community of
disappointment, but we must never lose
Glencoe, Susan Graham moved to Portland
infinite hope.” At the same time, she has
in 1965 to attend Lewis & Clark College and
refused to be discouraged by the choices
there met her future husband, David
Portland makes, while she keeps pressing us Emmons.
to do better. “We refuse to believe there are
By the time she was hired by Peter
insufficient funds in the great vaults of
P
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--.dS
1
M
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Susan E m m ons accepts the President’s Volunteer Action Award from President George
H. W. Bush and first lady Barbara Bush in 1990.
■
Em m ons is accompanied by Peter Paulson, the founder o f the Northwest Pilot Project.
When Paulson retired, the board named Em m ons director, a post she’s held fo r nearly
three decades.
Paulson, the founder-director of Northwest
Pilot Project, she and David had lived in
Scotland and Austria and returned to
Portland, where Susan completed her
degree in English at Portland State
University. In the grand old tradition of
female English majors, she had worked in
various secretarial positions, finally landing
at First Congregational Church, where her
potential was finally recognizéd by an
enlightened senior pastor. Working with the
Rev. Lincoln Reed, Susan pushed far beyond
typing church bulletins and homilies; she
took it upon herself to fill what she saw as
wasted space in this historic church and
invited dozens of nonprofits to hold their
meetings there, then managed the
complicated scheduling.
In 1985, the year Paulson stole her away,
David Emmons was employed at Powell’s
Books, and publishing his poetry. Their twin
boys, Gavin and Iain, were already 10 years
old.
The Rev. Peter Paulson (1921-2005), who
was an Episcopalian priest and a United
Church of Christ minister, was one of this
city’s great visionaries. Already in his 40s
when he relocated to Portland from
Birmingham, Ala., he worked first as a
hospital chaplain at Good Samaritan Medical
Center, where he was alarmed by the
practice of releasing elderly patients to the
street without follow-up. He pulled together
a loose federation of local churches that
pledged to support his work and, in 1969,
started Pilot Project to address the needs of
the poor, the elderly and the homeless. In
addition to befriending and championing
these people, he started the first Meals on
Wheels program in Oregon.
In 1985, Susan moved from her relatively
lavish office at the stately old church on the
Park Blocks to a crude work space in the
(now demolished) Hamilton block, facing the
historic Lownsdale Square (where Occupy
set up camp in the fall of 2011).
Paulson’s original idea, which accounts for
the name of the agency, was to pilot in areas
of unmet need. Traditionally, Northwest
Pilot Project identifies a need and pilots a
program to address it. Often it test drives
and tweaks it until the performance is up to
its expectations, then locates an agency in
whom they have the confidence to run it *
with the same efficiency - and heart.
Thus, when Susan started work, NWPP
was still doing money management, a
challenging social service meant to ensure
that vulnerable clients, at risk carrying their
own funds, still have enough to last them
the month. When another agency emerged
dedicated to this task, NWPP turned this
function over to it
“For the first year, I was Peter’s associate
director,” Susan explains. Thè agency sent
her to a grant-writing workshop. “And it
turned out having an undergraduate degree
in English gave me transferable skills!” Her
ability to write successful grants gave NWPP
a wider reach.
But the event that left the biggest
impression on her in those early years was
the relocation of the Governor Hotel (now
the Sentinel). Because, like Paulson, she has
a special regard for the elderly, for their
particular wisdom and irreplaceable stories
Paulson had entered the field of
relocation in the ’70s, again, because no one
else was doing it. With a crew of volunteers
- many of them students and Catholic nuns
- he relocated elderly tenants from half a
dozen hotels and, at the request of the
police, sometimes even from cardboard
boxes. Most of the hotels, such as the
Freeway, the Laurel and the Hatchie Rooms,
were demolished. But there were a few
wins: the Haviland, from which volunteers
effected a big relocation when it closed in
1980, was purchased and remodeled by the
Schnitzer family and reopened at the end of
1982 as the Park Tower. These 162 units of
Section 8 federally subsidized housing
represent a precious resource to this day, in
the climate of dwindling low-income housing.
As Susan explains it, the Governor Hotel
was sold to an out-of-state developer in 1986.
“It was my first experience with a
relocation,” she recalls, pain audible in her
voice. “In October, we found 110 very low-
income residents - most of them seniors -
living at the Governor, paying $125 per
month for a small studio apartment. Some of
them had lived there for over 20 years. We
had 30 days to move them.”
As usual, Susan does not dwell on the
negative, but many of us were scandalized by
the eagerness of developers who would rush
to get the old people out of the building,
even though it would be four years before
they found the money for the remodel. It is
just this kind of property-over-people
mentality that can make the work of
relocation so
wrenching.
MORE OMLINE
Three years
Read Susan
ago, when Susan
E m m ons'2013 Oliver
delivered the
annual Oliver
Lecture in its entirety
Lecture to a
at news.streetroots.
large crowd at
org/olivertecture
the First
Congregational
Church, she told this story about that
relocation:
“Estelle was 82 years old and had lived in
the building for 23 years. She had coffee
every morning at the Ritz Sisters in the
Galleria - at that time a vibrant shopping
center across the street. She used the
downtown library, shopped at the Safeway; it
was her neighborhood. When we found her
an apartment in Northwest Portland, she
said: ‘What am I going to do in Northwest
Portland?’ She refused to move. On the last
day, she was carried out by the police and
Page 9
died in a nursing hom e....
“There were others at the Governor we
moved multiple times as buildings kept
closing and being converted to another use.
Mr. Christiansen had been a school
custodian. We moved him from the
Governor to the Hamilton Hotel. When that
building closed to make way for the new
federal courthouse, we moved him to the
Ben Stark. When that building was
converted to the trendy Ace Hotel, we
finally were able to move him to a subsidized
building. He was 84 years old. He asked us
if we thought he would have to move again.
We told him the building had a 60-year
affordability requirement. His response:
‘That should last me.’”
Within two years after Susan began at the
agency, Peter Paulson retired, and the board
named her director, a post she has held for
29 years, building a staff of 17 people. She
hired Cindy Mosney in 1988 to do
emergency services, but by the following
year, she realized that, as brilliant as Peter
and the agency had been responding to
emergencies, what was really needed was an
effort in the direction of greater stability. So
in 1989, she put out a call to hire the
agency’s first housing specialist, and Bobby
Weinstock was hired to focus on permanent
solutions. As with so many who have had the
privilege of working with Susan, they were
both longtime staff members: Cindy just
retired last year, after 27 years, and Bobby is
still there, with no intention of leaving.
If the relocation of the Governor is what
most stands out in Susan’s mind, it was her
attempt to save the housing in the old
Hamilton block that made her known
throughout the city.
In 1992, it was proposed that the
Hamilton block would be a perfect place for
a new federal courthouse, and Susan waged
a long and highly visible campaign to get the
city to promise that the low-income rental
units demolished on that site would be
replaced downtown. Because it was the
Lownsdale Community, the issue was
especially loaded.
Back in the ’70s, Portland looked very
different. In 1974, there were nearly 6,000
units of rental housing downtown affordable
to people on a low income, and a community
of 600 people lived in the vicinity of
Lownsdale Square. A booklet published by
PSU’s Urban Studies Center in 1971, offers
this description:
“Lownsdale Square ... is quietly busy even
in relatively inclement weather. Older men
play rummy on worn-smooth park tables
next to the towering war monument, or
checkers on a small wager to keep it
interesting. Still others converse with an
acquaintance or snooze or read a paper in a
warm summer sun.”
With the 1993 demolition of the
Lownsdale and Hamilton hotels, the last of
thè Lownsdale Community was
extinguished.
And although Susan had extracted that
promise from the city to replace the
housing, it would be seven years before all
194 new rental units were available.
When the first of those buildings came
online, with 92 affordable studios on
Southwest 13th Avenue, it gave Susan great
pleasure to name it the Peter Paulson.
At the time of Paulson’s death 11 years
See EMMONS, page 13