“A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” Portland Realty Board Code of Ethics, 1919, not repealed until 1953

Vanport

Regional Equity Strategy

Purpose is to operationalize Equity as one of Six Desired Outcomes for the region

Six Desired Outcomes

• Vibrant Communities

• Economic Prosperity

• Safe & Reliable Transportation

• Leadership on Climate Change

• Clean Air & Water

• Equity

Equity Inventory Report

Findings •Lack of strategic

guidance supporting internal efforts

•Duplication of effort

• Inconsistency of approach

•Lack of capacity to advance equity as a regional outcome

Step 1 Goals • Establish an evidence-based decision making process

that ensures meaningful engagement from communities most impacted by disproportionate burdens.

• Co-create internal and external capacity to understand Metro’s role in advancing equity across the region’s desired outcomes.

• Identify the institutional systems that stand in the way of equitable outcomes, as well as the institutional systems that provide opportunities to support equitable outcomes, including the tools needed to implement equitable practices throughout the agency.

• Define and implement Metro’s agency-specific equity strategy that is actionable and measurable.

Timeline

oregonmetro.gov/equity

Regional Travel Options 2011-2013 Program Eval. • $4.4 million biannual program

– ($2.1 million in grants)

• Needed a range of performance measures that were both flexible and deep

• Worked with SDG to create a new framework for measuring program outcomes and outputs

– Multiple Account Evaluation

Multiple Account Evaluation

Equity and health account

Equity and Health

Reduction in average household combined cost of housing and transportation

Convert non-SOV trips into household transportation cost savings; in cases where the cost savings benefits are localized and housing costs are known, household cost savings could be converted into combined cost of housing and transportation.

Improved reliability for environmental justice populations

Evaluate reliability improvements for trips to work or recreational destinations for environmental justice populations – including low income and minority populations. Measured by assessing the consistency in travel times in these populations, or through qualitative surveying.

Health improvement opportunities

Active transportation as a proxy for improved health. On a regional level, mode split may be used. For program level evaluation qualitative is more appropriate.

Indicator and units Indicator description

bikeportland.org/tag/n-williams-avenue oregonmetro.gov/equity oregonmetro.gov/travel-options-research oregonmetro.gov/es/tools-living/getting-around communitycyclingcenter.org/index.php/community/new-columbia/ vimeo.com/51456405

For more information: Dan Kaempff daniel.kaempff@oregonmetro.gov 503.813.7559

1 I want to start by telling you a story. This is a story about my home, Portland. How many of you have visited Portland? I think I’m pretty lucky to have born, raised and spent most of my adult life in the Rose City. It’s been fun to see it transform from a rather sleepy place back in the 60s and 70s into the vibrant, thriving metropolis it is today.

2 The Portland of my youth looked like this. This is Harbor Drive, part of US Route 99 through downtown, sitting right on the west bank of the Willamette River. This picture is from the early 1960s. You can see that Interstate 5 is under construction on the east bank.

3 This is a parking lot, one of many. Portland, like most US cities in the 1950s, was busily tearing down its older buildings to create more space for cars. This parking lot, though, was kind of special, because…

4 To create this parking lot, we tore down this, the Portland Hotel. A magnificent structure that was less than 50 years old when it was demolished. This was pretty typical behavior in American cities in the post-war era, when the car was rapidly reforming the landscape and people were fleeing cities for the utopian promise of suburban living.

5 Fortunately, we put a stop to the insanity. Or, at least put the brakes on it. The 1980s began a transformation of the city into what it has become today. There’s no one person responsible for this transformation, but a good example of the leadership we had back in that day is Mayor Bud Clark. Portlanders chose a bike-riding tavern owner to lead their city, over a conservative business-oriented establishment candidate. You may not be familiar with Mayor Clark, but you probably do know him from this poster. Note his tie clip – a light rail train.

6 And, Bud still rides his bike at age 82. This picture was taken last Friday.

7 So over time, the freeway along the river became this amazing park

8 And the parking lot on the sight of the former grand hotel became Portland's living room, Pioneer Courthouse Square.

9 Portland became a city that said, it’s OK to ride your bike, and use light rail. In fact, we want you to.

10 …or the streetcar

11 …or the aerial tram

12 Portland has always attracted or created its share of hard-working, talented, creative, and slightly off-beat people, and that trend continues to this day. It is not the city where “Young people come to retire” as Fred and Carrie like to joke.

13 It’s a place where people became millionaires, just by selling bacon encrusted maple bars.

14 Or a really, REALLY good cup of coffee.

15 Portlanders place a high value on our city being a unique place in the world, and, almost to a fault, we cultivate that image for all it’s worth.

16 So in addition to great restaurants, we have an equally amazing collection of food carts.

17 We’re home to over 50 microbreweries. You can try a new one practically every week of the year!

18 And, we’re the best large city in America for bicycling (although we’ve been resting on our laurels…) We love our bikes. We close down two interstate freeways one day a year to ride across our bridges

19 We hold rides for red-headed people…

20 We race our bikes in the mud

21 We celebrate those who ride to work in the rain

22 And more…

23 In fact, in an act of harmonic convergence, we have food carts that sell microbrews, using tap handles made from bicycle components!

24 This is Portland's version of a football team, one that actually plays the game with their feet. We cheer like mad for our soccer team, win or lose

25 And same goes for our basketball team

26 We even love the 9 months of rainy weather we get each year! There’s no bad weather in Portland; just leaky jackets.

27 It’s a pretty good life we have in my hometown, and I think most Portlanders feel pretty lucky to live where we do.

28 But what I really want to talk about with you today is the portion of the Rose City’s history that most people never hear about, never see for themselves, and are usually shocked when they do.

29 What I’m talking about specifically is how for decades, minorities were denied access to housing in most of Portland's neighborhoods. And the neighborhoods where they were permitted to buy homes, were neglected, overrun with freeways and other development the residents never wanted and suffered as a result of, and ultimately gentrified.

30 As late as 1953, it was considered ethical for Realtors to not sell homes in certain neighborhoods to people based on their race. In fact, up until the 1920s, Oregon’s constitution prohibited African-Americans from even living in the state. By 1940, there were only about 1,800 African-Americans in Oregon.

31 World War II changed all of that. Like the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland was home to several Kaiser shipyards, constructing the ships needed for the war effort. The need for workers resulted in a rapid influx of new residents, which quickly overwhelmed Portland's available housing stock. The answer was Vanport, Oregon. This city sprung up overnight on the lowlands along the Columbia River between North Portland and Vancouver, WA, hence the name. During the war’s peak period, Vanport was home to over 40,000 workers, about 40 percent of them African-American. It was the second largest city in Oregon.

32 After the war ended, Vanport’s population quickly dropped to less than half of what it had been. Yet, the city remained viable. Vanport College was created to educate returning soldiers under the GI Bill, and in time, became Portland State University, the largest university in Oregon. In essence, the continued existence of Vanport after the war had everything to do with the City of Portland not wanting its residents, and it was one of the few places around Portland where African-Americans had not been “redlined”.

33 If you’re not familiar with the term, Redlining basically meant designating certain parts of a city to be off-limits to people based on their race, or other factors. So the red areas on this map are the neighborhoods where African-Americans were permitted to live and own homes. If you were African-American, you could not get a loan to purchase a home outside these redlined areas. Note Vanport location. This is a 1938 map, so just prior to the creation of Vanport.

34 Vanport came to an end on Memorial Day, 1948 when a dike burst and floodwaters engulfed the city. It was a total loss, and instantly 18,500 people were homeless. 5,000 of them were African-American.

35 Portland was forced to deal with the issue of where to house these people who had lost everything and had nowhere to go. Just like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, temporary trailers were put into service.

36 Obviously, a more permanent solution was needed. So most of the African-American residents of Vanport were forced into housing located in the Albina neighborhood, indicated here.

37 However, the city couldn’t leave this neighborhood alone. The construction of Memorial Coliseum in 1960 came at the expense of 476 houses, along with a historic church and scores of African-American owned businesses.

38 When Interstate 5 was built through Portland in 1964, it plowed right through Albina, displacing yet another 300 households, and exposing the remaining residents to a major increase in air pollution.

39 And this thriving corner at the intersection of N Williams Avenue and Russell Street was demolished in the early 70s to make way for an expansion of a hospital. 19 acres, and 1,000 homes were lost. However, the expansion didn’t occur for 40 years.

40 At one point, Williams Ave. was full of booming jazz clubs and home to a thriving black middle class. But growing up, this was my impression of it. Desolate, uninviting, crime-ridden. I only traveled it with my parents a handful of times, because, really, there was no reason anyone needed to go there in the 70s and 80s, unless it was where you lived.

41 That all began to change in the 1990s. As people began discovering the Portland renaissance that I described earlier, they began flocking to the city, eager to be a part of it. The Portland region’s population increased by 27% in the ‘90s, and by 15% in the 2000s, even considering the Great Recession’s impacts. The desolate, neglected neighborhoods of N. Williams Ave. quickly changed from being forgotten and ignored, to one of Portland's hottest real estate markets. The former vacant lots soon became new housing developments, coffee shops and restaurants. And of course, bike lanes were installed on N. Williams.

42 In less than 20 years, the demographics of N. Williams were turned upside down. The African American population went from 70% down to 27% in less than a generation. Property values soared, raising the cost of buying or renting a home. The result was that many long time residents were priced out of their homes, and were forced to move, yet again. This time to East Portland, another part of the city that is struggling with the impacts of years of neglect. It was Gentrification 101 in action.

43 As more people moved into N. Williams, bicycle traffic exploded. In 10 years, daily bike trips went from 500 to 3,100. Competition for space between autos and transit was becoming a real problem.

44 So, the City of Portland set about to address this problem in a fairly standard manner – conducting a project intended to improve operations and safety along a busy, multi-modal corridor. Same thing they had already been doing successfully in other parts of the city.

45 What happened next was a turning point for the City of Portland, and by extension, the entire region. What made this project different from all the others, was that the remaining African-American residents said, “Enough. Over the decades, we have watched you, the City, demolish and destroy our neighborhood – the neighborhood you forced us into. And, now that most of us have been forced to leave and our neighborhood looks very different than it did even 10 years ago, NOW you want to “improve” it!?!?! Why didn’t you want to improve it earlier? Why wasn’t having safe streets a priority in the 60s, 70s, or 80s?”

46 To be fair to the City of Portland, their staff and contractors working on this project include many wonderful, completely well-intentioned people that I truly respect. But they never saw this coming. Decades of the bottled-up collective hurt and anger that come from being treated as a second-class citizen had finally exploded. All over a bike lane.

47 I am happy to report that the City quickly grasped the enormity of the

situation, and hit the reset button on their process. They added more community voices to their decision-making committees, and realized that the past was as important as the present and the future.

48 The final project agreed to by the committee and PBOT wasn’t so radically different from what had been proposed all along. What was different was that the African-American community finally felt like they had had a voice in the process, and that their experience had been recognized and honored.

49 Portland is by no means the only metropolitan area that is dealing with the issues such as these. And, we’ve admittedly been slow to respond to these issues. The benefits of our transportation investments in particular, have not been distributed as equitably as they should be. The N. Williams story is a prime example of how we’re beginning to correct the errors of the past. But I wanted to share some other examples of the region is doing a better job of serving ALL of its citizenry.

50 N. Williams showed us that while we may have our hearts in the right place regarding equity, there is a significant knowledge gap in our collective understanding of how to address it in our decision-making processes, AND we don’t fully possess the capacity and tools needed to put understanding into action. So in 2011, Metro began an effort to improve upon this shortcoming, and to take the step of Operationalizing Equity in our decisions, not just saying that it’s important.

51 Equity is one of the Region’s Six Desired Outcomes that direct everything we do. Quick list of six desired outcomes

52 You can’t solve a problem if you don’t really understand what the problem is. So we began the process by developing an inventory report, to define how Metro was currently intentionally incorporating equity considerations into agency activities. Summarizing the areas for improvement (read slide)

53 Out of that report, these four goals were established: • Creating a way to make decisions that ensures everyone is involved • Create the capacity – both in the agency as well as with our external

partners – to better understand our role in advancing equity • Identifying those systems that both help and hinder efforts to support

equity • Define AND implement the agency’s equity strategy in a manner we can

take action upon and measure outcomes

54 We are currently at the start of Phase 2 in this timeline. The work plan has been created and work is beginning on establishing an equity baseline. I’m not going to go further into this topic, because I want to touch on a few other items before I wrap up, but there is much more information on our website.

55 Now, I want to take a quick look at how we are improving our efforts to incorporate equity into the region’s TDM program. Every two years, we conduct an independent evaluation of our efforts to ensure policy makers that their investment of funding is paying off. About half of the program’s budget is dedicated to grants to external partners to fund local or regional projects and programs. There’s a broad range of project types that we fund, and the ongoing challenge has been capturing data and measuring the outcomes. We have typically wanted grantees to measure changes in mode split or reductions in vehicle miles traveled. But that’s not always possible to do, particularly on a grant budget of less than $100,000, which many of our grants are. So we worked with Steer Davies Gleave on our most recent evaluation and explained this challenge to them. Their response was to create a new evaluation framework that provides us with a much greater array of metrics.

56 Multiple Account Evaluation is a methodology that establishes “accounts” based on high level goals and objectives, and then assigns relevant indicators that can be measured to determine whether or not the goals are being addressed in a meaningful way. Equity has always been a part of our grantmaking policy, but it’s not been easy to really measure or define what successful projects look like.

57 So this is what the Equity and Health account currently looks like. One of the nice things about this framework is its flexibility. As we continue work on the Regional Equity Strategy and develop more specific metrics, we can incorporate those into our Multiple Account Evaluation framework. So we can continue to improve our specific program’s equity outcomes, as well as improve outcomes at a regional level.

58 Finally, we continue to learn and develop new partnerships through grant projects. I know I’m running out of time, so I want to just touch on a couple of projects that have helped us to better understand how to engage with people from all walks of life. Back in 2011, thanks in part to a Kaiser Foundation grant, we began an outreach program in Washington County called Vámonos! This was a Spanish-language only program, aimed at encouraging members of the significant Hispanic community living in that part of the region to take part in active transportation. We found quickly that the typical outreach methods would not be successful with a Hispanic audience. There were entirely different ways they get information, and more importantly, the sources of that information were long-trusted leaders in their community. So a squadron of well-meaning government workers from Portland was not going to be people that would be listened to. So we began visiting community organizations, and asked questions. And listened. We got the community involved in designing programs and materials. We asked them what they wanted, and what their needs and concerns were. Over time, trust was established and partnerships were formed. And from that, methods of conducting outreach that would be effective were established. What we achieved with this project was relatively modest in terms of quantifiable outcomes. We didn’t dramatically reduce congestion, or start a bicycling revolution. What we did accomplish, though, was to demonstrate to the community involved – a community that has generally been overlooked and undervalued – that THEY were important. And that their government was doing something for them. Their government cared about them.

59 And finally, Metro has awarded a series of grants to the Community Cycling Center, a non-profit organization whose mission it is to bring bicycling to underserved and low-income communities. Starting in 2009, the Center began partnering with the New Columbia community in North Portland. New Columbia is a mixed-income community which is the largest neighborhood revitalization project ever undertaken in Oregon. It is home to more than 2,500 adults and children, with 11 languages spoken among families representing 22 countries. The project brought together residents, community leaders, government officials and representatives from local organizations to learn how they all could work together to improve access to bicycling and its benefits within low income communities.

60 From those discussions, much has happened. A new bicycle repair hub has opened and now trains kids how to maintain and repair their bikes. A new bike skills track has been built, which gives kids a fun way to learn how to handle their bikes. And, the community has formed a committee called “We All Can Ride” which leads a series of organized rides that teach how to ride safely on the street, and are fun!

61 So that’s just a brief look on equity in the Portland region. I’m happy to take any questions you might have, and you can find more details on much of what I’ve spoken about at these weblinks. Thank you for your time.