Portland’s CORE problem
The Portland Business Alliance, city leaders and homeless
advocates have agreed to clean up downtown together. Will their
innovative solution work?
By Oakley Brooks
Photo by Stuart Mullenberg
At least once a day, Jordan Walden, the manager of
Finnegan’s toy store in downtown Portland, calls in the
Portland Business Alliance security force. The officers’
charge is to drive off, again, the pack of rough-edged,
restless teenagers gathered outside Finnegan’s front
door. “Sometimes they’re hanging out, sometimes
they’re spare-changing, sometimes they’re
fighting,” Walden says of the youngsters, who spill over
from the Central Library on the other side of 10th Street.
They’re a drag on Walden’s attempt to keep the
place warm and fuzzy and attract families looking for a toy
fire truck or a stuffed animal. In fact, Walden ranks the
panhandling vagrants outside her door as the biggest issue
facing Finnegan’s, more than those lifestyle malls
springing up in the suburbs or the road construction wave
sweeping downtown Portland. “It’s intimidating for
people to come to our store,” says Walden.
Walden’s perception of what’s eating away at
downtown business puts her squarely among the majority of
Portland’s owners and managers. Last year, for the fifth
year in a row, they ranked panhandling as the top concern in a
Portland Business Alliance (PBA) survey. The homeless people
and other vagrants crowding the city sidewalks were on the tip
of everybody’s tongue when Mike Kuykendall, the
PBA’s vice president for downtown services, began making
the rounds to meet local business leaders in mid-2004, soon
after he was hired. “I could see that the number of
people sitting on the sidewalks had just grown
exponentially,” says Kuykendall, a former prosecutor in
the Multnomah County district attorney’s office who had
just returned from a legal think tank in Washington, D.C.
So early last year, Kuykendall renewed the PBA’s
push to clean up downtown’s sidewalks. The resulting
plan, to be debated beginning this week by the Portland City
Council, is a feat of compromise between Kuykendall and
homeless and civil right advocates, the PBA’s traditional
adversaries on public nuisance issues. As part of the
multi-pronged plan, police would be allowed to issue a $250
fine and a court citation to anyone repeatedly sitting or lying
on the sidewalk in highly trafficked areas between 7 a.m. and 9
p.m.
The tradeoff for homeless advocates is that the city and the
PBA would invest in a day shelter for street people that would
provide health care, job support and other services. The city
also would install more bathrooms to reduce the chronic fouling
of dark corners downtown, and it would put in benches carefully
constructed to give people places to sit, but not for too long.
A citizens’ board would oversee all of these new
measures.
Passage by the city council, which has voiced support for the
compromise, would allow the city to throw out an older
“sit/lie” law, as the ordinance is often called,
that had been a source of bitterness in the city. An earlier
sidewalk nuisance law had drawn the ire of civil libertarians
after it was used to arrest Iraq war protesters. Then a 2004
update of the law backed by the PBA angered homeless advocates
because they weren’t consulted; meanwhile, police rarely
used it because it had too many conditions.
After five months of haggling in a work group convened by
Mayor Tom Potter, the new plan holds some historic consensus.
“It’s remarkable,” says Kuykendall, noting
that the American Civil Liberties Union and the Oregon Law
Center, among others, have given their backing to the proposal.
“There’s a who’s who of homeless advocates
and public defenders in this group and they’re unanimous
in support.”
The plan promises to change the tone of downtown by breaking
up some of the spare-change encampments along sidewalks and
offering up new opportunities for street people to get healthy
and employed. But it’s unclear how deep or lasting its
impact on downtown business will be. It does not address
aggressive panhandling. There’s also the question of how
deeply vagrants on the sidewalk affect Portland’s retail
climate — indeed any downtown retail climate. Despite all
the complaints, 2006 has been a banner year for new investment
in Portland’s retail scene.
Meanwhile, public defenders and homeless advocates involved
with the plan are hedging their support for it on the viability
of new homeless services. Some advocates say they will alter
their position if the proposal turns into a simple method to
sweep people off the street.
“I would say the jury is still out,” says Genny
Nelson, co-founder of homeless center Sisters of the Road and a
key member of the mayor’s work group.
WHEN POTTER TOOK OVER IN 2005, he and the city council tried a
different approach to cleaning up downtown by offering
addiction treatment, housing and job support for chronic
offenders. The PBA has kicked in money for that program.
(Business owners also fund extra police and security guards and
hire formerly homeless people to clean city sidewalks.) Police
also cleaned out downtown’s South Park blocks of its
usual band of street kids, which had colonized one end of the
park for drug dealing and trick biking.
But early this year, Kuykendall told Potter he still wanted a
new, more effective sit/lie law; the existing one was ready to
sunset in June. Initially he got a chilly response from
Potter’s office. Potter’s deputy chief of staff,
Austin Raglione, and Genny Nelson say that homeless advocates
were still smarting from the new law passed under former Mayor
Vera Katz. But in May, Potter agreed to extend the existing law
to the end of the year and gathered a panel to at least study a
new one.
Kuykendall and Nelson, both named to Potter’s panel, had
a private sit-down before the group’s first meeting.
Nelson explained that the reason there were so many people
roaming downtown Portland during the day was that they had no
place to go. Homeless shelters kicked people out first thing in
the morning and many had no option but to sit on the streets.
More services and a place for homeless people to go during
daylight hours would be a big step toward solving some of the
problems downtown.
By the end of their talk, Nelson and Kuykendall had reached a
verbal agreement that Nelson would be open to a new sit/lie
ordinance provided Kuykendall attached new homeless
services. It changed the complexion of the upcoming
meetings. “I have been doing this for a long time and the
business community had never come to the table supporting [new
homeless services],” Nelson says.
It wasn’t until September, however, after a long summer
of talks in the work group, that a plan came together. With the
full group still in disagreement, a mediator urged Nelson,
Kuykendall, Oregon Law Center attorney Monica Goracke and
members of the city’s police force and the city
attorney’s office to break off and take a stab at some
concrete details. Goracke, who represents homeless and other
indigent people, says she would have preferred that there be no
new sit/lie law.
But she had listened to Kuykendall voice concerns about
transients blocking access to businesses and had looked at
Seattle’s
sit/lie law, which had the support of its business community,
and found it reasonable. It was limited in time of day and in
the area in which it was applied. “It wasn’t so
bad. I thought my clients could live with it,” she
says.
That became a starting point. The group set the boundaries as
the downtown core and the Lloyd District. Homeless advocates
also negotiated with police reps to have street officers
specially trained in dealing with transients — serving as
resources as well as law enforcement personnel. And they argued
that any new homeless services, to which Kuykendall had agreed
to commit PBA funding, should function as part of the long-term
goals of ending homelessness set out by Portland City
Commissioner Eric Sten in 2004. In other words, the services
shouldn’t be ineffective band-aids.
This last issue rose to the fore in late October when
Potter’s public safety chief, Maria Rubio, presented the
full panel with a draft of the new plan. As part of the plan,
Rubio announced that the city would contract with the Portland
Rescue Mission on West Burnside Avenue for daytime homeless
services.
That decision had been arrived at thanks to behind-the-scenes
research and negotiating by Kuykendall and a downtown cop named
Jeff Myers, who got the rescue mission to sign on and the city
council to verbally agree to the contract. But Nelson says the
deal was acted on without a wide call for bids and that the
rushed effort hinted that the city wanted to dump people in the
rescue mission as soon as the new law went into effect.
In late October, she told the work group as much. “I
said, ‘I’m concerned. We will not support an
officer saying to someone that they can’t stay in
downtown and they have to go to the rescue
mission.’” Kuykendall told Nelson that wasn’t
his intention; the issue was that a formal request for
proposals would take too long.
Nelson finally agreed to both a short-term contract with the
rescue mission and to putting out a request to other agencies
for a long-term contract. (The city also is searching for
alternatives to the rescue mission.) But after several months
of friendly negotiation with Kuykendall, some political lines
have been redrawn. “If this plan doesn’t include
meaningful services, we won’t lend our support to it.
We’ll pull out,”Nelson says.
WILL THE NEW PLAN ACTUALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE for downtown
businesses? It does not address aggressive panhandling,
an option which Kuykendall says was discussed only
peripherally. Some cities around the country have implemented
ordinances that specifically target aggressive panhandling, but
Kuykendall says a similar law was out of the question here
because it would be tough to get past the city council and
almost definitely wouldn’t pass muster with the
constitutionally liberal Oregon Supreme Court: Basic
panhandling is a constitutional right protected by free
speech.
A better method to decrease aggressive panhandling, Kuykendall
says, is a massive education effort discouraging downtown
workers and shoppers from giving change to street people. He
plans to start that effort once the homeless day shelter is up
and running.
“Giving money to people downtown is probably the worst
thing you could do for them,” he says. “It gives
them money for drugs and alcohol and draws people to business
areas to panhandle.”
As concerned as business owners are with panhandling,
there’s also a contradictory phenomenon going on
downtown: It’s resurging. The city’s epicenter,
Pioneer Square, may look like a collection point for most of
the hardcore punks, Goths and junkies between Medford and
Seattle, but at the northeast corner of the square, workers
beaver away on the $137 million makeover of the former Meier
& Frank building into a new Macy’s and five-star
hotel.
On the other side of the square, Nordstrom has committed to a
complete remodel of its store. Abercrombie & Fitch is busy
revamping its outlet across the street and Lucky Jeans will
soon be filling in an empty storefront on the opposite corner.
One half-block away, Seattle’s Jeri Rice is hawking
$1,700 dresses in a new storefront. And it’s all but
certain that a big national retailer will lease 11,000 square
feet in the Galleria mall by the end of November, according to
brokers.
Across the downtown area, pedestrian counts were up 2% this
past spring over 2005. Meanwhile, crime in the downtown core
has dropped 12% in 2006.
Speaking of downtown, Scott Andrews, chairman emeritus of the
PBA and president of Melvin Mark Properties, says, “I
haven’t been this optimistic in a long time.”
Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis is reporting its downtown retail
vacancy rate at 5.78% for the third quarter of 2006, healthier
than the rate at the same point last year. And while the
headcount for downtown workers is still 4,000 below
pre-recession levels, there’s near-unanimous consensus
among brokers that demand exists for a new Class A office tower
downtown, which will mean more bodies in the area for
retailers.
THE UPWARD TRENDs mean that the issue of panhandlers clogging
the streets may not be as desperate as it seems. Restaurateur
Lisa Schroeder, who is the vice chair of the downtown retail
council, recalls a lot of complaints about the street scene in
her retail council meetings but very little proactiveness in
solving the problems of increasing vagrants and street
kids.
“We struggle to get people to attend
meetings,” she says. “We ask people for input and
it’s not really given. There are just not many ideas
offered up.”
And, with pedestrian traffic healthy, national retailers also
have little incentive to worry about street-level problems.
“They’re just counting pedestrians on the
corner,” says Ruth Scott, the former CEO of one of the
PBA’s predecessors, the Association for Portland
Progress.“They’re not worried about whether people
are polite.”
Kuykendall says the city and the PBA have a duty to keep
downtown looking sharp to attract future retailers, but he
admits, “I haven’t had anyone say I’m not
coming here because of the homeless problem.”
It could be that they don’t care, but it’s more
likely a sign of acceptance. In any downtown, including
Portland, some edginess is a part of business.
That philosophy underlies the city’s new $1.3 million
downtown marketing initiative. Directed by ad agency
North’s John Czarobski and marketing consultant
Chris Finks, the initiative’s centerpiece is a series of
YouTube-inspired TV spots that extol the virtues of independent
retailers. Asked if the grainy, rock-n-roll infused ads appeal
to the person who wouldn’t mind stepping around a few
panhandlers, Finks and Czarobski said yes, they were after the
“urban tribe.” As for those who don’t care
for that kind of atmosphere, “You could spend $4 million
to convince them that downtown is safe,” Czarobski says,
“And you still wouldn’t get them.”
One of the TV spots? It shows a bunch of kids gleefully
playing toy instruments — at Finnegan’s. Even if
the store is in a cold war with rowdy teens, the bet is that
people still will make a holiday trek to the
neighborhood, warts and all.
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