Portland 2.0 Update: Have we lost our way?

This is a personal commentary based in part on the Portland 2.0 project in January, 2019. That was a one-off event to look at governance of the region past, present and future. Much has changed in the three short years since that event, leaving many to say Portland is now the city that doesn’t work.

This commentary is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of sponsors or of my co-host Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson. (Disclosure: I am a supporter of Commissioner Vega Pederson’s campaign for Chair of Multnomah County but she was not consulted in the preparation of this commentary.)

… David Yaden

Don’t read this if you think Portland today is a vibrant, thriving, healthy city and you are confident of our ability to solve problems and get things done. On the other hand, if you think our job is bigger than “solving” the homeless crisis, read on.

This paper is not about nostalgia for Portland’s past “urban success.” At the outset, let’s be clear: Portland’s “urban success” has not been equally shared. People of color, especially, have been excluded and too often subjected to the predations of urban renewal and discrimination in housing, education, employment. That is changing but not fast enough.

And, let’s be clear about this: the future belongs to a younger generation that is finding its own way. Nonetheless, while the times have changed, there are a few lessons from our history worth pondering. Whether they are timeless or just out-of-date, they are offered in the spirt of Abraham Lincoln’s timeless counsel:

If we could but first know where we are, and whither we are trending, we could better judge what to do.

The Portland 2.0 project was about governance—a deep dive into the region’s civic infrastructure—our human capital, the soft corollary of the physical stuff we need to make a city work. It encompasses formal and informal roles and relationships of public, private and civic organizations, participation of people in all of them, and especially, how they work together. It is about people, structure, processes and institutions. About leaders and citizens. It is about attitudes and values. About managing conflict and finding common ground, about competition and cooperation. It is about having a shared sense that we can control our fate even as we fight over it while agreeing not to treat every victory or defeat as existential.

In short, it is about how we get things done.

In the 1960s, Portland was on a trajectory much like other urban areas: families with kids moving to the suburbs, downtown emptying out after work, freeways threatening to slice up neighborhoods, sprawl threatening to make us look like Los Angeles.

Then something noteworthy happened as a younger generation of energized citizens and leaders at the local, regional, State and Federal levels managed to come together around a shared sense that we were headed in the wrong direction. In a way, they managed to create an inflection point that led to a burst of civic creativity and action over the following decades that gave the region a reputation for innovation, civic vitality and urban success.

We’ll call that period the beginning of Portland 1.0, acknowledging that there is a rich history preceding it stretching back to the first indigenous inhabitants from whom this land was taken..

Recognizing, then, that the Portland 1.0 as related here is but one version, there are some important take-aways.

Beginning in the late 1960s, citizens and leaders managed to knit together a variety of citizen hopes and grievances into a larger, positive sense of direction. According to one citizen activist of the time:

A major effort in those years was the formation of STOP (Sensible Transportation Options for People)…. And I realize that it wasn’t just about stopping the Mt. Hood Freeway; it was trying to organize support for a different way in Portland.

Organizing for a “different way” is a pretty good synopsis of the Portland 1.0 story.

Like all historical narratives, it is a distortion to portray that era as uniquely free from conflict over policies or uniquely clear-headed and unified around a “vision.” Nonetheless there are some important lessons, explored at the Portland 2.0 event in 2019.

In 2019 it felt as if we were treading water but certainly not floundering or drowning.

Today, three short years later, it seems we are gasping for air. Worse, we are shoving and kicking each other, trying keep “our” group afloat. At the Portland 2.0 conference, older and newer generations of civic leaders shared perspectives about about how to enhance, improve our civic infrastructure. Today, it looks like more of a repair or rebuild job.

Surveys confirm that Oregonians are in a very pessimistic mood, whether measured by trust in leadership and institutions, faith in our ability to solve problems, or concerns about the future.

Consider two of the core questions we posed to panelists at the Portland 2.0 event:

Can we find a way to celebrate and extend our livability successes without being held captive by them and without ignoring unintended consequences?

Do we care as much about the people who live here as the place we share, as much about our neighbors as our neighborhoods?

Today those come across as naive, out-of-touch.

Now, getting the garbage picked up constitutes a livability victory. Oregon ranks dead last for new construction keeping up with population growth. We are behind peer cities in recovering from the covid tsunami.

As for our neighbors, pick your headline. No room at the inn or in my neighborhood for the homeless. Vehicular hit-and-run. Shots fired, bodies found, gangs rampant, yes, in my neighborhood too. By most measures inequality grows and people of color get hit the hardest.

Even more recently, we are seeing a backlash in many “liberal” cities such as Portland as frustration mounts over what people see in the streets and read in the headlines.

There is no shortage of smart people with smart policy solutions. No shortage of advocates speaking truth to power. The result, however, is one big shouting match. Everyone trying to out-squeak the other squeaky wheels.

To reflect on how far off track we seem to be, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, later wrote about the “opportunity gap” in America between those equipped by education and family circumstance to thrive in today’s economy and society and those increasingly left behind. Asked about what might be done, he said, “our best hope is to look to places like Portland with its record of civic innovation.”

Seems nostalgic.

Many say the situation is urgent, that we can’t afford any more talk without action. However, urgency that results in more motion than action—more flailing than swimming, more backlash as frustration grows—tells us we should go upstream and look hard at why our civic capacity seems so inadequate to the moment we are in. Spoiler: it is about more than “leadership” or changing the form of government (although those would help).

If Portland 1.0 was about creating an inflection point to go a new self-defined direction, at the moment we seem to have stumbled into a new inflection point, uncertain of direction. This it’s not to say Portland I.0 was wonderful and we should return to it. The opposite. It was an energetic response to that moment. Today is very different but the question persists: are we up to organizing to go a new, different way that is both inclusive and effective?

You probably don’t want to read further if you are eager for ready-made, out-of-the-box, fast-acting solutions. Remember that this is a look at root causes, not just symptoms. So, the quick fix does not exist. More importantly, it is by working hard on critical understanding of our situation and its roots that solutions begin to reveal themselves. We need to start by getting statement of the problem right.

There are some suggestions at the end about where we should head. In particular, there are a number of civic organizations and foundations working with leadership training programs. Hopefully, they might use this, not necessarily as a guide, but as a goad to dig deep into the issues and lessons raised here. (Follow up posts will give more attention to what might be done.)

Civic assets: optimism and trust

Despite the deep divisions and unrest unleashed by the Vietnam War and civil rights movement, the 1960s and early 70s are generally considered a time of optimism, particularly among younger generations. That was magnified in the younger generation that asserted leadership in Portland.

In the words of historian Carl Abbott: “The new leaders… came of age during the optimistic years of the Great Boom of 1945-74, which instilled a sense of possibility rather than limits.”

One of those leaders, recently-deceased Tom Walsh, said: “We had opportunity barely touched by our idealism.”

Optimism and trust are foundational for at least three reasons: (1) they create a sense of building, not just “fixing” problems, (2), they help bridge divides and constrain conflict, and (3) they enlarge the sense of possibilities, the awareness of greater potential.

Trust and optimism are at the top of civic assets.

In contrast, does today’s pervasive sense of pessimism limit our horizons?

In a series of workshops with younger leaders following the Portland 2.0 event, it seemed that participants were coming together not around a shared sense of optimism so much as a shared sense of frustration, confusion, uncertainty.

So, how do we go about restoring or finding broadly shared trust and optimism? There are a few hints at the end of this paper without pretense of being an answer.(Remember, this is more diagnosis than prescription).

The intentional city: Fixing or building?

One of the most consistent themes about Portland 1.0 is the power of the vision thing. Call it a north star, a shared purpose, a definition of victory, or a sense of direction.

Gil Kelley, head of planning in Portland and then in San Francisco has observed:

San Francisco rarely contemplates what kind of city it wants to be when it grows up…. It’s too busy just making that future in the moment, development project by development project…. Intentionality, goes to the core differences in the ‘DNA’ of these two cities and my best hopes for Portland.

At the Portland 2.0 event, former head of the Urban League Michael Alexander said:

The greatest opportunity for the lenses that equity and inclusion brings is in how we build not how we retrofit, and I think that’s where we are so stuck on this continuum of do we want to try to find a way to repair versus…what are we building?

Like trust and optimism, this is about our attitudes, our values more than policies. To repeat the view from Portland 1.0: it’s about “organizing for a different way.”

As another key player from that era put it: “we decided we needed a paradigm shift.”

The refrain of getting our heads around building rather than fixing was prominent at Portland 2.0.

Rukaiyah Adams, founder of the Albina Vision Trust emphasized the need for building a “commonwealth” but one that is more inclusive than in the past:

there’s a really fundamental underlying question, is Portland 2.0 re-distributive or are we trying to build a kind of commonwealth that we haven’t shared in the past.

To emphasize, this is about more than overcoming our woeful history of exclusion and marginalization. If that comes—and it must—at the expense of creating a broadly shared sense of community, it will be a short lived victory.

“Everything is related to everything”

If Portland 1.0 emerged from a shared sense of purpose (shared not by everyone but by enough) and a lot of figuring it out as we went, there was a simple but powerful secret sauce: awareness that in a metropolitan region, everything is related to everything. The pieces were knit together, the dots connected, into an overall idea—vision if you will—of what Portland could be.

The idea that everything is related to everything is not a signal to throw up our hands and complain “so, we can’t solve anything if we can’t solve everything?” Rather it should be a reminder that chasing solutions to individual problems or issues or demands falls short of building community unless it is informed by and shaped by the idea of building, constructing rather than “fixing.”

A few years back, the Knight Foundation assembled several panels of leaders engaged in building Portland 1.0. Here are some important conclusions from their report as summarized by Ethan Seltzer, one of Portland’s premier urbanists:

The unifying notion here is that actions should be driven by ideas, not solutions. This is another way of saying that identifying overarching principles first enables solutions to emerge in a new and useful context, rather than to drive the process with interest-driven actions from the outset. For example, in Portland the 1972 Downtown Plan really mattered. However, it arose not as a way simply to physically remake downtown, but as part of a larger strategy to remake the city.

The vision was comprehensive and expansive, about the whole place and the city writ large. Everything is related to everything.

In addition, a good vision allows leaders to take unpopular actions. That is, people are unlikely to embrace meaningful change without first seeing whether it works. Leaders often have to take the risk of committing to changes before people can know whether the changes are likely to succeed. The vision is the baseline against which the reasons and intentions and commitments of leaders are measured, or at least it should be.

Carl Abbott, historian:

During 1973 1974, and 1975, [the mayor’s] team brought together a variety of ideas that were waiting for precise definition and articulated them as part of a single political package that offered benefits for a wide range of citizens and groups.

Alan Webber, part of Portland 1.0, now mayor of Santa Fe, NM:

the thing that really was a defining characteristic of that time was the ability to look for patterns. Not to think about the city as a series of one-off projects, but to think about pattern recognition, and unifying themes

Rick Gustafson, first elected head of Metro:

It’s easy to have disagreement, very hard-to-have agreement…. And then finally, the comprehensive approach…to make sure to understand [that issues] all relate to each other and that comprehensive approach has got to be preserved.

Simple lesson: to get big things done and have them last, it takes broad coalitions rooted in big visions.

A collection of programs does not a strategy make

Although hinted at in the above, it is worth repeating: good governance requires strategies that connect the dots of different issues around a shared sense of direction. Such strategies foster broad coalitions. The difference between a strategy and a collection of programs is that a real strategy has both a focus—a north star—and a coherence among its elements. It is grounded in a deep understanding of the situation, the moment in which we find ourselves.

Consider our homelessness situation. The strategy has been stated as “permanent supported housing,” Fine, but that is really a goal. It leaves out the critical question of what happens until that is achieved. The truth is that no leader has done the work of uniting us behind a realistic strategy so that we can see and appreciate steps taken along the way. Instead we seem to be bouncing from pillar too post arguing over each zig and zag.

We have an abundance of “action plans” for lots of different efforts. Most of them are nice spreadsheets with discrete actions and due dates. Few add up to strategies that can mobilize people toward the goals that matter. If you need to refer to your action plan to see how you are doing, you don’t have a strategy.

Because so much of what we report about Portland 1.0 points to building coalitions around a shared sense of purpose, about connecting the dots, we should remember that it also was a contested time: Young upstarts turning over the apple cart, ignoring their elders. Fighting the construction of more freeways. Giving neighborhoods more sway over decisions that affected them. Challenging policies that made it easy to grow the suburbs by sprawling outward.

At the risk of distorting history, there is an argument that these were constructive conflicts. They were about more than winning the battle. To repeat the words of an activist at the time: “it wasn’t just about stopping the Mt. Hood Freeway; it was trying to organize support for a different way in Portland.”

By 2004, however, two of the foremost students of civic engagement in Portland worried:

Critics point out the failure of Portland leadership to define and seize a rhetorical high ground that could help sort and order the hyper-pluralism of interest group skirmishing in a city that is now more than ever a mosaic of vulcanizing interest, lifestyles, income brackets and ethnic identities…. The simplicity of the Goldschmidt doctrine that ‘neighborhoods and downtown need one another’ is nowhere evident in current discourse about what Portland should do next.”

Mathew Witt

There are many ways to divide Portlanders, but so few effective ways to bridge these differences that Portland is on the brink of losing its civic exceptionalism.

Steven Reed Johnson

Today, our politics have become more adversarial. Portland 2.0 co-host Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson said, ”we need to focus less on what we are against and more on what we are for.”

The highest calling for many young leaders today is to become an effective advocate. We would do well to also instill in them a sense of stewardship for the broader community. A sense of governing as well as advocating,

Politics to some degree has always been about both identity and interests but today it has swung more toward the former. This is understandable, given rightly intensified efforts to give more people a seat at the table, to make our politics more inclusive. The downside is that politics easily becomes harder–edged and less amenable to finding a common ground. We are more into our identities, making it harder to find shared purpose, to build larger and durable coalitions.

No easy solution here, but as part of our civic health check-up, we would do well to ask whether our practices and institutions push us toward a more tribalized, identity-driven politics at the expense of reduced possibilities to find common or shared interests.

Leadership ain’t what it used to be

The most commonly heard remedy for Portland’s ills? “We need leadership.”

Meaning someone on a white horse to charge in and take charge, get things done, fix things. OK. But let’s not hold our breath. The times have changed and so has the nature of leadership.

(It is also well to remember that effective leadership has always been more subtle and nuanced than the time-worn bold, assertive male figure. A subject for exploration elsewhere, but the fond memories of former Mayor Bud Clark give us a hint.)

Lots of people have noted the changed context within which leadership operates:

• Much easier today for groups, large and small, to get issues in front of elected officials. A proliferation of advocacy groups.
• More formal avenues of “civic participation,” some helpful, some a drag on effective democracy.
• Fragmented and weakened media.
• As noted, a more adversarial and polarized politics at all levels.

On the more hopeful side:

• An emerging energized and much more diverse bunch of civically engaged leaders, including many from the entrepreneurial channel.
• Growing recognition that today’s reality is a much more dispersed civic leadership. It doesn’t all flow through the mayor’s office in city hall.

The challenge is to help today’s emerging leaders develop the skills and determination to get beyond advocacy to stewardship of the community we all share. Also, to think more critically about whether the structures and civic engagement practices we have evolved work for today’s shouting match.

Think regionally, act locally

The Portland 2.0 workshops stressed the importance of a regional perspective and collaboration while also recognizing that it is at the community, the local level that consequences of action or inaction are felt. There was strong interest in the potential to improve the current neighborhood and community engagement process.

Perhaps it is time for a major re-think and negotiation over where we lodge governing resources, responsibility and accountability with an eye particularly on local areas, districts and neighborhoods (not limited to current delineations). Examples of “purpose-built communities” from elsewhere and the energy generated by what is happening in Cully or at in the Rosewood Initiative suggest that we might benefit by doubling down on the capacity and accountability of local communities to respond to displacement, educational disparities, homelessness….

This needn’t mean further fragmentation and NIMBYISM if this “localized federalism” devolves resources and responsibility. The potential lies in marrying resources and authority with accountability and integration into larger community values and directions.

Once a leader, Portland now lags in looking at what we might do with a re-imagined sense of neighborhood, community and citizen engagement. (Note that this goes well beyond recent controversies at the Office of Community and Civic Life.)

Things have gotten done by starting with shared purpose (to repeat)

Most of our past successes were based on building broad alliances, often rooted in a shared purpose of preserving livability.

Much of the energy behind citizen activism in the 1970s originated in opposition to threats (freeways, sprawl, destruction of neighborhoods) that got knit together into a more positive “different way” for Portland. Some observations from Portland 2.0 participants:

It sort of feels like that we get big things done in Portland, in physical space and in the protection of the natural environment over and over and over again, to the extent that it has created a celebrity region and and I think it’s by and large a collective action.

So I think that what happened is three-alliances came together: kind of the grassroots neighborhood activism, … ended up with an alliance between the neighborhoods and downtown interests; the development of the light rail system that created the possibility of an alliance between certain suburban interests and Portland interests; then finally, the the fortuitous simultaneous creation of a state land use planning system, which of course was not about Portland, it was about saving farms in the Valley.

People who you think are your enemies will surprise you. And it is, as Earl Blumenauer said, possible to find common ground and get things done by listening to other people and making some accommodations.

Be clear what you are for, not just what you are against.                                                        

Get the order right: purpose, politics and planning

It may seem a strange notion that a healthy and productive civic life depends on not confusing or conflating politics and planning. Roughly, a shared sense of purpose fosters a politics that organizes agendas that result in planning that produces actionable paths to getting things done.

Of course, this is not a straight linear progression but frustration results from trying to plan our way into a shared sense of purpose or from using politics to fight individual battles without understanding the larger issues at stake.

Alan Webber, now mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico and a key player in Portland 1.0, has a slightly different version, but one that starts with shared purpose:

We need a true north that represents the purpose of the city. The second thing is, people….. The best purpose, is worthless without the right people. So purpose, people, then we’re looking at processes–how do you get things done? And then the last thing is, project. Most people [wrongly] wanna jump right to the projects

Don Clark, the first elected chair of the Multnomah County Commission observed:

[None of us elected leaders] could have done anything without the network of people, just ordinary citizens, who were on the same wavelength. [Regionally] We came together around a regional vision. They could see a region, a metropolitan area. A group of progressive leaders on the same wavelength.

If there was anything that caused our triumph, I want to call it, it was that. It was just all around us.[emphasis added] Not just a few leaders but many, many people in the community.

So, how do you get a true north, a shared sense of purpose, a common vision? Not from formalized visioning or planning processes. In some ways it is through political leaders acting as the midwives of citizen demands, hopes, concerns.

Successful leaders are able to hear the multitude of voices and demands, find common threads and reflect them back to the citizenry in ways that grow into it shared sense of direction or purpose. Leaders make sense of where we are, what the moment demands of us, and offers us.

What is to be done?

All of those “lessons” are nice but long term and pretty high-level. Where do we start?

Let’s acknowledge that there are some terrific things getting done, including building affordable housing, universal pre-school, zoning reform. Still, a list of all the good things we are doing doesn’t add up to a sense of “we are in control and headed in the right direction.” It rings especially hollow when what people see and experience tells a different story.

So, for elected leaders and those who seek to influence them I would emphasize one thing: make the problem bigger. Give us the straight scoop about where we are today, and show us how the pieces of whatever we are doing knit together into building the shared community.

That’s not Zen. It is a bit of a test for whether leaders understand how a city (metro region, if you will) works. An obvious example is police reform and law and order (crime prevention). These are not competing choices, as so many would have us believe, they are two sides of the same coin that is effective and equal public safety. Treating them together is building community. Treating them as a choice to make is a doomed attempt to “fix” a too-narrowly-defined problem.

Rules of thumb:

• Connect the dots.
• Think building not fixing.
• Think big but successfully take baby steps. That is the road to rebuilding trust and optimism.

As for a broader agenda for repairing our civic infrastructure, I suggest that is good work for Portland State University and local civic organizations and foundations.

There is enthusiasm and momentum for changing Portland’s form of government. It is about time. However, the enthusiasm should be tempered with recognition that changing the structure of city government will not be sufficient to rebuild a healthy civic infrastructure. (More on this in a subsequent post.)

Voice and vision

In sum, as we work to get more voices heard, more people with a seat at the table, can we also find the vision, the sense of direction, that makes those voices part of building the shared community?