ACT 2014 Portland Oregon Outreach

30. “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1919, not repealed until 1953

34. Vanport

50. Regional Equity Strategy
Purpose is to operationalize Equity
as one of Six Desired Outcomes for
the region

51. Six Desired Outcomes
• Vibrant Communities
• Economic Prosperity
• Safe & Reliable Transportation
• Leadership on Climate Change
• Clean Air & Water
• Equity

52. 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

53. 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.

54. Timeline
oregonmetro.gov/equity

55. 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

56. Multiple Account Evaluation

57. 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

61. 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

62. 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

63. 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

64. 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”.

65. 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.

66. 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.

67. 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)

68. 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.

69. 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.

70. 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.