Old Town Community Association releases plan for revitalizing Portland neighborhood

On Tuesday, people who live and work in Portland’s Old Town released a plan to “repair and reopen” their neighborhood.

The Old Town Community Association says it would like to increase safety, cleanliness and accessibility in an area that’s seen negative effects from rising gun violence, drug addiction and mental health crises. The neighborhood has also seen an increase in people camping on sidewalks.

Jessie Burke, the owner of The Society Hotel and chair of the Old Town Community Association, says the neighborhood is not currently safe or humane for anyone.

“I don’t think that people can quite grasp, unless they come down here, what we’re talking about,” says Burke, “There are times when it is like a different world. A different country. You would never believe this is Portland in the United States of America.”

The Community Association’s plan sets a series of short-term and long-term goals involving additional lighting, policing, and cleanup. The plan also calls for reducing camping on the sidewalks.

Burke lamented, in particular, the lack of resources for people experiencing acute mental health crises. “There are people — in Old Town in particular — that are not here because they just lost their job,” says Burke. “There is something else happening. And they need to be taken care of.”

To listen to the entire interview with Jessie Burke on Think Out Loud, hit the play arrow above.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This morning, people who live and work in Portland’s Old Town released a new plan for their neighborhood. They want to, in their words, repair and reopen the neighborhood. The Old Town Community Association says it would like to increase safety, cleanliness and accessibility in an area that has seen the impact of rising gun violence, drug addiction and mental health crises. The neighborhood has also seen an increase in people camping on sidewalks. Jessie Burke helped to put this new plan together. She is the owner of the Society Hotel and the Board Chair of the Old Town Community Association. She joins us now to talk about their vision Jessie Burke, welcome.

Jessie Burke: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what an average day has been like in the neighborhood in recent months?

Burke: Sure. It’s really quiet with regular customers. We don’t have a lot of foot traffic down here these days and I think the thing that weighs heaviest on folks down here is that the people that we do see walking outside our windows are the very people that are suffering the most. I think that really it messes with your head to see something have devolved to this level.

Miller: When you say the people you see the most often of people who are suffering the most, what do you actually have in mind?

Burke: In our press conference this morning, I talked about how most Portlanders maybe haven’t left home much for the last two years and most of our businesses down here we can’t do remotely. We’re a lot of customer service businesses, but we work daily with some of the most extremely mentally ill people you’ll have ever met. They walk the streets naked even in winter. They lick our windows. They eat food off the street. They have untreated injuries that are the stuff of nightmares and truly if you’re not here, you would never know in Portland. I tell people that Old Town is a bit of the underbelly of the city and county priorities and the breakdown of our systems.

Miller: What has happened over the last year or more when you have brought these issues up with the various city bureaus or people in various city bureaus that have some say in these issues?

Burke: That’s a good question. No one denies at any level of government the struggle that Old Town has. I’ve been down here about 10 years and I have known a lot of my neighbors much longer. Old Town has always struggled but there’s been a real tipping point in the last couple of years since COVID-19 closures. And I think, in part, the feedback we receive is that they recognize the struggle. They recognize the breakdowns. It’s being worked on. COVID-19 is, we’re told, is making it difficult for them as well because they have limitations of people working from home. So I think it’s a lot of “just wait, we’re working on it,” is a lot of the feedback we received.

Miller: What was the overall idea behind this new strategic plan that you announced today? It has basically two timelines here: There’s a set of 90 day objectives and in the longer term 4 to 12 month objectives. What was your basic idea?

Burke: Yeah. We have a weekly call with the mayor’s office. There’s a sort of a smattering of folks from different bureaus and just interested parties and business owners and I think they do this in a lot of different neighborhoods. And in response to the fall bump funds, they were just filling us in one week about some of the changes that we should expect which would be in weekly tent count, increased number of IRP, that’s impact reduction program, an increased number of those teams. And I just asked the question, I don’t really care what you do all day, I’m just curious what your goals are with these changes. And the Mayor’s office said that’s up to you, that’s up to Old Town, which I thought was funny, I was (laughter) like, I get to decide what the goals are? And they said they tasked us with that. And I drafted something and put it to the board and it was asked that it be a 90 day Plan. I added the 4-12 months because I know what’s possible more immediately versus not. Our board vetted it, approved it by a vote and submitted it to the Mayor’s office.

Miller: Before we get into the details of the plan, I was struck by, on some level, how basic it seems. You have a vision that Old Town is a “safe, clean and accessible neighborhood.” That really seems like a floor, not a not a pie in the sky idea of what it could be: safe, clean and accessible. What is it like to have to fight for something that actually seems relatively basic?

Burke: That’s it. I appreciate you asking that question. I told someone earlier today, I didn’t, of course, expect that this would be what my volunteer time would be going towards was what people would expect to be basic necessities in operating a city, but I also never expected a pandemic. And until last year I never knew what certain types of guns sounded like either. So I think I’m just taking it as it comes. And I know it’s hard to be a leader in the city right now. So I’m trying to offer creative ways of my and our community’s support in putting ourselves out there. I know it’s been hard to be courageous in the city when people show up to your house if they disagree with you. So just trying to offer some of our own courage to spare. But I did tell someone recently in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in Old Town, we’re still at the bottom where we’re so far from self actualization, we’re just working on safety right now.

Miller: Let’s turn to safety in terms of the bullet points for the coming 90 days or the year to follow. You want 911 calls answered and police responses to be faster. Specifically for the 911 calls, you want those to be answered within 15 seconds and the police response for emergencies within seven minutes. What’s the situation now?

Burke: I want to be really clear- that’s the 4 to 12 months, which is under the assumption that we’re able to staff up. And there are actually two different departments. I joked that I know way too much about how our government operates at this point. But the police response calls are under BOEC, the Bureau of Emergency Calls.

Miller: Communications, I think.

Burke: Yes, thank you. So that’s one area. That’s actually just the national standard. I just was putting the national standard number in there. The response time I recognize is going to be hard because I don’t know how many people in Portland actually realize what both cuts and resignations and retirements have looked like in Portland. But including office staff and investigators and officers and cars, we have less than 800 officers left in Portland and less than 400 in cars. So the police that would show up to your house or your business if something happened, there are less than 400 of those people in our current Portland Police. So I just want to be really clear on the front end that those are longer term goals, assuming we can hire more people, which would improve our response times. So yes, that is a goal, but I know that there are a few steps that have to happen before that at least for the response times. For us right now, truly what happens in Old Town and it actually happens in the rest of the city, it’s just a concentrated number of incidents here, is that people don’t call at all because we know that there’s very little prosecution right now. So unless it’s pretty egregious, which is usually death at this point, unless there has been a death by murder, we don’t call. And some things, we’ll call, they say here’s the process to press charges and we have a very good relationship with all of our enforcement agencies. We just know all the limitations, too. So it was really a collective goal for all of us. It was less intended to be confrontational and more intended to be that these are our collective goals and people do better if we all know we’re working towards something.

Miller: You’re also calling in addition for a beefed up police response and emergency response. You’re calling for a mental health response team, something that Blanchet House has piloted, to be funded. These would be teams of people with lived experience who could help treat people going through extreme mental health crises. What happens now when you see someone in a mental health crisis on the street?

Burke: Great question. There is nothing. During a press conference today, I actually asked everyone to look around. I sat on a call with the county and the mayor’s office because they were going to tell us about the crisis response numbers. And after the presentation, I said yes, we all know in Old Town all the numbers, we know when to call, but where is anyone ever going to live? There are people so far gone here, they need to be taken care of. Where are they going to live? And the person from the county said that you can call this number and they’ll take them to the hospital for 48 hours. And I said yes, I know, but after that, where is anyone going to live? And she was really discouraged and she said there is nowhere. And I told everyone on the call to look outside and I said, this is the plan. There is no plan which is devastating and knowing places are closing and the Blanchet program is really just to mitigate violence. It’s when people are having mental breaks coupled with people becoming more violent. And that program has been approved by the county, but they have been in contract negotiations with temporary fall bump money that expires at the end of June, use it or lose it, and continue to navigate these negotiations and time is running out. So I just call it death by 1000 cuts in Old Town.

Miller: I’m curious how you think about these two sorts of bullet points next to each other. The idea of more mental health response teams and also you’re asking that police respond more robustly to calls and follow through by sending people to jail or at least prosecuting them even if they’re not going to spend any time in county lockup. How do you think of these two together?

Burke: I think people are really struggling in Portland with differentiating between judgment and enforcement. I come to the table assuming regardless of anyone’s political background that everyone is progressive and everyone is compassionate, everyone wants it to be better than it was before and they care about other people and there’s a real dichotomy in Portland. We see it a lot in Old Town where yes, there are mental health crises and maybe people need to have someone intervene. I don’t know where they go. I am a citizen volunteer and I would hope that we can navigate that without citizens having to figure it out for the government. But by the same token I get parking tickets and also observed two hours later a hatchet fight, right? I will watch a drug dealer light someone’s tent on fire because they did something that upset them. None of these things are legal and I’m not passing judgment on anyone’s life circumstances, but there are rules, we all agree to abide by as citizens of the city and it’s frustrating to see how we can’t maintain order so that we can function in this ecosystem. Our ecosystem has gone completely out of balance and I’m just trying to find tangible solutions to tangible steps to get us back to balance.

Miller: I was struck by the number of times and number of ways that lighting showed up in the safety plan in the shorter term, in the longer term. Getting brighter lights overall, maybe stringing up some, some strings of lights in the area. What role does lighting play in this in your mind?

Burke: I talked to Sam Adams several weeks ago, actually several months ago it came up that he was, I don’t know if it was during his time as mayor or before that, but that they had done a lighting study of Old Town years ago and found that it was statistically the darkest neighborhood in the city. Safety studies also show that when you have fewer dark corners, neighborhoods become safer, safer pedestrian ways and when people can see what people are doing, it mitigates those activities. So we thought it was a pretty low barrier and not a controversial way to try and improve the safety of the neighborhood.

Miller: You also have a whole section about your cleanliness vision. Maybe this is a dumb question, but what role does cleanliness play in everything you’re talking about? What are we talking about here when we’re talking about cleanliness?

Burke: I had asked some of our public safety teams, what do you see? What have you seen statistically that helps communities with safety? And they said activated storefronts and having people pick up their trash. Right? So there’s never trash in front of my business because I pick it up every day. But when you don’t, it’s a bit of the broken window theory where if someone doesn’t pick it up, it means that no one cares about that piece of property. And if the building next to it doesn’t pick it up, then that means no one cares. And then you’ll see graffiti start creeping in, so it matters a lot. We want our city centers–we want our whole city–but our city centers to be where we are on display. This is like what our city cares about and our county cares about. This is what we believe. It should be cleanliness too. I worked a shift at our cafe on Sunday and there was vomit everywhere outside of one of the museum doors and a small fire lit and I went to put it out and there was feces in the middle of the fire. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about some cans and some pieces of paper, this is human waste. And you wouldn’t believe the trash that we see, mountains of trash. And I don’t think that people can quite grasp it unless they come down here to see what we’re talking about. There are times that it is a different world, a different country. You would never believe this is Portland in the United States of America.

Miller: Let’s turn to what’s probably the most contentious issue connected to everything you’re talking about: homeless encampments in the area. What do you think should be done about them?

Burke: I feel that a lot of Portland’s are struggling to differentiate between what is happening on the ground and what their perception is if they’re living in a relatively safe environment, especially in the last two years. So I’ve been down here about 10 years. In the last two years with offices leaving and storefronts closing and government agencies not coming to work, nothing is getting cleaned up.There is a different world that has moved in, organized crime has moved to Portland and a lot of people don’t believe it or don’t want to believe it, but it is incredibly dangerous. And a lot of the same community is also living on the street preying on the actually vulnerable. And Portland’s others that aren’t here cannot differentiate between the predator and the prey. And I will tell you, predator, prey, the houseless community knows how to survive on the street. It’s a skill. You’re a hustler in the best sense of the word. But people are getting played. Portlanders at large are getting played by a segment of the population and it is so incredibly dangerous for the actually vulnerable living outside. I’ve observed people’s tents being lit on fire by people that were pissed about a deal that went bad, that then caught a building on fire. I’ve seen a woman die of a drug overdose that was being actively trafficked for sex on Davis. There was a drive by shooting, 21 rounds shot outside of C3PO (Creating Conscious Communities with People Outside). I know the sound of machine guns. I see hatchet fights on the regular, but I don’t think that people understand this isn’t safe for anyone. This is not humane. A lot of armchair critics refer to anyone wanting things to be better as, “you aren’t humane, you don’t care about people.”

Miller: Or that you’re a heartless business owner who’s only focused on your bottom line.

Burke: Correct.

Miller: I imagine you’ve gotten people who have said that to you as you’ve been making these arguments, have you?

Burke. Yeah, absolutely but not recently, but I do know and I’ve heard it before. I think the thing that is the most heartbreaking, particularly for business owners in Old Town, is that they are some of the most caring people you will ever meet. They are the ones doing coat drives. They’re the ones taking extra food at the end of the day out to everyone on the street. They’re the ones that show up when someone gets shot, point blank. They go and do the rescue. And I remember I talked to a property owner here once who said the thing that is so heartbreaking to him is that he doesn’t find it humane to walk over bodies on the street. But when he rang the alarm, everyone said, “oh, you just care about your property, making enough money, you just care about property over people.” And I’ve thought a lot about that. And I told him, it’s not property over people. It’s people over people and people are trying to decide who’s more important and the answer is no one, no one is more important, but this is not normal. This is not healthy. This is not imbalanced and we must aspire to a balanced ecosystem of a city. And so the answer of what should be done, people need safer spaces to be in. If anyone thinks that the sidewalk is the safest place to be, you are not here. Truly, cities–any space–aspires to balance as an ecosystem and nature is taking over. Rats are now eating through people’s tents and eating them while they’re sleeping. And anyone that thinks that that is a better option than literally anywhere else that could be enclosed is not anyone that I want to talk to about this issue. It doesn’t all have to be that we’re going to move everyone into affordable housing, we just have to build it all first. There are people in Old Town in particular that are not here because they just lost their job. There’s something else happening and they need to be taken care of and that is what we need to find a solution for. We need spaces to take care of people.

Miller: Jessie Burke, thank you very much for giving us some of your time today. I appreciate it.

Burke: Thanks so much.