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Former neighborhood, coalition, urban renewal leader moves to Centennial
LEE PERLMAN
THE MIDCOUNTY MEMO
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| Sharon Owen, long time Mid-County activist, moves to Centennial. Their gain, our loss. |
| MEMO PHOTO: TIM CURRAN |
Owen, a former Hazelwood chairwoman, announced last month that she was selling her house and moving to the Laisez Faire condominiums.
“I’m in tears that she’s leaving us,” current Hazelwood chairwoman Arlene Kimura says, “but I’m happy that she’s getting to do what she wants to do.” Kimura says Owen has been valuable both for her good judgement and her perspective based on her long involvement with the association. Owen “took us through the Outer Southeast Community Plan, which was a horrendous ordeal, and she was there when most of the development occurred.”
Family ties to Mid-County
Owen has deep roots in the area - her family owned Crescent Sawworks - but she grew up in Hermiston and attended college in Syracuse before returning to the area - initially to 148th Avenue - in 1974. She believes she attended her first meeting in 1983. “I attended once or twice before (the late) Jane Baker noticed me and made me secretary.” From there, in a natural progression for an able neighborhood volunteer, she moved into a leadership position. “First I acted as the chair, then I became the chair,” she says, serving in that position from 1991 to 1994.
Owen and Hazelwood were late entrants into the Outer Southeast Plan process. Begun in the early 1990s, it set zoning, land use regulations and city policy for much of Mid-Multnomah County. (Despite its name, it affected the area north of East Burnside Street, where residents to this day claim they were blindsided by a document they didn’t realize affected them.) Once involved, Owen was an important figure in the planning process - though, typically, she remembers disappointments more vividly than victories.
“There wasn’t much time for outreach - we who were involved had to settle for saying what we thought,” she recalls. “We got more savvy toward the end of the process. We called for more play areas, more housing with four or more bedrooms, greenery, attention to congestion issues, commercial development. None of it got into the plan, only into the appendix. The only thing that got into the plan was the pedestrian path at Portland Adventist (Medical Center). We did managed to get two areas zoned R5 (single family housing) that the city wanted to zone R2.5, a row house classification.”
City planner Ellen Ryker remembers Owen’s efforts quite differently.
“She was one of the major volunteers involved in the Outer Southeast Plan,” Ryker says. “She was very concerned about getting the word out, getting people to the meetings. She passed out flyers door to door. She was particularly concerned about changes proposed for Gateway and the light rail corridor. She was president of Hazelwood during the creation of their neighborhood plan, and she saw it through. She’s a very effective woman.”
Owen was one of the strongest advocates for creation of an urban renewal district in Gateway, and in this she was successful. “I felt that was the only way that area was going to reach its economic potential,” she says. “Public policy was that once light rail was in place you didn’t need to do economic development.”
Some unsuccessful fights
Owen participated in the siting of the East Portland Community Center. Of the adjacent East Precinct and its neighboring housing she says, “We took on the city and lost. We wanted them both to be well-designed, and they are not.”
In reviewing public and private developments, “We tended to lose fights over congestion or off-street parking.” One example was the design of the Midland branch library. “I got yelled at by the mayor and (City Commissioner) Charlie Hales,” Owen recalls.
“We were asking for the maximum number of off-street parking spaces to prevent spillover into the surrounding streets. I was told that parking congestion was a traffic calming device.”
Owen represented Hazelwood on the East Portland District Coalition, where she served as secretary and vice-chairwoman, and was one of those who voted for its dissolution in 1996. By then its “acrimonious” meetings were concerned with complaints about the staff, and disruptive behavior by some members intent on taking the group over. “We employed people, and we had difficulty as volunteers understanding and abiding by the requirements of a nonprofit organization. By the end we spent all our time dealing with personnel issues and people trying to take us over.”
“We had long since stopped dealing with neighborhood issues.” Richard Bixby, a former EPDC employee and now executive director of the East Portland Neighborhood Office, says, “I enjoyed working with Sharon. Her style was no nonsense, get to the point and move on. She was very thorough and quick.”
Leaves with good feelings
Owen says she leaves with a good feeling about Hazelwood, past, present and future. “I always considered it a victory that the city accepted us as a neighborhood, that they gave us courtesy they didn’t give everyone else. Under Jane, subsequent chairs and me Hazelwood took the position of being firm but not nasty with the city and other governments. We’ve done better since we stopped being part of a coalition. Like every neighborhood in the city, most people aren’t interested in what we do unless it affects them; it’s a constant struggle. But right now we’re pretty stable. We have a good board, we get new people from time to time, and we’re better known.”
Owen says she hopes to spend more time doing volunteer work for her Grace Baptist Church, and with a Slavic ministry at Grace Community Church.
“It’s a huge loss for us,” Kimura says of Owen’s departure.
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