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Study says Neighborhood Associations serve few, not many

LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO

Hazelwood Neighborhood Association Chair and Opportunity Gateway Program Advisory Committee member, (PAC is the Gateway Regional Center Urban Renewal Area advisory committee) Arlene Kimura was part of a panel, assembled by the League of Women Voters that assessed and critiqued Portland’s neighborhood system last month.

Other members of the panel, which held a discussion before about 50 people at the Multnomah County building, were Brian Hoop of the Portland Office of Neighborhood Involvement, Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program board Chair Paul Leistner, Linnton Neighborhood Association Vice Chair Pat Wagner and Kayse Jama of the Center for Intercultural Organizing. The league’s Pat Osborn presided and offered questions to the panel.

The league has spent the last year studying Portland’s neighborhood associations. It has published a history of the movement and, more recently, an assessment of it. It is planning a third publication, which will be a set of recommendations.

The consensus of the evening was that the system worked, but only for some people.

“As designed, the system is still serving that function (for some people), but it’s not serving the needs of many segments of the population,” Hoop said.

“I would have to agree. It wasn’t working for everyone,” Kimura said. “Neighborhoods are vastly different, and one size does not fit all. When you bring in large neighborhoods with diverse populations, you need some flexibility. The system needs tweaking and adjustments.” One of the functions of neighborhood associations is to be “a bridge between self-selected interest groups.”

Jama was more critical. “We need fundamental change,” he said. “We need to be honest. People are afraid of challenges. Portland is a very segregated city. Neighborhood associations are not a welcoming environment. If you’re from a different culture, they’re even less so. If you have an accent, forget about it. People of color feel outside the neighborhood system.”

Participation is achieved by addressing certain issues: “How and when you meet, the structure of the meeting. Do you provide child care?” Jama said. “We need to look at ways to empower other communities. People have to see that their interests are on the table. If the whole agenda is land use, don’t expect me to come, because I’m not a landlord.”

Kimura said, “In our part of town, we started as homeowners. Then we added a mix of people: tenants from multi-family housing, minorities. The euphoria of the homeowners was diluted.

“The meeting format is set up for people who can attend. If you’re part of the working poor, it’s not something you can do. We need to look at the structure of how we engage people.”

Osborn quoted researcher Steve Johnson to the effect that in press accounts of neighborhood activities between 1985 and 1999, there was a far more negative tone than there had been in the previous ten years. Both Jama and Leistner said that this coincided with the emergence of new activist community groups not affiliated with a given geographic area. Hoop agreed and said it was a question of “not if but when” the city started to provide support to such groups.

At one point the panel discussed the role of district neighborhood offices and their value to neighborhood associations. Kimura said that neighborhood offices could be the “repository of technical resources.” She added, “We desperately need people who are bilingual. We need some help with Russian and Spanish translation, but not all the time.”

Hoop blamed city government for not properly supplying neighborhood groups with the resources they need. He pointed out that in 1996, a task force identified the minimum funding necessary to supply core services citywide as $3.6 million. Yet the program’s funding is now $1.7 million. Programs such as budget advisory committees and the Neighborhood Needs process, which gave citizens meaningful input into the budget process, are now gone. Neighborhoods are allotted $1,000 a year each for printing and mailing assistance, “but for a neighborhood like Centennial that has 20,000 residents, that doesn’t go very far,” he said.

With the added pressure to be “inclusive,” Hoop said neighborhood associations are “trying to be everything to everyone, and they’re spread so thin. You would hope there’d be the political willpower to set priorities.” Without this, he said, “We’re putting all these expectations on neighborhood groups, and setting them up to fail.”

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