The city of Portland launched a “90-day reset” to clean up its Central Eastside. The results included lighting improvements, removing hundreds of camps, nearly 5,000 pounds of trash and 74,000 square feet of graffiti.
Courtesy Central Eastside Industrial Council
In response to increasing crime, drug use, graffiti and unsanctioned homeless camping, the city of Portland launched a “90-day reset” to clean up its Central Eastside. The results of the official effort were recently released and included lighting improvements, removing hundreds of camps, nearly 5,000 pounds of trash and 74,000 square feet of graffiti. Clare Briglio is the executive director of the Central Eastside Industrial Council and Central Eastside Together, one of the city’s three enhanced service districts. When the report was released, she praised the city’s efforts but also said the overall response was “a work in progress,” and that “businesses and residents deserve credit for their patience and passion during this time.” Briglio joins us to share more about the experiences of those in the district during and after the reset, and what she thinks should come next.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In response to increased crime, drug use, graffiti and unsanctioned homeless camping in Portland’s Central Eastside, the city launched a 90 day reset at the beginning of this year to clean it up. The results were announced recently. They included lighting improvements, the sweeping of hundreds of camps and the removal of nearly 5,000 pounds of trash and 74,000 square feet of graffiti. Clare Briglio is the executive director of the Central Eastside Industrial Council and the Central Eastside Together. She joined us before this reset began and she joins us, once again, to talk about it. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Clare Briglio: Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here this afternoon.
Miller: So we talked with you on the show last December. That was a month before the reset began. Can you just remind us what business owners and employees and residents were facing before this reset? What led to the call for this reset?
Briglio: Yeah, that’s a great question. I had assumed the role of executive director back in April, last year, and what I realized very quickly, being kind of an outsider to Portland – I’ve been in this work for about seven years – but being able to look at what was going on in our business community and the voice that was kind of buried under all of these other social concerns, was the concern of the business owners. And we had a very courageous, I would say, business owner, Jason Bolt, owner of Revant Optics down in the Central Eastside. We talked and had him go to city council to talk to the mayor about specific problems that he was having. And his business is right by Salt & Straw, and Kim Malek was also a great advocate in those moments.
And what ended up happening, was what everyone feared. There was an explosion outside of his storefront, outside of his building, and it really caught everyone’s attention. And we ended up forming a business forum very quickly. The Central Eastside Industrial Council hosted a business forum back in November,to elevate the voices of the business community. And I said, and I still say this again, in that period of time and in moments, where the social need is kind of drowning out the voice of the business community. A lot of our business owners felt like they were being held hostage, they couldn’t share their story for fear of retribution in some way. And that has continued, but I would say that was our largest, that was the catalyst that led to the 90 day reset.
Right after November, we worked with city leadership to get started on cleaning the district and focusing on safety, accessibility, and cleanliness within the district.
Miller: When you say that the CEO of Revant, and it’s an optics company, that he was brave in speaking out, what do you mean by that? And what were other business owners afraid of?
Briglio: For as liberal as a city as Portland is, I think it is difficult to talk about business and economic development without holding the social need that kind of impacts business viability in the Central Eastside. And I’m referring of course to our outdoor residents and high impact camping. And to hold both as a need to be addressed, but to also understand that without businesses and economic viability, you won’t have a city; that’s just a reality. And so I looked at it as an outsider, again, as a moment to elevate those business voices.
We have heard that businesses were threatened, that employees of businesses were threatened because of any position that the business owner may have taken. I mean, it’s really easy to see when you watch a city council meeting when we were debating and voting on this Time/Place/Manner Ordinance, and the few, or the couple business owners that came from the Central Eastside to talk about the impact of outdoor residents on the district were booed and heckled and all that happens, and shamed within the city. And I really think that’s unfortunate. I think that both can coexist, but we absolutely have a need to elevate the voice of the business community, and especially in the Central Eastside and that’s my opinion as an advocate, anyway.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what the reset actually entailed?
Briglio: Yeah. So this was a kind of a pilot program that the city had launched in Old Town – very different size, of course. Jessie Burke who runs that association there, went through a similar process, focusing on initiatives to improve safety, accessibility and cleanliness in the district. And under those goals came multiple action points.
For our district, because it was so large - I mean, you can’t even compare, it’s 600-plus acres - we focused on those three areas as well and looked at the amount of trash that we have picked up. For example, since 2019, since the Central Eastside Together was formed, we picked up over 3.5 million pounds of trash, and knowing the size of our district, the city knew in conversations with the mayor’s team, this is gonna take a little bit longer than 90 days. And so it really lasted about five months which the public doesn’t really know. I mean, we were cleaning starting in December. We had PEMO [Public Environment Management Office] involved with the lighting program, cleaning graffiti for free off of buildings, and over the 8 ft minimum that the city cleaning services provide. We got PBOT [Portland Bureau of Transportation] involved with removing abandoned autos and the impact reduction team to assist with unsanctioned camping and high impact campers in the district as well. And so that was primarily the effort.
There were a lot of efforts made by the police department and Central precinct, which I’m very grateful for, Sergeant Kenny who stepped in. Eric Zimmerman was the lead from the mayor’s office and we met, talking on the phone almost daily in the beginning to get a sense of where are the hotspots? Where does change really need to happen and be seen first? And then we can move on from there. And so, triaging that for about five months was my full time job, really.
Miller: Well, can you give a sense for what that entailed? And when you say like “triaging the hotspots,” and figuring out and essentially telling the police where the biggest problem areas were, can you give us a sense for what that actually looked like? I mean, what’s an example of an area you are concerned about and why?
Briglio: Yeah, I can give you an example. I think, just for greater context, I’ve said I’ve been working in this kind of disaster recovery and economic recovery field for about seven years. And so when you do that, you need to understand that it takes city, county, state and federal partners all coming together to make improvements to improve the economic viability and livability of an area that has been disrupted by whatever, and COVID obviously was our largest disruption.
We saw a 400% increase in campers in the district during COVID. And campers that, for whatever reason - and no judgment made there on why people find themselves on the street - but there are areas of the district that are governed by the state. There are areas of the district that are governed by the county. And so finding hotspots under bridges for example, and bridge heads, some of that property was owned by the state. And so we needed to get more money, for example, to clean out those areas. And we ran out kind of halfway in between the reset. And so we advocated and lobbied the state for more money to give to the city to clean those areas.
We worked with the county on reducing the amount of tents that were being handed out during that period of time as Commissioner Gonzalez requested that that be done when we had a number of fires in the district. And so each case is unique. Each person is unique and I’m kind of focusing on outdoor residents, but around 95% of the funding of the enhanced service district goes towards mitigating the impacts of camping. And that’s just the reality. Our safety teams have been working - Northwest Enforcement did an incredible job working to help move campers along, find them extra resources, [and] move them into housing. And we have had a good track record with doing that. And then there are campers who are resistant to services and that creates a problem. You know, if you ask how many people on the street will take assistance when it’s offered to them, whether it’s city or county assistance, when it’s offered to them, most people will say, ‘Yes,’ but the amount of people that will actually do that is another story.
And so when we were looking at kind of understanding each neighborhood, and the hotspots in each neighborhood, we are also trying to assess who the people there are. And our safety teams know these people by name. I mean, because they worked with them for four years and some of them were ready to go into transitional housing. Some of them were ready to go into drug assistance or those types of programs, social welfare programs and then others were not. And so I think this new initiative by the city to create…and we are hosting in the Central Eastside, the first temporary shelter to help mitigate these challenges, I think is another step in the right direction.
Miller: So Clare, is the reset officially over now?
Briglio: It is officially over, however, the work of some of the initiatives is still ongoing. So the lighting initiatives, for example, or lighting all of Grand and Burnside and down MLK. So there’s that lighting project continuing. Parts of the graffiti removal program are still continuing. But for the most part, yes, the city has used this as a model which I think is a very good model given an intense amount of focus to an area for a specific period of time. We know that a lot of other districts have been asking for this. So I know that the city has pressure to move on to other districts in the city to replicate what we received. And I’m incredibly grateful for it.
Miller: What do you see as the successes of this effort and the places where it fell short?
Briglio: I’ve had that question a few times and I was thinking more this morning. Overall, Dave, I think that the city of Portland is an interesting moment, in where the social contract is broken. Accountability is moved to places where it’s convenient. For example, we tell our business owners that the sidewalk between their place of business and the street is their responsibility to clean up. Unfortunately, if there are campers there or debris or whatever the case may be, we’ve told the business owner that they’re responsible for doing that, but we haven’t given them the ability to actually enforce that. They’re accountable, but they don’t have the authority to do anything about that. That is incredibly frustrating…
Miller Just to be clear, are you talking specifically about, say if somebody is camping on that sidewalk?
Briglio: Yeah, it really could be anything. It could be human disruption in any way. And I think when we transfer ownership or accountability to the wrong person, it creates a deep level of frustration. That’s what I hear on a daily basis.
This 90 day reset, the Time/Place/Manner Ordinance, the new sanctioned camping site within our district. I think these are all attempts to restore a social contract that’s been broken in the city of Portland. And so I do think it’s successful in those ways. And I would say, where it wasn’t designed to do, first of all, but I do think this needs to be part of it, is that the county absolutely has to be involved. The state has to be involved. And working in disaster response and recovery for as long as I have, and as I said, all those partners need to be at the table. We have a huge amount of mental health and drug [addiction] need within the city to address. And even the recent article that came out with Metro’s oversight over the county not spending as much as they needed to on their housing initiatives, that’s something else. So all of those people need to be at the table, need to be talking and need to be part of the solution. I would say if the city decided to do another 90 day reset, it would have to be in collaboration with our county partners. And that’s a big bridge to build.
I mean, I know in working with many of our partners who are wonderful people and that all all want something to change within the city of Portland to improve its economic viability and liability for everyone, whether you own a house or rent or do not. And you are an outdoor resident. I think it’s really important. And I’m feel like I’m being a dead horse though, but that it’s that all of those people are present in the conversation and all of them were not, and part of it was due to also my capacity and leading a team where I wasn’t fully staffed. So I’ll just say that and put a little bit of blame on us, but we would have been more successful, I think, if we had a partner from the county at the table.
Miller: Just briefly when you, when you were on back in December, that was at a time when Salt & Straw and other companies were talking publicly about the possibility of leaving the Central Eastside because of all the concerns you have been voicing again today. Is that still the case? Are businesses in the area talking seriously to you about picking up stakes and going somewhere else?
Briglio: There is still that underlying, I think, question of ‘Was this enough? Is anything gonna change or go back to the way it was?’ And I’ve read articles about certain businesses who felt like it did day 91. Well, there was no day 91, because we were here for five months, but working on this, however, this impact was felt differently around the district and I do acknowledge that.
Our challenge still will be safety, accessibility and cleanliness.
That will be our challenge. We are not over the hump, but we have come a long way. So yes, I do still have conversations with businesses that might leave. And I think again, the solution to that is the conversation that needs to happen between city, county and local business leaders, local business associations, to really focus on the solutions and they’re multilayered and they’re nuanced. And I understand that.
Miller: Clare Briglio, thanks very much.
Briglio: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Clare Briglio is the outgoing executive director of the Central Eastside Industrial Council and Central Eastside Together.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.