June 08, 2003
Blumenauer On Portland, Planning, and 'Cultural Creatives' (Plus: Why I Believe He's Running for Mayor)
Earlier today (thanks to my first-ever official press badge), I attended part of ARTrepreneur: The New Arts Leader, the annual convention of Americans for the Arts, held this year in downtown Portland.
Had it not been for an overly-long wait for the bus, I'd have an item to post about today's keynote, delivered by Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and how his ideas relate to the city of Portland.
However, an entire bus run was dropped from the schedule due to a breakdown in Gresham (Tri-Met, "in its infinite wisdom," according to the driver of the later bus which eventually arrived, had decided not to send in a replacement for the interrupted run), and so I only managed to catch the last ten minutes of Florida's speech.
And so, this item will instead focus on a panel discussion entitled, The Art of Place: Culture, Creativity, and Community-Building -- or, rather, that portion of this panel which involved Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon's Third Congressional District, which includes, of course, all of Portland.
Having served in the Oregon House of Representatives, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, and the Portland City Council -- not to mention potentially being a candidate for mayor -- Blumenauer's perspective is certainly relevant to the continuing conversation about Portland and the so-called "cultural creatives."
Blumenauer began his presentation by asserting that what a community needs are "very strong feelings that you need to know who you are" and that encouraging the creative class isn't about the Next Big Thing that everyone tries to emulate. "If you do that," he said, "you fail."
Charging that we've had "a sense in Portland that we could do something about the future [and] that we were not just helpless and hapless," Blumenauer said that it is "important for communities to think about who they are, what makes them significant, and what they want to do with it."
Portland, he said, "has done a very good job of being Portland."
And in thinking about our future, he argued, we should not be simply choosing amongst pre-existing plans as if they were products off the shelf: "If you're not careful, you can chase away the vibrant mix of any community." Taking this a step into specificity, he stated that "if you compete with the suburbs by looking like the suburbs, you lose."
Somewhere along the line, he said, we made the decision that our downtown was not going to be like Phoenix or Salt Lake City or Denver. "We were going to maintain its vitality by not surrendering to the car." For many communities, he claimed, the plan became to move as many cars through the downtown core as possible, and stack them up when they got there. Portland, on the other hand, actually capped the total number of parking spaces permitted in the downtown core, and fought back efforts to raze buildings (some of which could b considered to be part of the city's history) in order to build more surface parking lots.
Instead, Blumenauer said, Portland "put the investment into transit and bike paths, into walking and buses, and allowing people to live downtown as well as just work and shop there."
Further, according to Blumenauer, the idea is not to just develop the downtown core in a way that is consistent with community values, but to then radiate that approach into the surrounding neighborhoods themselves. In fact, he said, the neighborhoods adjacent to downtown were at one point not even intended to be neighborhoods -- the point being that we made a decision about that possible future, rejecting such a notion as not reflective of what Portland should be.
"Areas which are magnets to our creative class," Blumenauer said, "are in communities that would have been gone if the old way of thinking had taken place."
Blumenauer briefly discussed the idea that if a community fosters local culture and business -- whether we're talking of farmer's markets or locally-owned coffeeshops, to name two examples -- and not just "cookie cutter, anywhere-in-America malls" that people will pay more for the privilege of the "real." The argument being: Authentic local culture is a source not just of cultural richness, but of economic success.
"A city cannot create what is hip or trendy," he continued. "What you can create are the choices for people where it is livable, where you have a choice about housing type, transportation mode, about the type of experience." These things, he said, are "critically important."
Glancing back to his earlier reference about not surrendering to the car (a kind of short-hand for the types of development and community which spring up around car-based movement and commerce), he asked who, then, was in charge? "Put the people in charge," he answered. "Neighborhoods, people, business community, activists."
He then explained the origin of one of downtown Portland's most distinctive features, one that can't help but positively affect the city's livability: The comparatively small size of our city blocks (they're about half the size of the average city block elsewhere). These small blocks, he said, are the "legacy of greedy New England developers" who realized that corner lots fetched higher prices. Therefore, if you shrink the size of the blocks, you have more corner lots to sell. I'm sure the irony of a key facet of Portland's livability having its beginnings in development and greed isn't lost on anyone.
One of Blumenauer's next comments is sure to cause a certain degree of consternation and controversy, and I wish he had more time to go into precisely what he meant. "One of the things that's different about Portland," he said, is that we "have no throw-away neighborhoods." Tossing in a piece of data, perhaps to put off any immediate challenges to this statement (or perhaps because there simply wasn't time to delve into it more deeply), he added: "We get rated down by homeowners associations because we have no slums."
While he had earlier cautioned against simply going with the Next Big Thing or using ideas from off the shelf, Blumenauer did say this: "You can rob any idea that makes sense. But," he warned, "is is important to do this from the perspective of what your vision is for your city."
Saying that we've been "involved in the creation of a very unique city," he said that "Portland has created itself, and in doing so it is attracting people who believe in the Portland story." And they are, he says, "some of the most aggressive" in protecting our resources.
What they -- and we -- want, Blumenauer stated, was for "Portland to be like Portland but only moreso."
By way of closing, Blumenauer went further by suggesting that what we do in our own communities (Portland included) -- and how we do it -- can have a larger impact upon a greatly and deeply divided country:
What you have the opportunity to help us with today in creating a sense of what your community is going to be. Design with these principles of local land use, local education, cultural investment. Actually having a plan to enact your vision and enforcing it. You have a chance to change what's happening nationally.
"I am absolutely convinced," Blumenauer concluded, "[that] in the course of the next ten years we have an amazing chance to reverse the direction of this country."
Normally, that would seem like the logical place for this report to end. But there were, of course, questions from the audience over the course of the session, many of which were directed towards Congressman Blumenauer.
"What happens," one person asked, "to the people that were in those areas that were distressed when gentrification and 'revitalizing' hits?"
"To the best of my knowledge," Blumenauer replied, "there is not city in America -- large or small -- where people who are at minimum wage can afford basic housing."
What we have undertaken here in Portland, he said, "is to make sure that the community is investing resources in things like affordable housing. In many of those distressed neighborhoods, a significant effort was made to allow people to rent and sometimes own in those areas."
It's important when you revitalize, Blumenauer continued, to be sure there are places for people who were poor, low income, pensioners, etc. "If you revitalize a community and create value, there is money you can reinvest in things like housing [and] keeping communities intact."
Which is true, so far as it goes. As long as you have a public policy which keeps that money in the community for the purposes of reinvestment. But then, that would be one reason why a later questioner made very clear her opinion that Portland should be concerned with growing local small businesses rather than chasing large corporate businesses.
Another person asked about how "spaces for cultural activity" fit into the scheme of things.
"Any community needs to plan to be able to realize their vision," Blumenauer answered. "Things that some people think are amenities ... are, in fact, part of the basic infrastructure."
Offering one example, he added that "performance opportunities, large and small, are part of the cultural infrastructure that are used not just by arts organizations but a wide variety of institutions in the community" They must, he said, "be part of the planning process."
"How to you go to the people themselves in a community," someone else asked, "to tell you what's important?" My ears perked up at this one, of course, since I've been tracking the progress of the Citywide Public Involvement Standards Task Force.
"The same way we were talking about the arts being part of the infrastructure," Blumenauer said, "I think you have to have the citizen infrastructure." Part of some of Portland's successes he said, has been a "pretty vibrant citizen infrastructure" comprised of a "vast array of people for whom it is a part of their life."
After describing a process of sponsoring classes for neighborhood activists to study transportation issues (because of the experience that people behaved as if "anybody with a driver's license was a certified traffic engineer"), Blumenauer explained that "honoring and respecting what the citizen infrastructure" is important to revitalize civic activity.
Illustrating why such civic participation is crucial, Blumenauer said that "there is no 'other' in a community." Explaining further, he said that in nature monocultures are inherently unstable. In designing our communities, our cities, we want a diverse mixture, he said. And that doesn't happen if the people aren't engaged.
Another questioner returned to the conflict which arises when neighborhoods change. "You make it sound acceptable for artists to have to move on to another neighborhood," they asked.
"Part of what frustrates me here," Blumenauer responded, "is that we tend to freeze some of these things in amber and we don't have an ongoing effort." Referencing the plan for the Pearl District, Blumenauer (who says he helped put that plan into place) said that the idea had been to have a plan that lasts ten years but then "you have to come back and revisit it, and engage it before it gets away from you."
Explaining -- but not necessarily accepting as inevitable -- the process by which creatives move out of a neighborhood once it reaches a certain level of "success," Blumenauer said that "people aren't going to wait for government to catch up with them." Meaning that while they might want to remain where they are, if public policies don't help them do so, "they are going to go where they can create and live."
But, Blumenauer continued, there's "no reason we can't recapture the value we're creating to put it back into the same community for things that are not necessarily viable." The point being: If we desire it, we can have public policy (whether we do so currently or not is, of course, debatable) which helps creatives who are often partially responsible for the success of a community to remain in that community when further development of that community kicks in.
Bringing the conversations with Blumenauer to a conclusion was a question about whether there's a "consciousness in this community as to the lifestyle of the artist." Is it part of the planning process to show people what actually exists in their community?
"Part of what needs to be going on," Blumenauer said, is to "help people understand the value of what is created locally." Such as, he offered as an example, the difference between a locally-owned coffeeshop and a Starbucks. Such an understanding, he argued, "adds so much more value to the experience, and it leaves so much more in the community."
"If we were to work together to attach value to what's going on here," he continued, "it doesn't just help the local community."
"But for government to help people understand the value of being consumers of the locally-produced... that's, I think, part of what you can do."
I'll be forgiven, perhaps, for having the distinct sensation that I will watching a man seriously eyeing the 2004 mayoral campaign. Regardless of the degree to which you (or I) agree or disagree with his views on the issues discussed here, I think it's safe to say that at the very least the mayoral race would turn into a rather substantive conversation were he to throw his hat into the ring.
Throughout the session, he was animated by the challenges and opportunities facing Portland. Further, he seemed very captivated by his premise that what we do here could have an effect upon the nation as a whole.
My hunch: Blumenauer is leaning very heavily toward a mayoral candidacy. Further, I'll predict right now that by the end of this Summer -- if not sooner -- he will be in the race.