More than 30 years ago, Charlie Hales, a newly minted graduate of the University of Virginia, packed up his car and left for a city he had heard great things about: Portland. After falling in love with the city, he launched a career and got involved in Portland’s civic life, serving on the Hayhurst Neighborhood Association board and getting elected to City Council in 1993.
While on City Council, Hales became heavily involved with rail transit projects, particularly the streetcar line that runs through downtown and Northwest Portland and has drawn national attention for helping transform an old rail yard into a vibrant neighborhood. In 2002, Hales left City Council to take a position with HDR Engineering, where he worked on other rail projects in different parts of the country.
Hales is hoping to return to City Hall, this time as mayor, to address community policing, water and sewage rates, improving East Portland and other issues.
He talked with Street Roots after spending a morning volunteering with Friends of Trees, a nonprofit that seeks to expand Portland’s tree canopy.
“I’ve been at it for years. It’s really fun,” says Hales of working with the organization, where he has volunteered for 20 years and currently serves on its board.
Jake Thomas: Some of these streetcar and other rail projects that you’ve been associated with have significantly raised property values in nearby neighborhoods. The Interstate Corridor Urban Renewal Area was created, in part, for the MAX Yellow Line. There have been reports that a lot of people have had to leave Northeast because it’s too expensive. How do you make sure urban renewal works for everybody?
Charlie Hales: Urban renewal is a tool. How you use that tool matters. I think now we’re going to try and make sure that our urban renewal strategy is about small-scale neighborhood redevelopment, not grand-scale downtown redevelopment. We’ve done some grand-scale downtown redevelopment really well. I’m really proud of what we’ve done with the Pearl District and the whole west end of downtown that has been renovated. There’s a lot more affordable housing than there was before in downtown, there’s a lot more market-rate housing in downtown than there was before, and there are 12,000 people a day riding the streetcar.
So we’ve done a great job with that tool downtown, but now we have to look at the rest of the city and say, how do we help those neighborhoods achieve their goals on a more modest scale? What people want to do on Sandy Boulevard or Foster Road are on a different scale than what we accomplished downtown, and it ought to be more about helping the existing businesses grow and improve their buildings and improve the number of employees they have rather than replacing them with something else. I’ve always been a big believer in basing the city’s work on what the neighborhoods come up with for their own plans.
A good example is we’re finally building the Sellwood Bridge. Ten years after starting to talk about it, we’re finally building one. When I was in charge of the transportation bureau, the neighborhoods along Tacoma Street and the Sellwood Moreland Improvement League came to me and said, we’re worried that this is going to become a freeway through our neighborhood for Clackamas County commuters. So I held the line against the Oregon Department of Transportation and Clackamas County and insisted that the bridge be designed to be a two-lane bridge with better bike lanes and wider sidewalks. The neighborhood’s livability trumped regional auto convenience, and that’s the principle that’s actually held, and the new bridge is finally being built to that standard. That’s the right way to do it. Neighborhood livability first, engineering considerations second.
J.T.: Every year public transportation gets more expensive. Riders of the free zone downtown are seeing it steadily chipped away. TriMet is beyond the purview of City Council, but I was wondering if you had any ideas on how to preserve the free rail zone?
C.H.: This is one of those issues that illustrates my strength as a candidate. The big difference between my opponents and me is that I’ve had 10 years of experience working in city government, and I have a collaborative style of leadership in city government, which is how you get things done. Candidates talk about, ‘I will do this. I will do that.’ That’s actually nonsense. No one does much in City Hall by themselves. You do things by walking down the hall and building a coalition with other members of the City Council because they have the same vote that you have. You’ve got to have partners at TriMet and Metro and ODOT and Multnomah County and Washington County and the private sector and the nonprofit sector.
Friends of Trees — I’m on their board. We would have never planted 415,000 trees in Portland if it was a city initiative alone. So the way you get things done in city government is by being a creative, effective and reliable partner with lots of other people. I’ve been that partner with TriMet in the past. That’s why we have airport light rail. That’s why we have interstate light rail because we built that good partnership between the city and TriMet and I was personally involved in making those projects happen. So I’m confident that we can work with TriMet to keep that free rail zone, and if we don’t find it we’ll find a way for citizens who need transit and don’t have the means to pay for it to get around.
One of the most amazing conversations I’ve ever had about transit was with Susan Emmons, who runs the Northwest Pilot Project, who came up to me in a coffee shop and said, “Hey Charlie, when you were a city commissioner and were making the streetcar project happen, I really didn’t like it. I thought it was a toy for yuppies. But now, our clients, these formerly homeless people who are making their way back into the economy, getting housing or job training to enter the workforce, the last thing they can afford is a car, and they are riding that streetcar. I was wrong about it being a tool for yuppies. It’s a service for everyone.”
Transit should do that. Transit should not just make Portland a model city, it should allow people across the economic spectrum to live good lives.
So the fare-free zone has been a way to do that. But there are other ways. Another strategy at risk is the student pass program, where every student gets to got to school on transit. It would be crazy to loose that and make parents drive kids or not allow kids to go to school reliably. Those strategies that allow everyone to get on the bus or the streetcar or the light rail are really important. The fare-free zone was one of those tools, but not the only way to get to that same result.
J.T.: Speaking of collaboration, how will you work with county and state officials to develop better strategies to meet the needs of people living in poverty?
C.H.: That’s really a high priority for me. One of the things I’m excited about is the opportunity to work with Multnomah County Chair Jeff Cogen. I think he’s a great partner. Multnomah County’s budget is in tough shape right now, but they’re good partners and willing to work on innovative ideas. So I think it’s time to reconsider what the city does, what the county does.
There’s a lot of overlap and patchwork in that relationship, so I think we take that goodwill we have, and look at that crazy patchwork, and say can’t we do better than this? Can’t we do better than this patchwork of the city paying for part of mental health services, and the county the other? Or the city maintaining streets on either side of the county bridge? So let’s look at housing and mental health services and poverty and really think about what the city and the county do because there’s not going to be extra money raining down from Washington (D.C.). We’re going to have to be smart and careful about how we spend money.
J.T.: The city’s stock of affordable housing continues to shrink, despite promises to not lose any of it. Meanwhile, the wait list for some of these units is very long. What are your ideas for sustaining and expanding the stock of affordable housing?
C.H.: I think the 30 percent set aside is a good policy and we should keep it. And we should look for more opportunities to do what we did in the Pearl District, which is to have development agreements that require private developers doing major projects with city help to commit to a high level of performance with affordable housing. So I helped negotiate some of those agreements, and that has worked out really well, and it has actually exceeded the 25 percent affordable housing.
I think we need a combination of the 30 percent set-aside and development agreements while trying to get the rest of the region to participate in affordable housing. Years ago, I was trying to get other local governments to take their share of affordable housing, rather than just having the suburbs being expensive cul-de-sacs with their homeless and poor being forced to move into Portland. I want the region, including Metro, to step up and take a reasonable share of that responsibility and not just let Portland do it. If you think about it, Portland is a third of the metro region’s population. Tell me there’s no low-income people in the suburbs, no low-wage jobs that require affordable housing. Portland should be a leader, but shouldn’t be doing this solo.
J.T.: Employment is at the foundation of self-sufficiency. What are you going to do to help create jobs for people with multiple barriers to getting hired?
C.H.: One secret to innovation is finding the good ideas that someone else has and growing them. I’ve seen some great work being done with Central City Concern to help people get back into the workforce. It’s just phenomenal. So how can we work with nonprofits like Central City Concern to expand what they’re doing? It works; it’s cost effective; it’s much more effective than what the government can do by itself. So let’s grow that program.
The Portland Workforce Alliance is doing this great effort to connect kids in our high schools who are not necessarily college-bound with great job opportunities in our manufacturing businesses. There are 45,000 family wage jobs in those areas. So if we can connect more of our underemployed and younger workers to those great job opportunities, they get to live a good life and buy a home and be part of Portland as a productive citizen. Sometimes government is smarter if it finds really successful innovative partners like those and uses our scarce dollars to help them expand rather than come up with a brand new partner of its own.
There are so many great nonprofits in Portland. One of the things that’s different about our city compared to other cities is how broad and sophisticated our nonprofit sector is. It’s amazing. Again, everything from planting trees to running the Pioneer Courthouse Square and the Chinese Garden are run by nonprofits.
The community development corporations are great. I used to be on the board of REACH and HOST, a couple of the more successful nonprofits in the city. So I think if we’re going to be smart and innovative on how we solve these problems with limited tax dollars, we need to use the nonprofit sector in a smart and innovative way.
J.T.: I’d like to get your thoughts on the Right 2 Dream Too encampment and the camping ordinance the city has in place coupled with the lack of housing.
C.H.: In our climate, camping is not a good long-term option for anyone. So we’ve got to start with that rather than arguing over the right to camp or the right not to camp. Let’s argue over the right to good housing and how to provide that to people. Because Portland in January in a tent is not a good life. The right to sleep in a doorway isn’t such a great right. Neither is the right to sleep in a tent at Fourth and Burnside.
I’d rather be arguing about how to find more affordable housing, especially in places other than downtown, the most expensive real estate to buy and develop. We’ve concentrated a lot of our efforts in the central city. Why don’t we think this through and where we can more cost effectively put more truly affordable housing? Because the housing that’s affordable in downtown is affordable because it’s been deeply subsidized. So we need smarter solutions than $200 per square foot land for the next affordable housing project.
J.T.: That’s going to take a while to accomplish. What do you do in the meantime?
C.H.: In the short run, people have to sleep outside for a while, but let’s make sure that it’s safe and it’s not a public health issue. With the Right 2 Dream Too encampment, I don’t know all the twists and turns, but it sounds like the city made the situation difficult for the property owner, and he felt that he had no choice but to use the property this way. I’d rather not have our property owners feel like they’re backed into a corner and the only thing they can do is have an encampment. Again, I’m not interested in just sending in people with billy clubs because someone’s violating the camping ordinance. I’d like to solve the problem, but solving it at Fourth and Burnside might not be the most cost-effective solution.
In the long run, it’s not about the right to camp, but working together for more job and housing opportunities. The rights arguments are a great place to argue, but no one makes much progress in real life when you get lost in a rights argument.
J.T.: What are you thoughts on the creation of the Office of Equity and Human Rights?
C.H.: By the time I take office as the next mayor, if that’s what the voters decide, we’ll have had more than a year to see how the office is doing. It’s important to have real objectives to determine if there’s progress being made. It’s easy to talk about equity. We don’t need to hire people to talk about equity; we need to hire people to make the city more equitable.
I was able to do that within my own bureaus when I was a city commissioner before. We had a fire bureau that wasn’t equitable at all. It had two women and six African American men in a workforce of 800 people. I brought in a fire chief who, with me, put together a trainee program that changed the face of the fire bureau forever. Now there are 150 people of color and women in that bureau. Just watch the trucks go by and you’ll see what I mean. So we did that because we were committed to the principal of equity, and we did it without the Office of Equity. If we have an Office of Equity it ought to make us even better at what we do, not just talk about it more. That’s the standard.
J.T.: After the office has existed for a year, what sort of things will it do or not do to affect your opinion?
C.H.: Every city bureau has to be held to the requirement of performance. Every city bureau ought to be putting more money into real services and less into overhead and administration. I’m going to start in the mayor’s office where there are now 24 positions, and there used to be only 10. And we’re going to slim down overhead, and we’re going to increase the number of our scarce general fund tax dollars going to streets and parks and neighborhood services.
So we’ll hold every office in the city to that common sense standard: that if dollars are not infinite then we’re going to make sure we spend as many of them as possible on real services, instead of just studying the problem.
I’m not interested in people studying the problem of equity. I want to see that they’re actually improving the situation of our citizens, and so we’ll hold that office to that standard, just like we’ll hold the transportation bureau to making sure the pot holes are filled and making sure that the police bureau is intervening in the lives of our kids before they become gang members.
J.T.: You’ve expressed reservations about the Columbia River Crossing. Do you think the environmental justice component of the project has been addressed, and what are you going to do to ensure that it is going forward?
C.H.: Well, I think that we clearly need a new bridge across the Columbia. Getting rail to Clark County is part of making sure we’re simply not increasing automobile pollution over time. So there are parts of the project that make sense.
I suspect that the next mayor will be helping to refine that project, and that’s one of my great advantages compared to my opponents. They’re both great people, but neither of them have any experience in local government or these types of complex transportation projects, and I’ve had decades of experience in both the private sector and being the commissioner in charge of transportation before. So I have a belief that we’ll be redoing that project, and I know how to do that.
J.T.: How about the environmental justice component?
C.H.: I am concerned about that. Let me put it this way, if we’re going to invest for the next 100 years in anything, it ought to have positive results across the board. It ought to be better for neighborhoods, better for long-term and short-term employment; it ought to be better for our quality of life. And we ought to hold ourselves to that standard for any big expenditure of public money, and the Columbia River Crossing should not be exempt from that standard. So the ultimate project should make it better to live in those neighborhoods, not just mitigate the damage. That’s the standard we ought to hold ourselves to.