Portland's Caring Community: Old Town Chinatown

www.pdxcaringcommunity.com

Website and Portland's Caring Community (download pdf) is a guide to the housing landscape in Old Town Chinatown. It paints an accurate picture of how the housing in Old Town reflects the healthcare sector in terms of not only housing, but employment. 

57% of all housing units are dedicated to the homeless and their recovery.  It is comprised of two types of housing - supportive care and shelters. 

Healthcare is the major industry and is one of five economic clusters prioritized by Prosper Portland based on “local employment concentration, historic and future growth, global reputation and brand, and middle-wage job accessibility. It is the primary sector in Old Town Chinatown. 

This might all come as news to people who think of it as the entertainment district and are surprised to learn that people not only work here, but rent apartments and own condominiums in our neighborhood.

Safety First Campaign

There is a special report on the Safety First campaign launched by two residents and digital marketers, Ruth Ann Barrett and Katherine Fischer. The primary reason for raising the red flag of safety is straightforward and personal.  

With the existing 365 bed cluster the crime rate is over the top (22% of drug/narcotic offenses and 6% assaults). Resources such as the Police Bureau’s Behavioral Health Unit*, like the Police Bureau, is significantly understaffed. Our neighbor Jacob Shroyer was brutally murdered in the lobby of our apartment in May of 2017 and since then there have been five stabbings in a few blocks and a second murder around the corner. Residents and our guests tell us they do not feel safe.  

Safety First raises safety concerns of the residents and employees adjacent to a cluster of shelters at the North End of the New Chinatown Japantown Historic District where there are plans to add 200 low barrier beds to the existing 365 beds. Residential properties most impacted to the South include the condo, Old Town Lofts, and affordable housing units in Pacific Tower, Fifth Avenue Place, and Fifth Avenue Court.

The many supportive housing units and other residential units in the area North of Everett including Everett Station Lofts may also experience safety and livability issues as it is estimated that the sheltered population has a sizable share of persons reporting mental illness and drug use issues: as high as 71% of the unsheltered reported that they have one or more disabling conditions according to the Point In Time Study, 2017.

To the North of the shelter cluster and across the railroad tracks, the Yards at Union Station and the McCormick Pier Condominiums, two large residential properties, may find an increase in shelter beds creates more safety issues for both renters and condo owners.

Download Safety First report here.  

Call the Opinion Line at City Hall 503-823-4127 and insist on Safety First when it comes to locating another shelter in Old Town Chinatown. 

*This is the unit that coordinates the response of Law Enforcement and the Behavioral Health System to aid people, city-wide, in behavioral crisis resulting from known or suspected mental illness and or drug and alcohol addiction. 

Ruth Ann Barrett, PDXdowntowner.com, January 7, 2018, Portland, Oregon.

Public Safety and Livability at NW 6th and Flanders

Person Crimes

The corner of NW Sixth Avenue and NW Flanders is critical to addressing public safety issue on Sixth Avenue and Flanders as well as surrounding blocks that include NW 5th and NW 4th Avenues and cross streets from Davis to Hoyt and the Greyhound bus terminal.  Think of Katrina’s as the hub.

Scary.

Society Crimes also signal a kind of neighborhood that does not represent Portland’s Healthy Connected Neighborhood Strategy for even  the most basic activities such as walking, sleeping, and grocery shopping.  Many women who live and work here carry pepper spray. Friends from other neighborhoods hesitate to visit.  Most of the decision makers (community association, City agency staff, elected officials, business owners, developers) don’t live here, but may work here.  The Portland Development Commission offices are here, just around the corner from me on NW 5th and Everett.  

And hang on to your belongings, lock your car, and be careful who has access to your building.  Many of us live in buildings with lobbies that are not staffed during day hours - only late hours on weekends if at all. 

Back to the hub at the Corner of NW Sixth and Flanders. The corner store continues to deteriorate. 

Historical buildings contribute to the blight of our neighborhood. The City lacks any ability, despite programs and investments of the Portland Development Commission - not to mention URMs as this is one - to even stem the tide of blight and crime.  

See my video on the Story of U here on my blogpost, right column.

Across the street is P:EAR a program to creatively mentor homeless youth and a bus stop.  

It’s a popular corner too and across the street from the hub.

On the whole these folks are uninterested in non-buyers and can be courteous even. They are role models for our young homeless youth? Really.

As noted in a previous blog post on NW Flanders and NW 4th Avenue, it’s not uncommon to have men posted at corners, sometime two or three.  This is Nw 4th and Everett. The building is vacant and vacant buildings, historical and otherwise, parking lots, and empty retail space attract campers and drug dealers. It’s on the same block as my apartment. I pass it daily.

Getting off the Max at Sixth and Davis recently there were five people standing around on the NE corner and another four or five people at NW Sixth and Everett, an increasingly popular streetscape as many cars use Everett on their way out of the City which can also be viewed as a flow of customers.  I was not able to photograph the crowded corners and at Everett two women were fighting on the corner and in the street so I quickly turned and walked over to NW 4th and to my apartment.  Shouting, yelling, fighting. I don’t go out much in the evenings. Too scary.

It is complicated. Our first person accounts have been discounted, statistics and trend reports are unavailable, and the City as a whole is short on police officers.  A new look at the PDC’s role in our community would help and before the remaining amount of the $58M in funding (Five Year Action Plan) gets spent or is moved to the post office project. 

I might add this is the neighborhood where young adults from the suburbs come to be entertained. They park on and all around NW Flanders late at night.

Camping Now Across Street

March 13 Update - clear

March 4, 2017 Campsite on East Side of NW 4th Avenue between Davis and Couch Streets (see previous blogpost) was moved and a railing built to discourage further camping. But not to worry, new campsites across street have sprung up. Saturday morning, March 4, 2017

A Railing Deters Street Camping

This building is on NW 4th Avenue at Davis Street in the New Chinatown Japantown Historic District in the Old Town section of Portland, Oregon.  This property, long vacant with broken jagged windows, now has a second floor tenant, after the building was repaired and upgraded, but the first floor remains empty.  A railing was added by the landowner to deter camping and street gatherings under the portico especially useful during winter rains and very hot summer days.

February 2017, Ruth Ann Barrett, PDXdowntowner on YouTube and Twitter

Urbanization and Creative Thinking About Our Environment

Some things do change and this do-over of a freeway, one not unlike our I405, encourages freeing up the mind to think more creatively.  Not so much tear down as dig up.

Neighborly Start Up - the CJNA

We are neighbors who live in a twenty block area of the City designated by the National Park Service as the New Chinatown Japantown Historical District.  It is part of the Old Town Chinatown Neighborhood here in Portland (PDX), Oregon and is one of about fourteen such districts in Portland.

Certain events have spurred some of us to reach out to our neighbors to become active in making this a healthy connected neighborhood which is a strategy of the Portland Plan* and one which we intend to focus on for the reasons outlined in the plan:

• Address significant health issues
• Provide equitable access to healthy environments and opportunities
• Improve watershed health and reduce carbon emissions and air pollution
• Align (and promote creativity) for where and how we grow and invest to achieve common goals

Like many neighborhoods we cannot yet check all the boxes:

Our housing is decidedly urban in design and as such our neighborhood, unlike many other PDX neighborhoods, is made up primarily of renters.  

What's in a name?

We named our band of residents the Chinatown Japantown Neighbors Association (CJNA) because we believe the place where we live is special and important. We are worried about how we grow while remaining respectful of the past, our environment, AND provide for the next seven generations in the context of population growth, global warming, climate events, economic challenges especially the growing income gap, and a community where it seems business and real estate development drives decision making, not community development.

Number One Objective.

Most of the decisions made about our neighborhood are made by folks who do not have the experience of living here.   Our first objective then is to encourage our neighbors to start talking to those who make decisions and recommendations about our neighborhood, but do not live here.

The decision makers, recommender and influencers are volunteering and/or working in organizations such as the Portland Development Commission (PDC), the Old Town Chinatown Community Association (membership primarily made up of profit and non-profit organizations), the Historic Landmarks Commission, the Old Town Heritage Group, and a range of City bureaus to include Planning and Sustainability, Transportation, Neighborhood Involvement, Environmental Services, Police, and the County Health Department to name most of them and, of course, non-profit organizations such as Clean and Safe and Central City Concern.

Every Friday at 11AM at Rob's Cafe.

For now we want to get the ball rolling and keep expand the number of voices we hear from through our Facebook page (CJNAinPDX), this blogpost/website (write a blog article(s) for us by contacting mary@cjna.info), find us on nextdoor.com (our district/group)), and by visiting with our neighbors we meet on the street and in places where we can sit and talk starting with Rob's Cafe a.k.a. Monte Rossa at  333 NW 4th Avenue at Flanders every Friday, 11 AM to start. Look for the anchor scarf and the secret greeting is "hello neighbor."


Your neighbor, Ruth Ann Barrett

P.S. Big story coming up this Wednesday in the Willamette Week by Lisa Dunn.  Check it and us out.



*The Portland Plan is at bit.ly/PDXplan. It is updated every twenty-five years and is this year, 2015, our citizens, elected officials and employees of the City are working on an update.