I had my first direct involvement with OPAL, the non-profit parent group of Bus Riders Unite!, this past Saturday, which marks the first event of my independent study. This particular organizing drive focused on the electronic fare system TriMet hopes to roll out new year. The organizers I met gave their talking points about the problematic aspects of TriMet’s planned card system, including its inability to use a single card for multiple people traveling, the $3 fee, the requirement to load $5 minimum at a time, and the relatively limited amount of retail locations at which one will be able to purchase/reload the card. This specific drive focused on educating people about the upcoming roll-out (the vast majority of people we talked to were completely unaware of it), getting them to testify about the negative impacts of the aforementioned aspects of TriMet’s plan at an upcoming board meeting, and attempting to get people involved with OPAL.
We rode the 4 from the offices at 49th and Division out to 82nd Avenue, where my group then rode the 72 north on 82nd and then west before deboarding and then retracing our steps back to the office. For those unfamiliar with the local geography of Portland, 82nd Ave roughly divides the older, gentrified/gentrifying streetcar suburbs of the Inner Eastside (i.e. the parts that look roughly accord to the Portlandia image) from the disinvested, low-income, auto-oriented postwar landscape of east Portland. 82nd avenue itself is a five-lane state highway, flanked by surface parking lots, low slung commercial buildings, and auto dealers. Large swaths of land near 82nd, including the Gateway Regional Center and Lents Town Center, have been categorized as Urban Renewal Zones since 2000 and 1998, respectively. Despite the apparent wishes of the city to see dramatic investment in east Portland, the area is still far closer to the environment described in the late 90s planning documents than the gleaming, vibrant urban district planners imagined existing in nearly twenty years time. Rather than becoming another site of “urban revitalization,” east Portland has become the locus for those displaced by the gentrification seen in closer-in areas, having seen a substantial increase of its non-white population and a continuance of its relatively high poverty rates. Nevertheless, this situation is by no means set in stone. The fact that home values have increased dramatically less there than in the Inner Eastside over the past twenty years doesn’t necessarily indicate the future landscape of gentrification. As Kolko (2000) points out, gentrification has a tendency to spread through neighboring census tracts.
The experience of bus organizing was a little reminiscent of canvassing. We were armed with clipboards, organizational identifiers, and a set of talking points, thrust into the outside world to talk to strangers. I felt a bit reticent to organize, paranoid that I would just be annoying people trying to go about their lives. Most people seemed somewhat more receptive after realizing we weren’t asking for money, and I did have some positive interactions, with most people agreeing with the points about how TriMet’s plans are not in line with transit equity. Many were worried about how their specific monthly passes would be affected. I met far more people without internet and banking access than I had anticipated, which made me understand the importance of OPAL’s point about retail access. Overall, I managed to get about five people to sign up for email or phone updates from OPAL, with two or three of those expressing real interest in trying to get involved to change how TriMet rolls out the HOP pass. I was surprised at just how packed the 72 got, especially considering the relative lack of visible density around 82nd Ave. and the fact that this was early afternoon on a Saturday—hardly a peak commuting time. By the time we passed the MAX line heading south, the bus was crush loaded and there was little room to maneuver to talk to different people. The demographics of the 72 were far more diverse than those of Portland as a whole; for a moment it was hard to believe I was in the whitest major city in the U.S.
After getting back to the OPAL office, there was a brief debriefing session. More members of the organization were there, set to talk to members of grant foundation from Seattle about a two year grant application. I was told that I was welcome to either stay or head out, and chose to stay to gain some more insight into the structure and internal orientation of the organization. On those counts, it was quite fruitful. OPAL seems to have adopted a fluid, yet still formalized hierarchy, with several directors and other titled members, a steering committee, and a small number of paid staff, in addition to a fluctuating number of volunteer organizers. They apparently get most of their money from grants, but will fundraise when necessary to cover organizational costs. The group’s identity seems based on a relative egalitarianism and informality; organizers emphasized their work as consisting of community involvement to combat “progressive paternalism” within TriMet and direct engagement to foster collective power. They mentioned their practice of participatory budgeting as part of their transparency and egalitarianism. The network-based nature of this non-profit world was also made readily apparent, with OPAL heads mentioning several organizations they work closely with, including the Anti-Displacement Coalition, and talked about the various people that they’ve ended up working with. They were also asked specifically about the connection they saw between housing affordability and transit equity, which they framed as a matter of creating a non-profit network to rally behind a broadly-framed livability politics. I also learned about a planned low-income fare drive, which they framed as being a goal which they could only devote sufficient resources and time to with the provision of the grant. Ironically, OPAL could well become a victim of displacement themselves; they mentioned that their rent is set to double within the next year, though they have no specific plans for relocation and may scrounge up the money to remain at 49th for the time being.
In terms of the scope of my independent study, this first organizing drive has assured me that OPAL and bus organizing provides a good window into understanding the central issues of gentrification and transit in Portland, as the organizers are seemingly well-acquainted with those issues. I am realizing that I may need to do some additional ethnographic work to get the full participant perspective I was hoping to gain. Even an organization as informal as OPAL creates some institutional constraints in terms of research—I spent more of my time reciting points than I had anticipated.
Over this first week of my study, I have also been amassing some resources for understanding gentrification within the situated context of Portland. I’m generally aware of both the broad theories of gentrification (supply-side cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment and demand-side theories of an urban aesthetic and the rise of the creative class) and what gentrification has looked like in Portland, but I need to do more research to critically connect the two. Over the course of writing this post, I’ve found some very interesting municipal documents on the east Portland Urban Renewal Zones and plan on posting a narrative/content analysis of those documents in the coming week. The Gateway document is particularly interesting, as it eschews the vague and wonky bureaucratic language for vivid and concrete predictions of what Gateway was projected to look like in 2019. Evaluating its claims with present data certainly seems like a worthwhile undertaking to understand gentrification in relation to transit and the extent to which a municipal government can shape spatial investment.