Over this past week, I attended two OPAL meetings, the first being a general membership meeting and the second being a Research and Advisory meeting. I learned a lot about how OPAL defines itself in relation to TriMet and about possible coming changes to Portland’s transit system. There was a deep skepticism towards Trimet expressed throughout both meetings. One attendee at the general membership meeting on Friday said that he was constantly mistreated by drivers because of his homelessness and disability. A public policy coordinator for the Amalgamated Transit Union framed Trimet as using all the worst union busting tactics they can and reneging on benefits to keep federal capital project dollars coming in. While most of the main organizers are more circumspect about their criticisms of Trimet, OPAL operates fundamentally on the notion of creating alternative power.
The general membership meeting was conducted in English and Spanish, with translation provided on the fly. While obviously necessary considering the sizable contingent of Spanish speakers at the meeting, it did make the meeting a little tedious, taking 45 minutes for personal introductions. In the introductions, we were prompted to say a positive thing either OPAL or Trimet has done over the past year. Several in the audience chortled at the suggestion that Trimet had done anything positive. Orlando, the main facilitator of the meeting, followed up the audience’s skepticism by saying that if Trimet had made any beneficial changes, OPAL was probably behind it. Most of the people there brought up the half-hour transfer time extension Trimet enacted after strong pressure from OPAL and other transit organizers at the end of 2014.
The main content of that meeting was to recap TriMet’s approval of e-fare at a board meeting last Wednesday and to decide on OPAL’s main campaign over the next year. OPAL evidently got a partial victory in terms of the e-fare rollout; Trimet lowered the cost per card to $3, will be giving out 200,000 cards through various community organizations, will try to get Plaid Pantry in its retailer network, and is intending to study shared use of the HOP card. After this, we ran through OPAL’s bylaws, which listed their leadership criteria and the internal structure of OPAL. While most of the people there weren’t particularly invested in this section of the meeting, it was very useful for my purposes. Essentially, there are general members, who pay annual dues of $5-$25 and can voluntarily serve on the Action Planning Team and Research and Advisory Committee. To be on the Steering Committee, one must self-identify as transit dependent and one of: working-class/low-income, person of color/multi-cultural, person with a disability, sexual/gender minority, and/or youth. Their membership seems to largely reflect this standard, as I was the only able-bodied white male in attendance at the Friday meeting.
There were two potential campaigns proposed. The first was centered on advocating for a low income fare and including a push to allow group use of the e-fare cards, while the second involving issues of racial and economic profiling/targeting on Trimet by fare enforcement officers and drivers. Orlando emphasized that this decision was one of near-term prioritization, not exclusive choice. OPAL was pretty obviously better prepared to tackle issues of fare structure, and the vote to prioritize a low income fare and family e-fare campaign was unanimous. They had made a broad strategy outline of the fare structure campaign, which was displayed on a poster behind Orlando as he presented the two options. This strategy outline noted fareless transit as their ultimate goal, with a low income fare as the intermediate goal. It framed “transit dependent people” as their constituents; noted several Latino community organizations, a couple bike and pedestrian advocacy groups, the Community Alliance of Tenants, and the Center for Intercultural Organizing as allies; listed several Trimet board members as targets; and framed the GM and CFO of Trimet and developers as their opponents. It also listed their potential tactics (press releases, public testimony, rallies, and petitions) and organizational limitations (only 1 full time organizer, three dues paying members, and limited and foundation-focused funding). Someone brought up the relative vagueness of the racial/economic profiling campaign, which lacked any specific goals, and Orlando tried to emphasize that the fare structure campaign was at a similarly early point, with no exact numbers researched or attached.
The following day, I learned through the Research and Advisory meeting that Trimet is internally preparing to deal with both the fare structure and fare enforcement issues. There was a Lewis & Clark Law School alum, Jared Franz, who is apparently quite plugged into the Trimet world, being a major player in the transit drivers union, ATU. He had spoken with John Gardner, the Director of Diversity and Transit Equity at Trimet, and relayed the information that Trimet is currently planning on doing an “intensely focused” public effort on a low income fare this spring/summer, but doesn’t expect serious progress until the fall. On fare enforcement, Trimet is currently working internally on establishing a list of principles which it will present in a framework to the board in ~2 months, followed by nine months of community engagement, culminating in a presentation of proposed changes in a bit over a year.
At the Saturday meeting, OPAL organizers also discussed some legislative updates, including on inclusionary zoning, which they had highlighted as an important aspect of their livability agenda. Apparently, the bill passed the Senate and is likely to become law, but the organizers framed developers as having taken over the drafting of the bill and weren’t happy with its current state. It includes tax credits for developing under inclusionary zoning standards and allows in lieu fees. They also discussed the renter protection bill, which was similarly diluted down to requiring a 90 day notice for rent increases and a ban of rent increases in the first year. John, the research advisory chair, then brought up two Trimet bills which the organizers were glad had stalled in the current legislative session. The first would have expanded their ability to spend money from payroll taxes on active transportation and the second was a small, regressive wage tax to be used for bus service. Their opposition to these bills seemed rooted in a fundamental mistrust of Trimet. One of the attendees asked why they were opposed to the active transportation bill, and the chair responded by saying that they see any expansion of Trimet’s footprint as a bad idea, calling them an unaccountable and “autocratic” institution. The wage tax bill was opposed on similar terms, with organizers noting that nothing would prevent Trimet from repurposing existing bus funds for rail capital investments, should they receive explicit bus funding from this source.
The end of the meeting turned towards a discussion of Trimet’s service cut history, beginning with a question about whether or not Portland was truly back to pre-recession service levels. Some brief research found that their total revenue hours weren’t quite back to the 2009 peak in 2015. One person raised the issue of how this service was distributed (essentially asking whether or not East Portland areas have seen a restoration in service), but we decided that was going to be too difficult to get proper data on. Jared Franz said that going down that rabbit-hole was ultimately unproductive, as Trimet would insist that it had expanded capacity (via streetcar and light rail investments), even if total service hours were still slightly down. The meeting finished with a panning of Trimet’s “Attitudes and Awareness Survey,” which measures riders attitudes towards Trimet in its district, but aggregates the data from all surveyed riders, regardless of how often they use transit. In the committee’s view, this was to fluff up Trimet’s image and hide deeper dissatisfaction with Trimet’s service among those who depend on it daily.
Besides attending OPAL meetings, I’ve also worked some on doing a statistical analysis of the spatial data I found last week. After talking with my ENVS 330 professor, Jessica Kleiss, I realized the importance of doing some basic statistical analysis of the data I’ve gotten. She said that, when working with spatial data, it’s a little too easy to essentially trick your eyes into seeing a pattern among the noise. Jessica also pointed out that there is a common narrative, especially in suburban jurisdictions, that transit lowers home values by increasing poor people’s access to outlying neighborhoods and thus increasing crime. While most of the literature I’ve read on the relationship finds a measurable positive correlation between home values and transit, and this relationship can be justified from both neoclassical and Marxist frameworks, it’s worth keeping in mind both the possibility of a real negative correlation and the influence of the perception of a negative correlation.
I produced the below scatterplots by creating a centroid for the census blocks with a geoprocessing tool in QGIS and analyzing the distance between that point and the nearest transit stop. Looking at the scale of Portland as a whole, I found essentially no correlation between the increase in home values and proximity to rail stops. It is worthwhile, however, to drill into the exact location of these data points. I’ve already noted that East Portland has seen little gentrification around MAX in my investigation into the Gateway Regional Center. Additionally, center city gentrification is poorly captured by this metric as it is only the values of owner-occupied housing. Interestingly, I found a stronger correlation between proximity to all frequent transit stops and rising home values, with the percent increase in home values since 2000 declining by 22% for each mile away from a frequent bus or rail stop. The r-squared is only 0.07, suggesting that this proximity explains about 7% of the variation. Because most homes in Portland are within half a mile, the association is rather muddled. I would be interested in broadening the scope of my analysis to the metro area to see if there is a more significant correlation at the regional level. Finally, I plotted the value of homes in 2000 relative to the median area value against the subsequent rise in value from 2000 to 2014, to test if some sort of rent gap mechanism was measurable at this scale of analysis. I found that it basically wasn’t, with a modest positive correlation and an r-squared of 0.015.
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