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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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Playing Journalist and Mapping Wetlands

Hello!

The past few months have taken me in directions that haven’t directly related to this blog, though I’ve still been working on plenty of projects. The wheelchair-related interviews I did over the summer have been hugely influential in creating momentum for the DIY wheelchair night, and the campaign for Ervin Jones is making progress. In addition, here are a few other things I have been up to: Swept With Nowhere to Go: ArcGIS Storymap In August, I made a webmap using the ArcGIS Storymap platform. Portland’s mayor made an emergency declaration that unhoused campers along safe routes to school improvement zones would be prioritized for sweeps, and I wanted to show how this, among the other emergency declarations and exclusion zones, makes it nearly impossible to sleep while homeless in an area that is not in some sort of exclusion zone. Viewed geographically, you can also see how enforcement of these policies will push unhoused campers deeper into residential areas, increasing conflict between housed and unhoused neighbors. I feel proud of the GIS and data work that went in to creating the page, but less proud of the writing and the design of the page itself. The GIS data I used to make the exclusion zone features on the map all came from public data sources, but not all of them were easy to find. The city and county both have websites where they host public GIS data, but some of the features, for example the wildfire hazard zone polygons and safe-routes-to-schools lines required some digging in the back end of the city’s Arcgis REST server. One of the successes of this project was learning how to do the digital detective work necessary to find and interact with the data. However, I think the writing suffered from trying to address too many topics at once. For example, I wanted to do some homelessness mythbusting and make it clear that it is illegal to camp while homeless anywhere in the city of Portland. Because of Portland’s liberal reputation and visible homelessness, many right-wing media sources claim that Portland “allows” homeless camping. This isn’t true: visible homelessness is not the result of an overly permissive city, it is the result of a city that doesn’t have the police and prison resources to achieve their goals.

Second, I wanted to highlight how each of these policies, while sold to the public as measures to increase safety for homeless people, results in the increased criminalization of homeless people. For example, camps along high crash roads are prioritized for sweeps; this is supposed to reduce the number of unhoused people killed by cars each year. This is a good goal! But the result, police evicting campers from campsites along roads, ignores the fact that the only reason people set up camp along busy roads in the first place is because they have nowhere else to go.

Camps are also prioritized for removal if they are in wildfire hazard zones: again, a policy that makes sense at first glance, especially since fires at camps are common. But fires are common because people often burn trash, scrap wood, and pallets in homemade fire pits to stay warm and cook food. Campers could be given more appropriate fire containment systems like steel barrels cut in half, or they could be given fire extinguishers (something mutual aid groups have already done). But instead, the city sends in police to evict people, confiscate their belongings, and tell them to go somewhere else. Where, though? Shelters are full. Lastly, I wanted users to be able to use the toggles on the map to be able to hide and show each exclusion zone. By turning them all on at once, you can see how individual policies, which may make sense at first glance, result in a system where there is nowhere left for people to exist while homeless.

I’m not sure my writing in the article was effective, and I was beaten to the scoop by mere hours: a few hours before I published my article, the Oregonian also released a map showing the same thing I did. However, theirs was not interactive, and also not complete: they did not include scenic and environmental zoning code areas like my map did. Overall, I learned a lot about finding city data and using the ArcGIS Storymap platform for the first time. I wish my writing had been stronger and integrated the storymap platform features in a better way.

This week, I start night classes at Portland Community College again, where I’ll be taking a course in web-based mapping applications. I plan to use the skills I learn to re-do the storymap and to learn more about how to make interactive maps for the readers of this blog.

Bark! For Mt. Hood: Wetland Mapping

I have also been volunteering lately with an organization called Bark!, whose mission is to defend and restore Mt. Hood. They perform government watchdog operations, such as visiting proposed timber sales and verifying that the Forest Service’s claims about the site are accurate. They also have a legal team, and I’ve been working with a citizen science project that is mapping and groundtruthing wetland data. First, an environmental scientist at Portland State University uses satellite imagery to find and classify wetlands in the Mt. Hood area. Wetlands are classified by the type of water (marine, estuary, lakes, rivers, ponds), the type of vegetation present (trees, shrubs, submerged plants, etc), and the water regime (seasonal versus continuous saturation, eg). The environmental scientist makes educated guesses about these classifications for each wetland using satellite imagery, and then a group of volunteers led by a Bark employee go to the site in-person and verify that the wetland classification and map is accurate. We document plant and animal types, take photographs, and take soil samples. The most fun part of these hikes is the opportunity to do environmental detective work: you learn how the presence of water stained leaves, algal crusts, and certain kinds of plants provide clues about the water regime in each area.

The verified wetland data is later used for various conservation-oriented uses. I’m excited to do more wetland mapping throughout this month and the next. If I can find the time, I am also considering volunteering to count salmon in the Johnson Creek watershed this winter. I am really glad to be doing something environmental again and for having a reason to hike around off-trail in the woods. With school, work, and these projects, I'll be busy through the fall! I'll find the time to write updates as I get them. Thank you!

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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Justice for Ervin Jones

In April of 2021, I posted an article that I had been working on for a few months. The article was about the murder of Ervin Jones, a Black man, by police in Portland, 1945. The first mention I heard of the Ervin Jones story was a single note in a Portland history book I was reading, but somehow it got stuck in my brain and I started researching. I found a few academic papers that reconstructed the events of the murder, and found out that public outcry and demand for justice in wake of the case helped coalesce the early civil rights movement in 1940’s and 50’s Portland.

I also learned about Guild’s Lake Courts, the neighborhood where the Jones family lived, a wartime housing development and sister city to Vanport that housed 10,000 white and Black families at its peak in 1944. I couldn’t believe that an entire neighborhood of 10,000, in an area I frequently drove through, was something I had never heard mentioned before. So I started reading.

One of the reasons I couldn't let go of the Ervin Jones story was its similarities with the murder of Breonna Taylor. In both, plainclothes police were serving no-knock warrants in which they failed to announce themselves. In both, the residents of the home thought they were being robbed. In both, the person killed was innocent and not a suspect in any crime.

The officers involved in Ervin Jones’ murder were exonerated of all wrongdoing by an all-white jury. Ervin Jones’ death certificate lists his cause of death as “Justifiable Homicide.” Learning the story of Ervin Jones showed me, in my whiteness and suburban upbringing, a lesson that I had to learn, that despite 80 years and thousands of miles of historical distance, the similarities in these stories weren't coincidence. They were evidence of the revolving wheel of systematic violence against the Black community.

Eventually I published an article on this blog, drawing from the academic and historical sources I could. I never expected that a few months later, I would get an email from the grandaughter of Ervin Jones. Her name is Rhonda Winbush, and she lives near Shreveport, Louisiana, where her family returned after the traumatic events in Guild’s Lake. Her mother, Ardodia Jones Perry, and uncle, Ervin Jr, are survivors of the 1945 shooting. Ardodia was three years old at the time, and her head was grazed by one of the police officer’s bullets. I started talking with Rhonda, and I referred her to an investigative journalist at Street Roots, to connect with the historians I had talked to and to dig even deeper into the story of Ervin Jones. Street Root’s Melanie Henshaw published her incredible, in-depth, impeccably researched article on June 15th, and it can be found here. To quote from the Street Roots article, “Rhonda, who has a daughter and granddaughter herself, and Ardodia, a doting grandmother and great-grandmother to them, want closure to this painful chapter. They’re calling on city officials to acknowledge Ervin’s death and condemn the city’s tacit endorsement of the police’s conduct.” With Rhonda’s support, I have created a form letter you can use to help demand justice for Ervin Jones from city officials.

Dear [City Councilmember],

In 1945, plainclothes detectives from the Portland Police Bureau murdered Ervin Jones, a Black man, in his own home, in front of his family. Despite the fact that police had no warrant, despite the fact that they were looking for a white suspect, despite the fact that they failed to identify themselves as police, and despite inconsistent testimonies in court, an all-white jury acquitted the officers of any wrongdoing and listed the cause of Ervin Jones’ death as a “justifiable homicide.” Following the trial, the Portland City Council voted to pay all legal fees incurred by the lead officer, but offered no assistance to Elva, the widow of Ervin Jones.

Today, the Jones family is asking for the justice our city failed to give them in 1945.

Ervin Jones brought his family to Portland in search of a better life, a dream never to be realized. After Ervin's murder, Elva moved the family back to Shreveport, Louisiana, where they live today. She and Ervin are survived by their children Ardodia and Ervin Jr., who were three and five at the time of the shooting, as well as their granddaughter Rhonda. This is a family that could have stayed in Portland and become a part of our city’s vibrant social fabric, but were subject to racial violence and the generational trauma of 80 years without justice.

I am writing this letter to join Ervin Jones’ descendants in calling on you, as the city leaders of Portland, to acknowledge the injustice of Ervin’s death and remove his cause of death listed as a "justifiable homicide."

Sincerely, [Your Name]

Mayor Ted Wheeler: [email protected]

Commissioner Mingus Mapps: [email protected]

Commissioner Carmen Rubio: [email protected]

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty: [email protected]

Commissioner Dan Ryan: [email protected]

District Attorney Mike Schmidt: [email protected]

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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DIY Powerchair Repair with Dan of Totally Normal

For a long time, I have wanted to connect with Dan Payton, the person behind the youtube channel Totally Normal. Dan is an expert in powerchair repair: in his videos, you can watch him repair lift and seating components, replace tires, and fix joystick centering errors. He also maintains a website, BrokenWheelchairs.com, where he provides links to any available technical manuals and error code documentation he can find.

I wanted to talk to Dan because I wanted to build my knowledge about power wheelchair repair, and after speaking with Madison Dennis about the (now-passed!) Colorado HB 1031, I was curious to hear his perspective on some right-to-repair questions. Powerchairs can be intimidating to work on. My experience as a bicycle mechanic means I have enough background knowledge to be reasonably comfortable helping people with manual wheelchair repairs, but powerchairs include batteries, hydraulic lifts, and electric motors that add levels of complexity. Plus, some of the components are covered by plastic guards, which can hide fasteners and make the method of disassembly less than obvious. So, I met up with Dan in his workspace near Portland, where we talked about all things powerchairs and repair. Almost 30 wheelchairs sit in the warehouse space. Some I recognize from vlogs, like the off-road powerchair, and others I don’t. He also shows me a workbench he has set up with software and cables from different powerchair brands and systems, allowing him to plug different components in, diagnose errors, and see how things work.

One of my favorite things about watching Dan’s vlogs is the joy and enthusiasm he brings to repairs and customizations. During our wheelchair maintenance workshops, people often approach issues with discomfort and unease, worried that they will make something worse in the process of fixing it, or end up in a repair that goes over their heads. When you’re talking about a mobility device that works as an extension of someone’s body, it’s easy to imagine the gravity of these concerns. But Dan's joy is infectious, and it's easy to see why he attracts youtube followers- he makes repair fun to watch, even when we're talking about crucial mobility devices.

DIY Powerchair Maintenance

In my last article, I shared a survey about power wheelchair repair from the Public Interest Research Group. One of the questions was: “Considering the problems or issues that prompted you to make a service request, what percentage of those do you feel could be performed by a friend, family member or independent repair professional with the right information, access to parts, etc.?” In his youtube videos, I’ve seen Dan perform some incredibly simple fixes: removing a plastic cover and cleaning something with rubbing alcohol, for example. But I’ve also seen Dan solder wires and customize software, so I wanted to get Dan’s perspective on the scope of DIY powerchair repairs. First off, he says, pointing to one of the joystick control units used to operate powerchair functions, “The housing on these things, they just tend to break down and crack over time.” He shows me the screws that hold the plastic cover on the joystick unit, and the hex bolts that mount the plastic to the armrest. If replacement parts were available, this would be a relatively simple fix for a relatively common problem, and someone with a little bit of technical proficiency could probably handle it. “Tires and caster wheels are also a regular thing everyone needs,” he says, noting that powerchair tires typically have a 6-month lifespan. He starts showing me how to access the bolts on a few different kinds of chairs. Most powerchairs use solid (non-pneumatic) tires, and the wheels separate into halves to facilitate install and removal. But each chair is a little different: he points to one chair where a plastic hubcap comes off to expose the wheel bolts, and shows me a different style where there are two plastic clips that need to be removed first.

With the wheel covers off, he asks “see that big yellow sticker there?” and points to a yellow warning sticker on a large bolt in the center of the wheel. “The manufacturer had to put that sticker there because when people were trying to change tires, some people would take this bolt off, and you do not want to take off this center bolt.”

It turns out, that big center bolt is used to set the bearing preload for the main drive wheels, similar to the way that a hub bolt works on a car, and then the axle uses a tapered fitting, so the bolt needs to be set to a very specific tension. Even if you're a mechanically inclined person, the large, obvious bolt in the center of the wheel seems like it needs to be removed in order to remove the wheel, but it doesn't, and doing so can cause problems. “But, the rest of it, if you’ve ever changed a tire on a bike, is pretty similar!” He shows me the bolts that mount the wheel onto the axle, and the other bolts which separate the rim halves from eachother. He also mentions that changing batteries might be within the scope of what friends or family members could do, but we run into the same sorts of “yes, but” disclaimers. “It definitely depends on the brand,” he says.

“The chair next to you- you tilt it back, the front cover comes off, there are two connectors, and then the batteries literally slide right out.” But other brands aren’t so simple. “In other chairs, the batteries come out of the back, but there’s a lot of cabling and wiring down there, and it’s not blatantly obvious how it all comes apart.”

The theme here seems to be that many of the common maintenance tasks on powerchairs aren’t necessarily complicated, but there is some sort of “if” or “but” that keeps these things from being easy to DIY. For example, the plastic covers of control units are relatively easy to replace, if you can get parts from the manufacturer, which aren’t always available. Tires are easy to replace, however it may not be obvious which bolts connect to which parts of the wheel. Batteries can be easy to replace, but it’s not a standardized process between brands.

Without documentation and clear how-to guides, it is easy to see how a friend or family member could take a wrong turn and mess something up, even in these basic, routine maintenance tasks. But it’s also clear that not all maintenance issues require a technical mindset or specialized tools, and a little bit of how-to support goes a long way in making sure people can approach repairs comfortably, confidently, and safely.

Into the deep end: Powerchair Hacking

Beyond the regular and routine maintenance tasks, I also wanted to ask Dan about his experiences with customizing the functions of his chair. During our conversation, I came to really appreciate the pragmatic and measured way Dan approaches safety concerns.

“There are some hacks that are legitimately dangerous!” he says, and tells me about how the automatic parking brakes on powerchairs loudly click into place when the chair starts and stops moving. “That clicking is obviously obnoxious when you are in an environment with a bunch of people in chairs, or a quiet house or whatever,” so he figured out a way to bypass one of the chair’s sensors to prevent the parking brake from automatically engaging. He tells me that this can be great if you’re somewhere with level surfaces like the floors of your house, but if you forget to re-enable the automatic parking brake before you start heading down an accessibility ramp, the results could be disastrous!

“This is where I can see the manufacturer’s side of things,” he tells me. “I like to share how this stuff works and be able to get people going again, but at the same time, I don’t want to give people just enough tools to be able to get themselves into trouble.” He also mentions that on his website and in his repair guides, he leans into disclaimers pretty hard: he tells people “look, this will void your warranty, and unless you have a backup chair, if something goes wrong here, your chair is not going to work anymore.”

Through the course of our conversation, I developed a real appreciation for Dan’s approach. He clearly loves taking things apart, tweaking different variables, and is happy to test out customizations on himself; but he’s also someone who is keenly aware of the stakes at hand and does not encourage people to jump into the deep end of powerchair hacking unless they are really, really sure they want to do so.

“Right now, the way it is, you don’t want to go exploring in the software and programming of these chairs, until there is proper documentation that can tell you how things work and actually integrate together.” It’s entirely possible to do some sort of customization or enable some feature that will prevent the control box from communicating with the rest of the chair software, leaving you stranded, he mentions.

He tells me that sometimes, if there’s some sort of error, you may just get an error message on your screen, or the chair software will work, but only in a degraded mode. Other times, in order to reset after an error, users will need to turn their chair off and back on again, which can take more than 15 seconds. If you’re messing around with a backup chair in your own home, this might not be a huge problem, but if it happens to your primary chair while you’re in a crosswalk, the consequences could be much higher.

Navigating Risk

I left our meeting and drove home, my head swimming with ideas about powerchair repair. For one thing, I still had the feeling that powerchair repair just isn’t an obvious endeavor. The same way that you can’t tell what an alternator does just by opening the hood of a car and looking at one, it’s hard to tell where to start with a powerchair repair unless you have a little bit of background knowledge about how they work.

But I also left with an understanding that this doesn’t necessarily make powerchair repair intimidating or impossible; instead, it underlines the fact that people attempting DIY repair need a little bit of support: support like Dan explaining which bolts to loosen and which to leave untouched, or a schematic diagram showing how a control unit connects to an armrest.

As I’ve mentioned in other articles, DIY repair isn’t always something people do by choice. For people who live in rural areas or who don’t have the financial resources to pay for an ATP’s time, DIY repair might be a necessity, and hopefully the passage of Colorado’s HB 1031 will help give those people some of the support they need. Even if people aren’t attempting their own repairs, Dan’s vlogs still help people build technical literacy about how their devices work, which can help people advocate for themselves to their medical providers.

I also thought back to my conversation with Madison Dennis, where we talked about navigating safety and risk when repairing powered wheelchairs. “Our viewpoint at right to repair is not that people should be forced to work on their own wheelchairs that they aren’t comfortable with- it’s really just so people can navigate their own risks,” she said. Listening to Dan talk about testing things out on his own chair made me think about navigating risk, and what it means to trust wheelchair users to do that for themselves, instead of hiding service manuals and schematics from the users of these devices.

If you want to support Dan's wheelchair repair work, you can support him on patreon, become a youtube member, or use this amazon click-thru.

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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Colorado HB 1031, The Right to Repair Powered Wheelchairs, with Madison Dennis and PIRG

Right after we finished our presentation on wheelchair repair at The Street Trust’s Active Transportation Summit, I checked my inbox and saw that one of my co-presenters had forwarded me an email with a link to a survey about how Right to Repair legislation could impact the lives of wheelchair users. The email came from Madison Dennis, New Economy Associate at the Public Interest Research Group. I opened the link and was excited to see that many of the questions in the survey were pulling at the same threads we had just talked about in our presentation. I sent Dennis an email and asked for an interview.

The Public Interest Research Group or PIRG is part of a coalition pushing for the passage of HB 1031 in Colorado. This bill has already passed the state legislature and is on Governor Jared Polis’ desk awaiting a signature. This bill would establish a legal right to repair for powered wheelchairs, ensuring that Durable Medical Equipment manufacturers (DME’s) make repair manuals, specialized tools, and replacement parts available to powered wheelchair users at reasonable prices. Currently, DMEs hold tight control of these resources, monopolizing options for repair when a battery, seat cushion, or joystick needs to be replaced.

Passage of this bill would revolutionize the wheelchair repair industry, at least within the state of Colorado, and help balance power between DME companies and the users who depend on their devices. “When you rely on your power wheelchair for basic mobility, any delay or barrier to repair is a quality of life issue.” Dennis says. “It’s no longer just about basic consumer rights, it’s about giving people what they need so they can get to their healthcare, their work, or whatever it may be.”

Coalition Building and Surprising Allies

PIRG is part of a larger coalition built around creating and passing this legislation. The Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition has helped support this bill, and within the legislature it has found bipartisan support. The bill’s primary sponsor is representative David Ortiz, (D., Littleton) who uses a manual wheelchair himself. “Right to repair has a really remarkable group of people who are passionate about this issue,” says Dennis. “Some of them are just regular people who have technical skills and want to make the best use of the products they already have; some of them are repair professionals or people who have small businesses who feel like they are losing out on customers because manufacturers are basically trying to block you into fixing it through them, or buying new.”

I ask Dennis if there were any surprising allies within the coalition of supporters, and she talks about finding support from school administrators who were having trouble keeping their technology fleets up-to-date, and from digital divide activists trying to keep devices working so they can get them into the hands of people that need them instead of becoming e-waste. Dennis pointed out that when you get into the nuts and bolts of this issue, you realize there really are no surprising allies, because right to repair affects everyone in some way. “Right to repair isn’t as accessible of an issue right off the bat as something like climate change, or saving the bees- it can be hard to understand at face value,” but when you consider the implications of these kinds of bills, you realize it’s really an extremely widespread issue that touches everyone in our community. “Every single person owns a phone, or has a technological device they rely on, or requires medical attention where they need a functioning ventilator, or needs a functioning tractor to provide food,” she says. Although this specific bill is limited to powered wheelchairs, it helps build momentum for the larger right to repair movement, the same way that Massachusetts’ 2012 Automotive Right to Repair bill helped lay groundwork for other right to repair bills in other states.

Safety & Trust

When we talk about the DIY Wheelchair Repair night we host, people often ask us how we make sure we’re not compromising wheelchair users’ safety; and I wasn’t surprised to see this coming up in news coverage of HB 1031. When reached for comment about repair, representatives from DME companies often say that wheelchairs are complex medical devices that shouldn’t be worked on by just anybody. I ask Dennis to talk about her experiences with this concern.

“Our viewpoint at right to repair is not that people should be forced to work on their own wheelchairs that they aren’t comfortable with- it’s really just so people can navigate their own risks. If you own it, it should be your decision, and if you don’t feel comfortable, then you should have the opportunity to wait for someone you trust. But if you don’t trust your normal provider to get it done right, or on time, we believe you should be able to make your own choices about when it gets done.”

Plus, Dennis points out, there are significant safety risks when your chair is broken, and people often don’t take those risks into account when considering overall safety. Wheelchair breakdowns cause loss of mobility, and forcing people to make do with broken equipment while they wait on technicians can cause injuries and other issues. Denver’s CBS news station quoted Julie Reikin, a 30-year powerchair user, who said “The argument that’s most insulting to us is that people with disabilities will make mistakes and hurt ourselves. We’re not stupid.” Part of right to repair is trust: trusting that wheelchair users know what they need, whether that means calling in the professionals, or handling something on their own. “If we can be trusted to independently fix cars that we’re speeding down the freeway on, then we should also have that same option for these super critical mobility devices,” says Dennis.

Wait Times

One of the questions in the PIRG survey asks people about the average wait times they experience in the course of seeking wheelchair repairs from the companies’ official providers. When speaking with folks during our Wheelchair Repair nights, people often blame the companies for excessive wait times, but the companies blame Medicare and the insurance industry for complications that lead to slow service.

“I do think there are issues with the billing and the processing, and we’ve been working to make some of those changes, too.” says Dennis, pointing to a companion bill in Colorado. But she also points out that expanding access to service manuals, tools, and parts should increase the number of repair technicians, since small repair businesses could effectively compete with the manufacturer’s repair service. This could also help improve the levels of service for people who live in rural areas.

Right to repair is also a common topic in the agricultural equipment industry, and Dennis notes that if you happen to live close to a manufacturer-approved repair shop, these issues aren’t as widespread. “But there are tons of people who rely on these devices who are a hundred miles away from a manufacturer certified repair chain. It’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of delays, and we want repair to be accessible to everyone, not just the people who live nearby.”

Do It Yourself

Another of the questions in the PIRG survey asked people to consider the issues that prompted them to make a wheelchair service request, and estimate what percentage of those repairs “could be performed by a friend, family member or independent repair professional with the right information, access to parts, etc.?” In my next article, I’ll be speaking with Dan, who runs the youtube channel “Totally Normal” where he is a DIY educator on powered wheelchair repair. In his videos, I’ve watched him perform simple fixes that involve taking a cover off for cleaning, and also watched him tackle complex customizations that involve soldering and re-programming control boards. Given the wide range of issues that can affect modern power wheelchairs, I ask Dennis to talk a little about this question.

“Those of us who have been working on this issue, we have been collecting what we call repair horror stories from people who rely on these power wheelchairs,” she says, and “we were hearing from a lot of people about cases where the delays were strictly because they needed to have a battery or a wheel replaced, and those are things that could be pretty easily and cheaply replaced by independent fixers.” She also mentioned that of course, the survey is not complete, but listening to wheelchair users directly helped inform the questions they asked.

“We are curious organizers and we want to know the depth of the issue, beyond the one-off bill or the one-off answer, we want to know how these things impact the community, and hear as many of these horror story conversations as we can so we know how widespread this issue is, how it’s impacting people, and how we can create change.”

You can learn more about the PIRG’s Right to Repair campaign here.

If you are a manual or powered wheelchair user, you can find the Right to Repair survey, here.

Edit 6/18/22: the PIRG survey is complete and you can find the results here!

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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$276 Million Unspent

This morning I saw this headline from Oregon Public Broadcasting: ‘People are dying’ while state bureaucracy holds up Oregon treatment dollars, say Measure 110 proponents.

Measure 110 was a November 2020 statewide ballot measure to decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs like methamphetamine and opiates. One of the other provisions in the bill diverted marijuana tax dollars to a fund that would be disbursed to drug addiction treatment and mental health facilities. But the OPB article reports that “the lion’s share of that money for the current two-year budget cycle — $276 million — has failed to reach providers.”

The oversight board responsible for distributing these funds was moved under the umbrella of the Oregon Health Authority, who have caused cascading bureaucratic nightmares that keep the volunteer council from getting anything done. From OPB, again: “Most recently, problems arose when the agency repeatedly sent grant application evaluations back to council members to re-do, saying they were incomplete. Eventually, the work became too burdensome for some of the volunteer council members, many of whom have full-time jobs and other obligations. ‘There were over 300 little boxes we had to fill — some were irrelevant, but they are requiring we put an answer there,’ council member Amy Madrigal told The Lund Report.”

These delays have real, ground-level impacts for nonprofits that depend on state funding. OPB quotes Central City Concern, one of the largest homlessness and addiction services providers in Portland, as saying they have empty beds they cannot fill because they are still waiting on the funding to support those programs. Tera Hurst, executive director of Health Justice Recovery Alliance, said “This is what happens when money goes out to communities of color,” she said. “All of a sudden, everybody wants to dot i’s and cross t’s even more, and we knew this was going to happen.”

___

The OPB article reminded me of a loose thread on my blog. In 2018, I started writing about the city of Boulder, Colorado’s “linkage fee.” A linkage fee is charged to developers when they build new market-rate developments, and the fee money goes into a housing trust. The housing trust is then tasked with distributing that money to various housing programs, whether they be supportive services like rent assistance or constructing brand new subsidized housing.

In 2018, the article I wrote was about the news that Boulder would begin charging developers $30 per square foot in linkage fees. Boulder also has a “cash-in-lieu” program, where developers can choose to either set aside 25% of the apartments they build as affordable, or not build any affordable units and pay into the housing fund. At the time of writing that article, the city reported that between 2010 and 2017, they had collected $47 million in cash-in-lieu fees.

But the loose thread in my article at the time was that I could never really figure out if or how they distributed any of that money. So today I did some digging. First of all, all of the links in my blog post are dead. Some of them go to 401-restricted pages or 404-page not founds. Another one asks for login credentials, which I obviously do not have for www-static.bouldercolorado.gov. However, I did manage to find a Tableau Dashboard that documents all of the payments in to the housing fund from 1990 to April 2020:

According to them, the city has collected almost $130 million dollars in fees. Again, this site does not list disbursements from this fund, only payments in. But what surprised me is that it lists due payments, even some dating back to 2015. Clicking through some of these due payments is bizarre. There’s one for a remodel on a BMW dealership warehouse, and one for a new airplane hanger by the local airport. There is a new 5-over-1 development near my first apartment in Boulder with $1,054,100 due in linkage fees from 2019. It is next-door to the office for tech company splunk, and located in the S’PARK market. I am incapable of making these things up.

When I buy groceries, I am not allowed to leave the store if I say “don’t charge me sales tax, I’ll pay it later.” I am also not allowed to skip paying my income taxes. If I default on my student loans I could have my wages garnished. Are there mechanisms are in place to make sure developers pay outstanding fees?

...

Despite my lucky tableau dashboard find, I couldn’t find a similar resource to catalog disbursements from the $130 million that the city of Boulder is sitting on. I tried looking through the city’s open data website but couldn’t find the info I was looking for. Some things were close; for example this dataset which lists grants made to community organizations, but not what I needed. It feels conspiratorial and wrong to think that the city isn’t doing anything with the money. And yet; if I was a city manager who wanted to have the appearance of doing something about the housing affordability crisis without actually doing anything, it would be a pretty perfect plan to lazily collect exorbitant fees and then rarely, if ever, disburse them to affordable housing projects. Or, maybe they aren’t just sitting on the money, and are actually investing it in worthwhile projects. But if so, I can’t find receipts.

...

People need relief now, whether from the opioid crisis or the housing crisis. I feel for the members of the Oregon measure 110 committee. They are people, many of whom have lived experience with addiction, who took on a volunteer obligation on top of their busy lives, just to help get money into the hands of people who need it. But they can’t; so $276 million dollars is just sitting. If this bottleneck isn’t resolved, service providers will start to close up shop or lay off staff.

Of course, there is going to be debate about the proper way to resolve crises. There are meaningful and important criticisms of housing market manipulations like linkage fees, and there are meaningful and important criticisms of the american rehab and addiction industries. To be clear, I think governments ought to take time to assess the impact of the programs they fund, to ensure that they are equitable and effective. The part that feels criminal is the disparity between the urgency on the ground, the daily reality of folks who need help; and the canceled zoom meetings and pushed-back deadlines of the state government.

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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Nesting, Wintering, Sheltering, Learning

I. News Despair

Last week, I needed a news break. First, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) revealed that that 70% of the people killed in pedestrian/traffic crashes in 2020 were homeless. This is a huge increase from already unacceptable 2019 levels, where 21% of pedestrians killed in traffic crashes were homeless. As a reminder, at any given time, only about 0.5% of Portland’s population is homeless.

In response to this, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced an immediate ban of camping (read as: existing while homeless) along “high crash corridors.” It might make sense to think of this as a sensible knee-jerk policy reaction to help prevent further traffic deaths, but Wheeler’s approach targets the victims of vehicular manslaughter instead of targeting vehicles. Instead of increasing lighting or using traffic calming measures in high-risk areas, Wheeler used this as an opportunity to further his agenda of violently displacing unhoused people. I’d also ask readers to consider this map of “Top 30 High Crash Streets” from PBOT, to see that Wheeler’s response effectively bans camping near any and all major streets in the entire city.

More info here if you're a maps & data person.

Also last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan announced a ban on camping within 150 feet of the proposed “Safe Rest Villages,” city-sanctioned campsites, which themselves have been the subject of negative press for their ongoing delays. Ryan originally promised to have six “safe rest” sites open by the end of 2021. Two months into 2022, the only progress we’ve seen is an announcement about the proposed locations of three of the six sites.

Two days before the news about the traffic death report and the camping ban, the Oregonian published a survey showing that 95% of the unhoused people subject to sweeps were not offered shelter before being swept. It’s common to hear people assert that visibly homeless people are “homeless by choice,” suggesting that the folks who sleep outside are people who refuse to be helped when help is offered to them. There are many reasons why this assertion is wrong, but now we know that 95% of the time, help isn’t even being offered when the police show up and tell people to move along.

II. An Antidote to Despair?

My typical response to this particular brand of overwhelm is to bury myself deeper in my mutual aid projects. The worse things get, the more I feel motivated to help in some way. For the past few years I’ve volunteered with a local group of folks who run a mobile free store. Twice a week, they go around town offering tarps, sleeping bags, hot meals, clothing, harm reduction supplies, pet food, and first aid kits to our unhoused neighbors.

But this kind of work isn’t always the antidote to despair that it seems to promise. I read “Social Service or Social Change?” by Paul Kivel last year, and it still echoes through my head. In this essay from 2000, Kivel makes a distinction between social service work- work that “addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence” from social change work- work that challenges the roots of the systems of exploitation and violence. Kivel creates this distinction after working with domestic violence shelters in Oakland, California. He notes that social service work is hugely important, writing “the needs and numbers of survivors are never ending, and the tasks of funding, staffing, and developing resources for our organizations to meet those needs are difficult, poorly supported, and even actively undermined by those with power and wealth in our society.”

But there is a crucial problem: addressing the needs of the survivors of domestic violence does nothing to end domestic violence in the first place. He notices that unless someone took on the social change work that addressed the root causes of patriarchal male violence, nothing was going to change.

Kivel does precisely this, establishing the Oakland Men’s Project to perform social change work ending the cycle of violence that creates domestic violence survivors in the first place. But the sentence that sticks with me is a sentence he quotes from the director of a women’s shelter: “We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change.”

Of course, the portrait of Kivel’s article that I’ve provided here is oversimplified, and I encourage everyone to give it a read for themselves. I think of it often. Is the work we do at the free store mere social service? Only a band-aid? If providing social service is so time-consuming and resource-intensive, how will we ever find the capacity to do social change work in addition to the service work we’re already doing?

III. Rosa Parks’ Birthday

February 4th, the day PBOT’s pedestrian fatality statistics were released, was also Rosa Parks’ birthday. To celebrate, Portland’s transit agency, Trimet, waived all bus and light rail fares. It reminded me that before covid, my primary activism interest was transit, specifically a campaign to secure fareless transit across the Portland metro. At the time, multiple organizations were making a serious push for fareless transit, and it seemed like critical momentum was beginning to build. OPAL PDX, an environmental justice organization, had won an extension of bus transfer tickets from 2 to 2.5 hours, and then won victories to protect and expand youthpass, a program that gives K-12 students in Portland free transit passes. It felt like energy was building in a transit-oriented direction, and fareless transit was a possibility, not a far-off dream.

And then, covid struck. In the early days of the virus, before everyone began masking, I remember seeing uneasy looks on public transit on my way to work. And then when the virus made its full weight known, transit ridership declined sharply. A staffing shortage of operators led to a 10% reduction in service, and then Trimet limited the number of passengers on buses to enable distancing. The result was long wait times for a bus that may or may not have the capacity to let you on.

It was in this climate that voters in Portland metro rejected Measure 26-218, a transit bond that would have helped fund major transit projects for the next 15-20 years. Covid wasn’t the only reason for a decline in transit enthusiasm, and as these headwinds stacked on top of eachother I gave up on transit activism. I dug deeper into disability and homelessness related things instead. IV. Myles Horton Learns from the Birds

Last month I read “The Long Haul,” an autobiography of labor and civil rights organizer Myles Horton, reflecting on his lifetime of activist work. Towards the end of the book, he included a small chapter about birds and headwinds. I will post some of it, here:

“As I read about birds, I realized that they not only use tail winds but they don't fight the winds. They change their course year after year on the basis of the particular situation. They never come back exactly the same way twice because the conditions are never the same, but they always get to their destination. They have a purpose, a goal. They know where they are going, but they zigzag and they change tactics according to the situation. I thought, for God's sake they're pretty smart, why can't we learn not to do things when it's almost impossible? Why can't we learn to hole up and renew our strength? Why can't we learn to change the entire route if it's necessary, so long as we get to the right point? I started learning from the birds about how to conserve energy and how not to wear myself out. I also learned how to take advantage of crisis situations and of the opposition and use that knowledge for my own purposes. Once I did that, it became a little easier to program ideas and survive, and to begin to share that kind of thinking with other people in a way they could understand.

Now sometimes even birds make the wrong analysis and fly into a storm. They have to fly against the wind, but after a while they stop fighting it and find a place to land and hole up. They don't try the impossible. I think that's very important in movements. There are times when you can't go ahead. It's not within your power to deal with it, because the forces out there are such that you can't. You're not superhuman, and it's beyond your power. That's the time to hole up and start thinking. You watch the wind, and wait for it to blow your way.”

Rosa Parks attended trainings at Highlander, the school founded by Myles Horton and friends. I remember being told about Rosa Parks in school, and the way the story was taught to me was that Parks was just a regular person who made a spontaneous choice not to move to the back of the bus. That story isn’t right. Not only was Parks attending organizer trainings, she had been a member of the Montgomery NAACP since 1932, and had been the executive secretary since 1950. In this time she had worked on voting rights campaigns and campaigns to help clear the names of young Black men falsely accused of rape. She was well known as a civil rights activist in Montgomery and beyond.

Horton writes about his conversations with Parks after the bus boycott. Parks admitted to Horton that her decision not to move to the back of the bus was not prearranged and that she acted individually; so in that sense it is true that her action was spontaneous. But Horton continues: “Parks operated with the full knowledge that for at least two years black people in Montgomery had been trying to set up a test case on the segregated buses… With that knowledge, Rosa wasn't only acting as an individual, she was acting in a way that was consistent with the beliefs of the black organizations in Montgomery, just as she was sent to a Highlander workshop by some of the same organizations.”

The Montgomery Bus Boycott itself wasn’t the first of its kind. Two years earlier, the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott gave people the opportunity to learn what it takes to run a successful bus boycott campaign. People had practice, and were able to share strategies with their peers. Black taxi drivers lowered their rates to help people get around town without using buses. Black women created support networks to ensure that kids got to school without using buses. These systems of cooperation and support don’t spring up out of nowhere, even if your history textbook wants you to think so. Organization requires coordination, planning, and cooperation; skills learned through practice.

Montgomery, Alabama 1955 was a time with particularly strong Civil Rights tailwinds combined with an organized, mobilized, cooperative community of Black activists who knew what they needed to do in order to target the levers of power and achieve real gains. When Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she did so as an organizer, making a targeted move that capitalized on the community’s power.

V. Nesting, Wintering, Sharing, Learning

All of this makes me wonder about what Parks’ life looked like from 1932 to 1955; what it looked like in the years of planning, learning, preparing, and building power within the community.

The headwinds proved too strong for transit activism in Portland 2020, and maybe I’m starting to recognize strong headwinds in housing activism in 2022.

Things have been rough. Our little mutual aid group has helped people weather two extreme wildfire smoke events, two extreme cold events, one heatwave, and a global pandemic, on top of the routine violence that comes from policing, sweeps, and the housing market.

Horton’s book helped me reframe the defeat I feel when I think about Kivel’s social change/social service distinction. Horton tells us that sometimes, the best thing to do is to hole up in our nests and wait for more favorable conditions. Perhaps social service is the best we can do right now.

And while we’re all nesting together, we can talk. Share strategies. Share our experiences. Share the skills we’ve learned. And meanwhile, continue caring for the folks in our neighborhoods.

“Mutual aid work plays an immediate role in helping us get through crises, but it also has the potential to build the skills and capacities we need for an entirely new way of living at a moment when we must transform our society or face intensive, uneven suffering followed vy species extinction. As we deliver groceries, participate in meetings, sew masks, write letters to prisoners, apply bandages, facilitate relationship skills classes, learn how to protect our work from surveillance, plant gardens, and change diapers, we are strengthening our ability to outnumber the police and military, protect our communities, and build systems that make sure everyone can have food housing medicine, dignity, connection, belonging, and creativity in their lives. That is the world we are fighting for. That is the world we can win.” Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis and the Next”

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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Wheelchair Maintenance and Repair Justice

Hello everyone, this is the first episode of my blog that I have done an audio version of. I hope you enjoy it! I wanted to do this because I know that long-form text isn’t accessible to everyone, so I’m trying to play around with a new format. This also means that if you prefer to read instead of listen, you can find the full text and clickable links as well as images on (here) my normal blog page. I wrote this article based on my experiences helping to facilitate a DIY wheelchair repair workshop series. This has been an article I have been working on for a very long time and then in November, we got the chance to present some of this content to an audience of bicycle co-ops at the Bike!Bike! International conference, and that presentation was the jumping off point for this article. At the end, you can hear my liner notes going through some of what didn’t make it in to this article and talking a little bit about other avenues I’d like to explore. Without any more intro, here you go:

It was a September evening and the sun was setting on one of the first cool days of the fall season. I was headed to Station 162, an apartment complex in East Portland, where we were hosting one of our monthly DIY Wheelchair Maintenance workshops. These apartments are managed by a property company that develops units designed specifically for wheelchair users, and we’ve asked to use their community room to host tonight’s workshop. The only parking spot I could find was on the opposite side of the busy five-lane street, and I waited for a gap in traffic to dash across.

For a few years now I’ve been volunteering at these wheelchair maintenance nights, organized as a collaborative effort between The Bike Farm and Oregon SCI. The Bike Farm is a community bike shop here in Portland, Oregon. Anyone can use the Bike Farm’s workshop space for $5 per hour, and used parts and bicycles are available for purchase. Community bike shops are also a knowledge resource. If you come in with squeaky brakes or a bike that won’t shift gears, friendly volunteers are there to help you diagnose and fix it.

Oregon Spinal Cord Injury Connection (SCI) is a nonprofit community health organization that exists to promote health, build community, and create opportunity for people affected by spinal cord injury. They believe that everyone who sustains a spinal cord injury deserves the care and community they need to thrive. Led by people with spinal cord injuries, they organize meetups, educational events, and offer counseling and support.

Outside, I meet up with my co-volunteers, Alison and West. The idea for wheelchair maintenance night came when Alison was tabling for the Bike Farm at a transportation and mobility conference. A wheelchair user approached the booth. After hearing about the co-op, he said he wished he could learn to work on his own wheelchair the way that cyclists can use the bike farm to learn to work on their bikes. This got Alison thinking, and soon after, she met West, who runs Oregon SCI. Their conversations resulted in the first wheelchair maintenance workshops. I met Alison and West when I was volunteering at Street Roots, a local newspaper sold by unhoused Portlanders. At the time, I was working at the front desk, and one of the newspaper vendors asked me if I knew who to call in order to get his power wheelchair fixed: his charging cord had gotten damaged by the elements and now the batteries weren’t charging correctly. For unhoused people, it’s often difficult to get a cell phone fully charged, let alone a power wheelchair, and I had no idea who to call to get this person help. I started looking for resources and came across a flyer for Alison and West’s wheelchair event.

A flyer. White headlining text says Wheelchair Maintenance Workshop. Orange subtitle text explains the event is hosted monthly on 3rd Thursdays at rotating locations. The Oregon SCI and Bike Farm logos are at the top of the page. A big diagonal stripe reveals an image of a woman working on a wheelchair suspended on a stand. She is reaching her hands towards the hub of one of the wheels.

Alison knew that I came from a background in bicycle repair, and encouraged me to come to one of the repair nights, thinking I might be able to apply some of my bicycle experience to wheelchairs. I started showing up regularly, and I started talking to wheelchair users about their experiences with repair. What started as a question about where to get powerchair batteries and chargers replaced led me down a rabbit hole.

NoMotion

When wheelchairs or other durable medical equipment (like walkers and rollators) need to be repaired, you call an ATP, an assistive technology professional. Both private and public insurance companies require wheelchair service and repairs to be done by licensed ATPs. But the world of wheelchair repair is complicated, slow, and expensive, putting undue burdens on disabled people. Tasks that might take a bicycle mechanic under 2 hours to complete might cost between $60 and $120. Similar tasks performed by ATPs might take 6-8 months and could cost between $500 and $3000.

Like so many facets of the American healthcare system, the companies that employ ATPs are engaged in a race to the bottom that drives up costs, extends wait times, and reduces the quality of service experienced by wheelchair users. Companies like Numotion and Belleview Medical compete to underbid each other for government service contracts that cover broad geographical territories. I spoke with Grant Miller of The Curiosity Paradox who told us that the quality of wheelchair repair in the Portland area has seriously declined over the past 20 years. “A lot of small repair places have been bought by national chains, who are notoriously overburdened with requests, under resourced with technicians, and seemingly indifferent to the burdens their operation puts on our community.”

Many wheelchair users refer to Numotion as “Nomotion,” and their Portland area headquarters maintains a 1.6-star rating on google. Since wheelchair repair must be performed by an ATP, and since insurance network systems limit people’s options for care, wheelchair users don’t have alternatives.

Grant continued: “I have had repair people show up unscheduled at my house when I was not around, then charge me for their labor. They have also charged me for equipment I never requested. Repairs can take anywhere between six months to nine months. For some friends who rely on their wheelchair full-time, this means that they completely lack access to their lives. Technicians can be hit or miss, but are usually non-disabled. They ask people to set aside an entire day to wait for them and will often only give 20 minutes notice before arriving. I continue to have unfinished repairs from a process that was started over a year and a half ago.”

According to research by Worobey et. al, they found a 7.8% increase in the number of wheelchair users surveyed who needed repairs, and they found a 23.5% increase in the number of participants reporting adverse consequences from a breakdown, compared against studies done in 2004 and 2006. This report also shows that minorities and power wheelchair users experience more repairs and reported a higher number of consequences, compared against all others in the study.

Guilty until proven innocent

Making an appointment with an ATP is not necessarily a straightforward proposition. Complex bureaucratic barriers to care have been set up by insurance companies and government agencies which require wheelchair users to prove the medical necessity of their devices.

In 2019 I interviewed Mick, a 35-year veteran of the assistive technology industry, who described how Health Care Procedure Codes (HCPCs) slow down the process of getting people access to the devices they need. “As an example,” he said, “a standard high strength lightweight wheelchair is coded as a K0005. There is an allowable sum for the chair which includes basic functions, like wheel locks, wheels, tires, upholstery, and so on. If there is a medical need outside of the standard package, there is another HCPC associated with it. Height adjustable armrest are K0026, anti-tip wheels, positioning belts, seating components, etc. all have their own codes as well.”

Insurance companies typically require each separate HCPC to have its own documented medical necessity in order to be covered. This documentation can include notes from therapists, doctors, and charts that establish a history of need. Often times these long paper trails cause confusion, which can lead to a delay in approval. Someone who needs a lightweight wheelchair with height adjustable armrests and a custom seat has a difficult task ahead of them to prove medical necessity for each of these items. The PDF that I have linked, here is a four-page worksheet that shows some of the documentation required.

This image is a screenshot from the first page of a manual wheelchair documentation checklist. It takes the form of a bulleted checklist. It begins with “Standard Written Order (SWO) that contains all of the following elements” and then lists those elements and their acceptance criteria. This image was intended to show the overwhelming and confusing nature of these documents.

After the passage of The Affordable Care Act in 2011, Medicare began requiring face to face, in-person, documented encounters between people and their care providers for durable medical equipment services. There are state laws, too, like Oregon’s Rule 410-122-0090 which states that “for initial ordering of DME (durable medical equipment) items identified in section (5) of this rule, an in-person face-to-face encounter that is related to the primary reason the client requires the medical equipment or supplies must occur no more than six months prior to the start of services.”

The ostensible purpose of this requirement was to ensure that doctors were not sending claims for DME’s, hospice, and home care to insurance without actually meeting with their patient. Theoretically, this doesn’t seem unreasonable, but the effects of this requirement as experienced by disabled people seeking care is that the face-to-face requirement is a huge hurdle on the path to accessing care. It feels like this law comes from a deep and sad cultural fear that assumes that if taxpayer-funded benefit systems exist, they are going to be abused by people making false claims.

The system we’ve created- this system that requires wheelchair users and other disabled people to prove medical necessity for every line item of their care, and which requires people to have face-to-face meetings with their doctors in order to prove that they aren’t abusing public benefits by asking for anti-tip bars on their wheelchairs- is a system which is based on a fundamental presumption that disabled people are guilty until proven innocent, which further entrenches an antagonistic relationship between patients and the medical system.

This photograph was taken at a pre-pandemic wheelchair night. In the foreground, three people are working together on the rear wheel of an adaptive handcycle. In the background, you can see the controlled chaos of parts bins, tires, and accessories in the bike farm space. One of the best things about DIY wheelchair night is that it returns people to the fundamentals of care: it cuts out these barriers and allows people to directly access the support they need. Photo credit Eric Thornburg.

Medical Necessity and Accessories

Medical Necessity also shows up as a barrier when wheelchair users are looking for accessories that can make improvements to their independence and quality of life. Take for example the SmartDrive MX2 by Permobil. The SmartDrive is a lightweight, battery powered wheel that attaches to the rear axle of a wheelchair. Controlled via an app or a watch, the SmartDrive system gives manual wheelchair users an electric boost, which can be helpful for navigating hilly terrain or steep ramps. This product costs around $6,000.

If you would like for insurance to cover the cost of your SmartDrive, it is HCPC E0986 if you were wondering, you’ll need to prove medical necessity for it. But medical necessity is always going to be a subjective and external evaluation. An accessory like this could substantially improve the independence of a wheelchair user trying to navigate an urban landscape that continues to deprioritize accessibility for those who use wheels- but our system is built so that a doctor is needed to decide if this is necessary. It seems to me that any person’s success must require hours of tireless self-advocacy and research in order to submit the best possible case to the cold logical workings of the medical system.

This image is an advertisement for the SmartDrive by Permobil. It is a small arm with a wheel on the end of it, connecting to the rear axle of a purple wheelchair. You can also see a handle on top of the drive unit for moving the SmartDrive out of the way when not using it.

"And so, it changed the course of my life, and I, instead of becoming a developmental psychologist and working with kids, I went to law school and public health school, graduate school in public health, to learn how to survive, literally just learn how to survive the systems that disabled and chronically ill folks in this country are forced to navigate. And it also is now my day job.” Matthew Cortland, senior fellow at Data for Progress and cofounder of the #DemolishDisabledPoverty campaign, from an interview here.

For people who don’t have systems of support in their lives that enable them to be their own healthcare counselor and advocate, and for people whose lived experience contains any level of nuance beyond what the medical necessity system can handle, medical necessity barriers can keep people from accessing the assistive technology they need and force them to seek out wheelchairs and medical devices out-of-pocket or secondhand. This is also true for people who are uninsured or underinsured who have no opportunity for a mobility device to be subsidized.

Through wheelchair night, we’ve met people with chronic pain who explained how their wheelchairs provided support on days where walking was difficult, but how this wasn’t enough to qualify for medical necessity. We’ve also met people who found used wheelchairs online through craigslist or disability support facebook groups, and who needed help adjusting these devices to their bodies and getting them into usable condition. For people in these kinds of cases and others, the usual avenues for wheelchair repair are inaccessible.

A person sits in a wheelchair with a red and white frame and silver wheels. This person secured this wheelchair secondhand, and we helped adjust the tilt of the front wheels and the position of the rear axle for their comfort.

Disability and Enforced Poverty

Wheelchair repair can also be financially inaccessible for disabled people, especially those living on federal disability benefits. The average monthly payment received by someone on Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) is just $586. The maximum monthly payment is $794, which means that at most, people receiving SSI benefits are getting about $200 per week. In order to continue receiving these benefits, people are also subject to a strict asset cap of $2000 as an individual or $3000 as a couple. This cap on couple’s assets mean that many disabled people don’t legally marry their long-time partners. However, this also means they are unable to access their partner’s insurance benefits through work.

If these dollar amounts seem criminally low, it can partially be explained by the fact that they were last updated in 1989. But even still, current legislation in S.2065, the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act of 2021, proposes that SSI payments should be raised to the federal poverty line. If this act passes, it would represent a step forward, but a shamefully small one, increasing the maximum possible SSI benefit to around $250 per week. Living in enforced poverty makes it difficult to find and keep housing, put food on the table, and save for emergencies like a wheelchair breakdown; and our legislators’ best proposal is to move people from sub-poverty to regular poverty levels.

“The disability community in America has faced systemic disenfranchisement in the form of what I would characterize as policy violence for generations. It's been happening in public. But it has often been ignored, sidelined, marginalized. Whether you're talking about from unconscionable barriers to healthcare, to income limits for those seeking accessible housing, to barriers to marry who you love, or whether you're talking about disparate impact on school discipline.” Representative Ayanna Pressley (D, MA 7th District) quoted here.

A Path Forward

It is clear that the current system lacks the immediacy that wheelchair users need in order to stay mobile. ATP appointments are costly. Appointment wait times are extreme. Medical necessity documentation and face-to-face requirements treat disabled people as guilty until proven innocent, and force them to expend time and effort proving and re-proving their need. People who are uninsured are stuck paying for expensive devices and repairs out of pocket, or are forced to choose from secondhand options that may not be ideal for their needs. People who use our country’s disability safety net are subject to enforced poverty, creating a further financial barrier to repair.

This pre-pandemic photo shows a group of people working on wheelchairs at the bike farm. One person is sitting in a wheelchair, one is standing and taking notes, one is kneeling on the ground. In the immediate foreground of the image, there is a wheelchair that has been tilted backwards and where the front caster wheels have been removed. This photo captures the fun and collaborative spirit of wheelchair maintenance night. Photo Eric Thornburg.

In the face of these factors, wheelchair users might choose to attempt DIY repairs, but doing so can be tricky and intimidating. West from Oregon SCI recently told us the story of his first attempts at cleaning his caster wheels when we presented at a conference. Removing the little bolts that hold the front wheels onto the wheelchair, he was worried he might drop one and have it roll under the couch and out of reach. Without a robust system for replacement parts, the cost of mistakes can be really high.

In our presentation, West reminded us that due to the nature of his spinal cord injury, he still has use of his hands, but that not every disabled person has the hand and body function to get leverage on wrenches or hold small parts like bolts and washers securely. Other folks might not live in a place where they have the proper tools at home, or a space to work on something that is potentially greasy and messy.

We believe that bicycle co-ops (also called community bike shops or CBS’s) are uniquely positioned to help fill gaps in care and reduce the challenges to DIY maintenance in order to provide wheelchair users with a better, more immediate way to have their repair needs met.

Our conference presentation was to an audience of community bike shops, and we tried to point out that most shops likely already have the tools and parts they would need in order to start their own DIY wheelchair night. Many wheelchair bolts are hex (or allen) bolts that are extremely common on bicycles. Many wheelchair wheels are spoked just like bicycle wheels, and can be trued (straightened) in the same way. Air compressors and tire levers can be used to install solid and pneumatic wheelchair tires. Many rollators and other wheeled mobility devices use lever and cable actuated brakes that can be repaired and adjusted just like bicycle brakes. As an organizer, I understand how limiting space can be when trying to create community events, but most co-ops have classroom and workshop spaces where they can facilitate events safely.

However we also recognize that wheelchair repair is new territory for bicycle co-ops, and there can be some intimidation when getting started. For bicycle mechanics interested in building their background knowledge of wheelchair mechanics and for wheelchair users interested in figuring out how to work on their mobility devices, we’ve found it’s best to start small, with basic maintenance.

Research done by Orozco et. al shows that many of the most common causes for wheelchair breakdowns are simple fixes, at least in mechanical terms. In their study, worn out tires and innertubes made up 17.1% of repairs alone. Loose positioning supports (16.4%), loose wheels and axles (6.4%), and loose powerchair controller boxes (4.7%) together combine to show that about a quarter of all wheelchair breakdowns could be prevented simply by tightening things that have come loose. This jumps to almost half of wheelchair breakdowns when we include fixing tires and tubes. These are things wheelchair users should not have to wait 6-8 months for an ATP appointment to fix.

And yet, our community-driven event is not intended to create an antagonistic relationship with ATPs by circumventing them. In fact, we’re hopeful that by helping wheelchair users take care of routine maintenance, we can reduce some of the strain on the existing ATP system. This would free up ATP’s time for people who have serious repair needs beyond the scope of what DIY maintenance can address.

And then, there are also people who are uninsured or who don’t meet medical necessity criteria for whom DIY repair and maintenance might be the only option. When folks are forced to buy secondhand wheelchairs, wheelchair users and bicycle mechanics can team up to adapt and adjust chairs to better fit their new owners. Bicycle co-ops can offer their space, tools, and parts to community members who want to help refurbish durable medical equipment in order to keep it in service- for example, replacing the grips, bearings, and brakes on an otherwise working rollator in order to facilitate passing it on to the next person who needs it.

An instagram post of a flyer. Title text says “Wheelchair Request!” on a blue background with purple stripes. The flyer is soliciting donations of intact, good condition wheelchairs. If you have one, you can reach out to Wheelchair Witches, a project of the PDX Disabled Support network, which helps field requests for wheelchairs from the community, and matches them to people who have wheelchairs to donate. I think bike co-ops can be meaningful partners to efforts like these by donating time, space, and tools to fix up wheelchairs and other mobility devices so they can be passed on.

Creating dedicated DIY spaces for wheelchair repair and maintenance can also provide a space for wheelchair customization. Co-ops can provide assistance for installing accessory devices like the Free Wheel, which lifts the front casters off the ground, or the electric assist SmartDrive. Through social media I found Sabine at Hell On Wheels Design, who makes these colorful wheelchair handle spikes among other mobility device customizations. They say “Mobility aids that match a person’s aesthetic and make them feel confident can make all the difference, especially for young or newly disabled people. Disability is not a bad word and it’s not bad to stand out in a crowd... The whole goal is to make disabled people feel more comfortable and confident in using their mobility aids.”

This photograph is from Sabine’s website, Hellonwheels.club, and shows one of the wheelchair handle spikes they make. The spikes in the image are studded into pink leather, and it forms a wrap that velcroes around a wheelchair push handle. These handle spikes serve as an opportunity to add some self-expression to wheelchairs and also serve as a reminder that nobody should ever touch anyone’s wheelchair unless express consent is given. Sabine also has a sponsorship page where people can financially sponsor community requests for mobility devices- more info here.

We envision a DIY wheelchair night that helps to build community- a place where folks can work on customization projects and on basic maintenance. A place where folks from the disability and bicycle communities can come together to share knowledge and create documentation like zines and videos that will help other people learn how to work on their own mobility devices. Our goal is to prefigure a system for wheelchair repair that trusts the wisdom and experience of disabled people, instead of requiring them to prove medical necessity at every turn. We can expand the scope of the existing infrastructure of community bike shops to help wheelchair users in ways that don’t present financial barriers to needed repairs. A better system for wheelchair repair is possible, and we don’t have to wait to start making it happen.

Our time at Station 162 is over, and I start packing up my toolbox. We helped tighten some loose bolts, diagnose a mystery squeaking noise coming from a back support, and cleaned chairs for some older women who were really excited to see the colors on the base of their powerchairs sparkle again. There are still some folks lingering in the community room. We talk about service dog training, and about ski resorts with sit-ski options. I rinse out some of our cleaning rags in the sink and watch as a service puppy in training annoys and older, soon-to-retire service dog.

Driving back home, my head swirls with all kinds of future dreams and things to reflect on. Every time I show up to wheelchair night I remember that it is a particularly valent experience for me: the things I learn and the perspectives I hear connect so readily to the other mutual aid work I do, and to the transportation justice work I have written about on this blog in the past.

Volunteering as an able-bodied person at wheelchair night has really informed my understanding of allyship. Without care, DIY communities can easily replicate a toxic kind of DIY attitude, where Do It Yourself ends up looking like handing someone a tool, walking away, and letting them figure it out themselves. Through wheelchair night, we want to create a culture of DIT or Do It Together; where we solve mechanical problems collaboratively, and don’t just perform mechanical tasks for disabled people out of pity or charity. The goal of this work is to build power, something that can’t happen if we’re just replicating a system where we as bike mechanics do things for, instead of with, other people.The second of the ten principles of disability justice is recognizing “Leadership of the Most Impacted,” and volunteering with wheelchair night continually reorients me towards this truth. To quote disability justice advocate Lateef McLeod, “people who are impacted by injustice get the clearest, starkest view of just how that injustice functions, and are the most motivated to seek real answers for how to overcome these injustices. Leadership of the most impacted is just another way of saying that we should follow the lead of the people who’ve put the most thought into these issues and have the most experience with them.”

Wheelchair night always makes me re-evaluate how I interact with this truth, and reminds me of what it looks like to provide support to disabled people by offering my time, tools, and knowledge while recognizing that the experts in the room are the disabled people who interact with the wheelchair repair system and with their mobility devices on a constant basis.

youtube

I made this video as part of our recent conference presentation. In it, I show how to remove and clean the front caster wheels of a wheelchair. The video is captioned.

My drive home takes me westbound on Burnside street. Out here, east of the 205 freeway, the MAX light rail line parallels the road, and there’s a fully-painted bike lane, too. I think about how I first started this blog as an urban planning blog, and how so much of the first things I saw in activism and organizing were related to creating space within our urban landscape for bicycles. I reflect on my brief experiences with public transit activism as well, and I think about how participating in wheelchair night has continually broadened the scope of what I think transportation justice looks like. Real transportation justice isn’t just adding bike lanes to busy roads like this one- it is making sure everyone is able to move and access the things they need and want safely. Transportation justice includes preventing wheelchair breakdowns, and ensuring that repairs are accessible when they are needed. When I first started talking to Alison, she said “the Bike Farm’s mission is education and transportation independence.” Through wheelchair night, we’re broadening the scope of education and transportation independence beyond just bicycles, so that we’re including more people who walk and roll through our urban landscape; but at the end of the day, it’s still all the same mission. Click below for liner notes.

First of all I want to thank everyone who has ever participated in wheelchair night or the writing of this article for what they have shared with me, through interviews and conversations, and through recommended resources. The things I’ve learned so far have been so deep, so rich, and so influential to my perspectives. At the end of the piece I mentioned disability justice. If you are interested in learning more about what this movement represents, there are so many great resources out there and it needs much more space than these liner notes to represent fairly. If you want more of this content, a great place to start is this podcast episode and the links and resources mentioned on its page.

If you’re interested in the healthcare policy aspect of this and want to know more, I would recommend checking out these two episodes of the Off Kilter podcast (here, and here). These provide a politics and policy perspective on disability that is valuable for explaining the kind of policy violence experienced by the disability community, and projects into the future how people affected by longterm covid might change some of the political discussion around disability.

If you are interested in learning how to work on wheelchairs, there are some good resources online to do so. One of the best ones we have found is here.

This blog post was adapted from a presentation we gave at a conference for bicycle co-ops, in an attempt to spread our gospel and encourage other bicycle co-ops to host their own wheelchair repair nights and to include wheelchair users in their programming. We don't intend to position ourselves as experts on this subject, but we have learned quite a few things in the few years that we have been doing this, and are really excited about sharing our experiences so people can develop their own events that are relevant to their own communities. If this sounds like you, please get in touch!

There’s a lot that didn’t make it in to this article. The research rabbit holes I went down were deep, and I cut a lot of things out just because there are so many potential tangents. And yet, each one of these tangents felt important, so I’m hoping to use some of that content in future articles. Stay tuned for an article about repair as an act of resistance, and about Right to Repair laws and the legality of DIY repair for durable medical equipment. We’ve seen Right to Repair show up as a barrier to getting hospital ventilators working for covid patients, and I want to explore why the companies that make these devices insist on such tight controls of their repair and service.

Another rabbit hole is Medicare’s Face-to-Face requirement, which of course is an even larger than normal barrier during the covid pandemic. There is a lot more to say here, but again, this deserves its own article.

For more info on hacking/DIY service of powerchairs, check out the youtube community that has sprung up around this channel: https://youtu.be/hQrwEItrP_w As always thank you for reading.

I am available by email if you want to talk: [email protected]

#Youtube #SoundCloud

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televisedbirdwatching · 2 years

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Invasive Species, Mountain Bikes, and the Spirit of Wilderness

It’s a sunny fall morning in Oregon and I’m headed to Rocky Point to ride my bike. Two years ago, our local mountain bike advocacy group, NWTA, negotiated member access to these 3,000 acres of timber land owned and logged by Weyerhaeuser. All the trails here are built and maintained by volunteers, so long as they stay out of the logging company’s way. From the parking lot, I cruise down a logging road, past a gate, and begin pedaling uphill on some singletrack, a trail called Tres Amigos. It’s a cool and shady north-facing slope, and I’m pedaling past ferns and big western redcedars on tacky, clay-filled soil. I have plans to ride a big loop where I’ll connect little sections of singletrack using the network of logging roads. I get to the top of the ridge and the other side is all a big clear-cut, full of tan, dry grasses and conical grey slash-piles. I turn south and start onto a trail called Seral Stage, named after a forestry term that describes the intermediate stages of vegetation succession following a clear-cut.

Clearcut, Seral Stages.

Many years ago in college, I wrote a paper for an environmental sociology course about mountain biking in wilderness areas. At the time, there was a national policy debate happening about whether or not mountain bikes could be allowed access to federally-designated wilderness areas. When the Wilderness Act of 1964 established this land designation, it specified that only “primitive” activities would be allowed, such as hunting, fishing, camping, and hiking, in order to provide a refuge from an increasingly mechanized and technological world. It seems to me that the debate about what activities are sufficiently primitive enough to be permitted has raged since the act’s passage. Consider the difference between traditional recurve bows versus compound bows and modern rifles with scopes. Are skis and bindings fundamentally more ‘technological’ objects than snowshoes? Others argued that we should categorize appropriate uses by their lasting impact on the land rather than by their “primitivity,” by which impact-heavy cattle ranching should be excluded but leave-no-trace on-trail mountain biking should be allowed.

During my research I came across this 2014 article by George Wuerthner, which has stuck with me ever since. In it, he argues that while mountain biking, he is more ‘focused on the trail and sense of movement’ than he is ‘aware and in tune with his surroundings.’ In other words, the setting of his mountain biking experience is irrelevant, since he’s focused on the jumps, whoops, berms, and other man-made features of the trail. As such, clearcuts and other environmental wastelands are great and appropriate canvases for the mountain biking experience- wide open spaces to be shredded upon by thrill-seeking riders. I think the reason Wuerthner’s article has stuck with me is that I just really disagree with him. I’ve ridden further down the trail and I see a little Pacific Garter snake sunning itselfl. I stop and let him slither back under the cover of a fern, and pedal on. Around the next corner, the trail is covered in deer poop. Next to me, I see a little area with trampled mats of grasses, probably the sleeping quarters of whichever hooved ruminant pooped on the singletrack. I like learning how to identify the flora and fauna in the natural lands I get to visit, and I like learning the names of geological features and the story of their deep-time history. These things make me feel a little closer to the world around me, and I think the search for this feeling is a big part of what inspires me to throw my bike on the truck and go pedal into the woods.

Deer Poop.

The next trail I’m riding is called Ill-Tempered Gnome. I pedal up and get ready for the descent. One of the things that makes mountain biking in Oregon so great is the high clay content in the soil, which allows for the construction of berms, jumps, and other shaped-dirt features that bake in the summer sun and hold their shape through the fall. My tires leave the ground a few times and there’s a satisfying feeling of compression as I sink into the bermed corners. I think to myself that Wuerthner might be right, at least a little. I just disagree that “shredding” and “appreciating nature” are fundamentally incompatible. Can’t we do both?

Ill-Tempered Gnome.

At the end of the trail I turn on to Powerline. The trail marker sits in an overgrown and dried out patch of canada thistle, a plant whose shape is burned into my brain permanently. In the summer of 2015, I worked in invasive species management, spraying canada thistles and their cousins with pesticides like Tordon, 24-D, and Glyphosate. Spending 40 hours a week looking for invasive plants, I developed a pretty good eye for them.

Powerline trail and canada thistle seed tufts.

This logging land is full of invasive species. I see canada thistle, hoary cress, himalayan blackberry, bull thistle, and pokeberry. Pokeberry is so invasive that you’re not allowed to dispose of the flowers or berries in Portland-area compost bins, they must go to the landfill. Logging operations are perfect vectors for invasive species. Seeds hitchhike on logging machinery, which also compacts the clay soils, making it harder for native plants to root down. Clear cutting deprives local plants of the shady canopy they depend on while also priming the ecosystem for sun-loving invasives to thrive. (photo pokeberry)

I recently read the New Wild by Fred Pearce, a book that argues that we ought to re-frame the way we think of invasive species. His book is based on case studies from all around the world, and a sort of “yeah, but” argumentative strategy that I find thought provoking but not ultimately compelling.

For example, he talks about an invasive mediterranean sea grass, where the “yeah, but” relies on the fact that ocean borders are made-up concepts. Caulerpa taxifolia is native to tropical seas, but was accidentally introduced to the mediterranean, where it took over and established a monoculture hostile to the local grasses that fish depended on. Pearce asks us to wonder if it makes a difference whether the sea grass could have just floated in ‘naturally’ from some other ocean, and whether or not we would think differently about it if we assumed it was spread by human activity. It’s a useful intuition pump that asks us to think critically about how and why we maintain a dualism between “human-caused” and “natural,” but I’m not sure this does anything to convince me that invasive species are any less of a problem. Pearce also asks us to consider thinking of invasive species in terms of the ecosystem services they provide, instead of defining them by story of their arrival. One argument used by native plant advocates is that dense colonies of roots help to bind the soil, keeping it locked down on steep hillsides, preventing watersheds from accumulating sediment and pesticides. That’s true, but I’m sympathetic to Pearce’s argument that in the case of a clearcut, the canada thistle we’re seeing is performing the same ecosystem service. Part of what makes canada thistle so difficult to eradicate is its creeping rhizomous root system that forms a dense mat underground. Would this not also make it an excellent plant for soil retention? Pearce’s “yeah, but” here is that maybe we shouldn’t care so much about which plant is performing an ecosystem service, but instead that the ecosystem service is being performed at all.

Baby canada thistles growing next to bulldozer teethmarks.

I ride my bike on Highline and Bobs Yer Uncle, enjoying a quick stop at a marshy pond full of birch trees and the sound of chirping birds. I descend some more and I’m at the bottom of the valley, looking up at the ridge I’ll have to climb up and over in order to get back to the car. I park my bike and sit for a minute to watch chipmunks and squirrels play around on the largest timber slash pile I’ve seen. In early spring, this valley is raucous with birdsong. There are so many songbirds eating bugs, grasshoppers hopping, squirrels eating snacks and skittering around inside slash piles it creates an audible din. These clearcuts are very alive and they seem to support thriving and vibrant populations. Maybe we don’t give animals enough credit for their adaptability to sudden changes like clearcutting. But then I remember learning about Fender’s Blue Butterfly, whose populations are threatened in Oregon because they evolved to depend on a type of berry that can no longer grow due to invasives. I also remember learning that even though I see lots of birds here, they are most likely european sparrows that have learned to build nests in the himalayan blackberries and who have outcompeted the smaller populations of native songbirds.

Climbing up The Great Escape back towards my car, all I can think about is how everything in environmental philosophy is messy. Is it ok if skiers, snowboarders, and mountain bikers are mere thrill-seekers, ignoring any conservationist thoughts in pursuit of adrenaline? Does someone on an electric assist mountain bike experience the same degree of “wilderness experience” that someone on an entirely human-powered bike does? Would I rather this clear cut be a native plant restoration project that requires hundreds of hours of hands-on human maintenance to ensure that only native plants grow back? Or should I instead be glad to see these little canada thistles acting as first movers and terraformers, helping keep the soil from running into the Columbia river?

When I get back to my car, I notice a display board at the trailhead. The sign was put up by the Portland Water Bureau, East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District, NWTA, and Western Invasives Network. The sign explains how to identify common invasive plants and provides a little brushing station so that trail users will clean their shoes on their way in and out of the area.

Stop weeds station. I drive back to the city tossing these questions around, truck tires humming on the pavement, legs tired, trying not to think about another week of work, indoors, staring at a screen.

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televisedbirdwatching · 3 years

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Sea Trash

Two weeks ago, my partner and I took a trip to the Oregon coast, to escape the city for the day. We went to Ecola State Park, where the parking lot was crowded but we saw almost no-one once we ducked into the woods, following a rolling trail past huge western redcedars and firs. Steep switchbacks brought us down to the shore, where the tide was out and the beach was mostly empty, pretty good for a sunny summer Saturday.

Whenever I go to the coast, I like to collect plastic. It started as a sort of boy-scout, leave-no-trace, leave-it-better-than-you-found-it thing. But I’ve kept doing it because I think the trash I find is really cool.

Walking along huge driftwood logs, jumping from rock to rock, I feel seven years old again, exuberant and expansive and somehow plural like I’m living a Cobi Moules painting. In and around the round grey rocks there are little chunks of red, orange, blue, and black. Pieces of fishing net hiding in bundles of dry kelp. Styrofoam chunks tucked into the driftwood at the high water mark.

Cobi Moules, Untitled, Yellowstone. Bois Just Wanna Have Fun.

I think to myself that collecting ocean plastics feels like the 2021 version of collecting sea glass, and I remember a trip we took to Glass Beach in California two years ago. Glass Beach near Fort Bragg on the northern coast is an instagram fever dream made real, a beach where each grain of sand is really a tiny pebble of sea glass.

Glass beach was the town dump. In 1906, Fort Bragg was a company town run by the Union Lumber Company. They needed somewhere to dump their trash, so they chose a particular cove. Then in 1943 the cove filled up, so they chose another one. When that one began to fill up they threw molotov cocktails at it. Finally in 1946 they moved to a third site, which served as the final resting place for glass, appliances, and vehicles until the California EPA told folks to stop in 1967. Over a long enough period of time, organic matter rotted away, buoyant items were carried out to sea, and all that remains is a lot of glass, some ceramic pieces, and some metal.

Today in Fort Bragg, there's an "International Sea Glass Museum," run by a retired captain. He also runs a jewelry store for sea glass jewelry. He is also a writer, and has wonderful links on his page to "Miraculous 'Quantum Sea Glass Tales' that demonstrate how the two following perspectives work together to manifest your miraculous world" and "Read The Captain's Paper In 'The Journal of Cosmology' And Find Out How Your World Works From The SCIENTIFIC Perspective! 'General Relativity and Effects in Time as Causation' A New Model of the Universe, the First One Ever, That Begins With the Creator." You can find this stuff here.

When I’m looking for plastic on the beach, I’m looking for things that don’t look natural. Colors, shapes, materials that seem like they don’t belong. I think back to my undergraduate career in environmental philosophy, and remember how difficult it is to pin down a definition of what is “natural” and what isn’t. In Steven Vogel’s book “Thinking like a Mall,” he writes about how our typical discussions on this topic assume a sort of binary, dualistic structure where “Nature” is anything not touched by humans. Anything else is, well, non-natural. Vogel thinks that someday, we’re going to consider this simplistic definition of nature as outdated as Descartes’ body/soul dualism looks today when compared against our contemporary understandings of consciousness.

Vogel write about humans long history of lamenting the destruction of nature, with each generation pointing backwards to some point in time before nature was spoiled. And yet, when we try to pin down those moments in time, we arrive on scene to discover that the destruction of nature is something that has always already happened. We’re watching this happen today as people think back to whatever it meant to be pre-climate change. Wordsworth did it in 1802 when he wrote “The World is Too Much With Us,” an anti-industrial revolution poem. And yet, the landscape he presents as with in “Tintern Abbey” (1798), a landscape powerful in its ability to inspire “tranquil restoration,” is also one that is full of people, and where little anthropogenic fingerprints are present at every turn. Was the world meaningfully different in a time before plastic started washing up on our beaches? How much time must pass before we stop thinking of these objects as “trash” and start thinking they are worthy of museums and jewelry? How long until they start inspiring thoughts of the divine?

I think these objects are really beautiful. After spending some time in the ocean, they develop a sort of natural, organic quality. I love seeing chunks of styrofoam with almost microscopic imprints from sand. Or this lighter- It’s interesting to think about how long it spent in the ocean. A week? An hour? A year? This fishing float came from Japan. Was it made there? Was it used on a Japanese fishing boat? How long did it spend floating around just waiting to get washed ashore- and how electrifying and lucky I feel to be at the other end of it’s cosmic journey, just waiting for me to pick it out of a pile of rocks on a windswept Oregon beach!

And yet there’s something that feels wrong about venerating these objects, since we’ve been so socialized to conceive of these objects as something out-of-place, something whose presence degrades and defiles and otherwise “natural” environment.

The drive back home from the coast takes us through the coast range, an area of Oregon that has been heavily logged. Certain clear cuts along the road have signs that say “planted 2016!” or “planted 2004!” like we’re supposed to be pleasantly surprised at the quick progress of the identical firs growing out of the ground, surrounded by dead wood and slash piles. We drive back to the city, a decidedly un-natural place, tires singing on the pavement as we cross the bridge into east Portland.

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televisedbirdwatching · 3 years

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Forgotten Portland History: Guild's Lake and the Murder of Ervin Jones

On the night of August 20th, 1945, three plainclothes Portland police officers shot and killed Ervin Jones, a Black man, in his own home.

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Jones lived in a home at Guild’s Lake Courts, a wartime housing development in Northwest Portland. Jones’ family was one of many Black southern families that moved to the Pacific Northwest to find work in the shipyards. During the war, the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) constructed and operated the largest public housing portfolio in the country, with 18,504 units. Across the Columbia river in Vancouver, Washington, the Housing Authority operated 12,389 units, for a combined total of 30,000 units in the metro area. For comparison, New York City’s housing authority operated 13,173 units at that same point in time [1].

The Housing Authority of Portland achieved these numbers through two large development projects: Vanport (see here) and Guild’s Lake Courts. The developers wanted to attract agricultural workers from Northern states (read as: rural Whites), so they built electrified units featuring refrigerators, heaters, and lights. At this time, only 33% of American farms were on the electric grid, and the promise of good paying jobs and modern living brought many new workers to Portland.

This aerial photo from 1945 shows the Guild Lake housing project at its peak. Forest Park is off to the north of this image, and Downtown is to the south. For more like this photo, the best collection I've seen has been preserved on this website here.

Construction began on the electrified units at Guild’s Lake Courts sometime in 1942. Oregon Congressman Clark Foreman had passed a state housing policy which mandated that local architects be hired to work on any federally-mandated housing projects in the state. The local architects hired for the project included Pietro Belluschi, designer of the Commonwealth Building (the first aluminum-clad office building in the US), and Morris E. Whitehouse, a Portland architecture all-star who designed Temple Beth Israel, the Gus J. Solomon United States Courthouse, both Jefferson and Lincoln High Schools, the Keller Auditorium, and more.

Top: The Commonwealth Building, 1944, designed by Pietro Belluschi, photo wikipedia. Middle: The Gus J. Solomon Courthouse, designed by Morris E. Whitehouse, 1933, photo wikipedia.

Bottom: The Morris E. Whitehouse-designed units at Guild's Lake. As far as I know, there are no photos of the Pietro Belluschi-designed units.

In a country still 10 years from Brown v. Board, and 23 years from the desegregation of Federal housing in 1968, remember that the Guild’s Lake development would have been strictly segregated. “By the time construction started on the units dedicated to African American residents,” writes Dr. Tanya Lynn March, “it was clear that all the electricity that could be spared to operate mechanical refrigerators, hot plates, and electric heaters was going to be absorbed by the round-the-clock operations of the war industries, so homes offered in the black section of Guild's Lake Courts lacked these amenities and were rudimentary in contrast to Portland's existing housing stock” [1]. All of the best land had been used for the construction of the White-designated homes, and the Black-designated homes were built on the marshy land that was left over.

This photo from Dr. March's website shows children playing in sand, but this is not a playground! Since the housing development was built on a marsh and the budget was low, they just filled the area in with sand. This was actually someone's front yard.

On the one hand, it makes sense that as the war continued, supplies grew scarce and the quality of housing suffered. However it’s not a mere coincidence that the same enthusiasm that went into attracting white residents to Guilds Lake did not extend to the Black residents. Without exaggeration and quoting verbatim, Portland Mayor Earl Riley said: “Portland can absorb only a minimum of Negroes without upsetting the city’s regular life” [2]. By 1944, no longer were famous Portland architects involved in Guild’s Lake. The housing was clad in tar paper for weatherproofing. No longer were the homes single-family, detached units. Now, there were 4-plexes and 6-plexes.

This photo shows the condition of the houses in 1946, when HAP began dismantling units. Photo from Dr. March.

--------- In 1945 the Jones family home would have been full to the brim. Ervin Jones lived there with his wife Elva and their two children. Two of Elva’s sisters and both of their husbands lived in the home, making seven people in all. On the night of the shooting, the other men were working the night shift at the Kaiser shipyards, so Ervin was home with his wife, children, and sisters in law. [3]

Earlier in the night, there had been a domestic disturbance at a house down the street. A man, Scott E. Thomas, shot and killed his girlfriend, Beatrice Terry, in an argument. Police found out about the shooting and received a tip that Thomas was hiding out in the home of Ervin Jones. At 2 AM on the night of August 20th, three plainclothes officers of the Portland Police Bureau made a plan to take Thomas into custody.

Two officers moved into position at the front of the Jones house, and one went to the backdoor. Ervin Jones heard the rustling of the officers and their muffled voices and assumed he was being robbed. He woke up his sister-in-law and his wife to warn them, and then grabbed his gun to protect his family.

The police were looking for Scott E. Thomas, a white man. Instead, they looked inside and saw Ervin Jones, a Black man, with a gun. Detective Purcell, the one at the back of the house, shot him.

Nevermind that Detective Purcell didn’t have a warrant to enter Jones’ home. Nevermind that he didn’t even have a warrant to enter Scott E. Thomas’ home, down the block. Nevermind that Ervin Jones, a black man, did not at all match the description of the suspect, a white man. Nevermind that the actual suspect, Scott E. Thomas, was found later in the night, readily admitted to the crime, and turned himself over to the police without incident. Nevermind all this because it was too late for Ervin Jones, killed in front of his family.

--------- Historian Rudy Pearson writes, “The prejudice [Black families] encountered in Portland surprised many of the newcomers, who could not hide their astonishment at Portland's segregated facilities and the hostile attitudes of many Whites. Before coming to Portland, for example, Bobbie Nunn and her husband had been stationed in army camps in Alabama, Georgia, and Texas. As they moved north, they expected to encounter more liberal attitudes than they had experienced in the South, but they quickly learned that prejudice had no regional boundaries, and Portland seemed like the southern cities they left behind.” [2]

White Portlanders begrudgingly accepted the influx of Black workers for the war effort, no doubt thanks to wheels greased by patriotism and nationalism, but also operated under the assumption that the Black workers would leave once their labor was no longer needed in the shipyards.

Kaiser Shipyards. Henry J. Kaiser is also the founder of Kaiser Permanente hospitals, along with many other ventures. Consider the following link propaganda but read more about Kaiser's choice to circumvent organized labor in order to hire non-white workers, here. Photo wikipedia.

“The Portland area grew from 501,000 to 661,000 in between 1940 and 1944. One could safely assume, in the war years, that every third person standing in line for the bus or a double feature was new to town.” [4]

“From the beginning, HAP officials made it clear that the agency had no obligation to respond to racial discrimination,” continues Pearson. “HAP was simply an ‘agent of private enterprise whose sole function was to manage wartime housing projects and dispose of them as soon as practicable.'" To that end, HAP began dismantling units in 1946. HAP was even offered money to purchase the land required to save some of the units as permanent affordable housing, but declined to do so; hoping that the poor and Black residents would leave and they could sell the land to other landowners in the future. “In some cities, privatization of Defense-era public housing enabled Blacks homeownership opportunities, as in Bayview-Hunters Point, in San Francisco. However, any chance to remain in the Guild’s Lake District and create a coalescent community was unimaginable in Portland, the Jim Crow city of the west,” writes Dr. March [1].

HAP made their priorities clear: their racist calculus led them to conclude that it was better to turn away free money than it was to provide homeownership opportunities to Black residents. And since HAP made the rules, they got their way. The last residents of Guild’s Lake left in 1952, and industrial uses quickly took over the site.

The only urban remnants of Guild’s Lake are two streets: NW Luzon Street and NW Guam Streets (shown above on the map in yellow), which were given Pacific Theater names as a wartime nod. I have heard that both these streets were part of the Black section of housing. As you can see, the area was an advantageous site for industry, but it's depressing to think about what could have been if the housing had been saved.

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After her husband was shot and killed by Portland Police, Elva Jones moved back to Louisiana. The Portland Chief of Police launched an investigation into the three officers involved in the shooting and quickly exonerated them of any wrongdoing. Attorney Irvin Goodman and the NAACP worked hard to bring the case to trial, requesting an official coroner’s inquest. In a moment of inter-racial solidarity, the majority-white Portland Council of Churches raised the money to pay for Elva’s travel expenses to Portland for the trial [3].

The six-person jury was all-white. Goodman requested that he be allowed to question the jurors before the trial in order to determine any racial biases, but the judge denied the motion. Next, Goodman argued that because Jones lived in a Black neighborhood, a “jury of his peers” should include at least some Black jurors. Again, the judge denied the motion, and the trial continued.

Elva Jones, her sister Susi, and the next door neighbor testified that the plainclothes police officers never identified themselves as such: confirming that Jones had no way of knowing whether the intruders were police or robbers.

Officer Purcell’s own testimony in the courtroom did not match the testimony he gave on the night of the shooting only two months prior. Purcell framed Jones as an aggressor, saying he was loading a gun and holding the door closed so that the officers could not get in. Police Chief Fleming testified that Scott E. Thomas had in fact been hiding in the Jones’ home, even though he was directly contradicted by Scott E. Thomas himself who testified that he had never been in the Jones’ home, and in fact did not even know of Ervin Jones until after the shooting.

Despite these inconsistencies, the jury exonerated all three officers. The Oregonian reported that the jury found Purcell justified “in performance of duties and in protection of himself and fellow officers. Adding insult to injury, the Portland City Council used taxpayer money to pay the legal expenses for Officer Purcell and the other officers involved in the shooting.

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After the Ervin Jones coroner’s inquest, “The NAACP and Urban League suggested city officials adhere to police training recommendations set forth by the City Club detailed in their recently published ‘Negro in Portland’ report (published 1945). Maude B. Leas, secretary of the YWCA, believed law enforcement could eliminate tensions if the police were trained in racial tolerance. However, they continued without that training.” [2]

Last June, I attended a public zoom forum with Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Portland Commissioner Jo Anne Hardesty, Urban League of Portland Director Nkenge Harmon-Johnson, and representatives from the Portland NAACP. Discussion topics included racial bias training and other attempts at police reform. Harmon-Johnson was exasperated that the elected leaders in the room continued not to acknowledge the policy reform proposals set forth by the Urban League. It had been 75 years since the 1945 policy recommendations were furnished to police in the wake of Ervin Jones’ murder, and yet conversations in 2020 revolved around the same topics.

I began writing and researching this article back in September of 2020. At the time, I was thinking about the similarities between the story of Ervin Jones in 1945 and Breonna Taylor in 2020. In both cases, the police failed to announce themselves as police, so the residents believed that the intruders were robbers. Both cases resulted in the shooting deaths of innocent Black people.

Tonight, after the murder of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis, 2021, I was reminded of the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, 2009. In both cases, Black men were killed when they were shot by police who "accidentally" reached for their handguns instead of their tasers. This isn’t something that should have happened once; and now, 11 years later, it’s happened again.

History is a wheel, and we continue to watch as the lives of innocent Black people are lost, while the gears of our policing and housing machines continue to churn: machines that those with their hands closest to the levers claim they are powerless to stop.

Sources:

[1] Google Site: Guild’s Lake Courts https://sites.google.com/site/guildslakecourts/

[2] "A Menace to the Neighborhood": Housing and African Americans in Portland, 1941-1945, by Rudy Pearson, published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly https://www.jstor.org/stable/20615135

[3] On this we build

[4] Carl Abbott, Portland in three Centuries, p119

Click "keep reading" for the liner notes.

Liner Notes

This article would not be possible without the work so so many people have done, and all of whom seem to be connected to Portland State University. Particularly I’d like to thank Dr. Tanya Lyn March for the incredible resource that is this google site about Guild’s Lake. There is so little information about Guild’s Lake and Dr. March has done incredible work compiling it. If you’re at all interested in primary sources or digging deeper into Guild’s Lake, please please poke around on this website, it’s truly incredible.

I was introduced to the case of Ervin Jones thanks to the book “A Hundred Little Hitlers” by Elinor Langer. This book provides a history of white supremacist groups up and down the west coast and their particular convergence around the murder of Mulugetu Seraw. Her history of the Portland Police Bureau as it appears in this book is part of what got me interested in Ervin Jones’ story.

There have been a number of articles I’ve read that have really given me perspective on the history of civil rights activism in Portland.

I want to call particular attention to "On This, We Shall Build: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Portland, Oregon 1945-1953”, by Justin LeGrand Vipperman. Vipperman’s account of the actual details of the Ervin Jones shooting were incredibly helpful in piecing together a coherent story from a few different sources. Vipperman’s essay is incredibly thought provoking and also a strange reminder of the cyclical nature of history.

More thank you’s and recommended reading: "A Menace to the Neighborhood: Housing and African Americans in Portland, 1941- 1945” by Rudy Pearson.

I cannot recommend enough reading “Portland, Oregon's Long Hot Summers: Racial Unrest and Public Response, 1967-1969” by Joshua Joe Bryan. While this essay did not end up directly relating to what I’ve written here, it has been hugely informative for fleshing out my understanding of the history of racial justice protests in Portland.

There is some really interesting reading to be done in the City Club of Portland’s “The Negro in Portland, 1945” report. This document presents the results of research into available job opportunities across different industries and unions in the city. Results are grim. It’s a document referenced by almost every text dealing with civil rights in the 1940’s in Portland, so if you’re interested in diving into this rabbit hole it’s required reading.

“Vanport Conspiracy Rumors and Social Relations in Portland, 1940-1950” by Stuart McElderry is another great article. You can learn so much about a social climate from the myths and urban legends that circulate within it.

And finally, I’d like to recommend Carl Abott’s book “Portland in Three Centuries.” Over time it’s proved to be an incredible resource, and it’s brimming with crazy and interesting jumping off points for further research.

My deepest thanks to the Multnomah County Library for giving me Jstor access and for loaning me so many books.

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televisedbirdwatching · 3 years

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Episode 3: Radiators, Deadly Air, Moral Panic

A few days before Christmas, Oregon Governor Kate Brown released new coronavirus safety guidelines for schools, stating that she wants K-12 students back in school by February 15th. This, despite the fact that there are more cases now than there were in March when schools were shut down. As justification, Brown wrote to OPB: “The long-term benefits of both heading off an emerging mental health crisis for our children and youth, and addressing the academic challenges that are becoming prevalent for far too many students in the absence of in-person learning, now far outweigh the short-term risk.” The teacher’s unions are skeptical that schools can reopen safely despite a slower-than planned vaccination rollout for Oregon educators.

You can track Oregon’s school covid cases here.

In 1907, doctors Mary Packard and Ellen Stone prescribed open air schools to help protect students from tuberculosis. The New York Times writes: “the subsequent New England winter was especially unforgiving, but children stayed warm in wearable blankets known as ‘Eskimo sitting bags’ and with heated soapstones placed at their feet. The experiment was a success by nearly every measure — none of the children got sick.”

Photos NYT

In fact, the steam heating systems found in many buildings built in the early 1900’s were intentionally designed to keep rooms warm even with the windows open on the coldest day of the year. The “fresh air” movement started at the tail end of the Civil War, but by the 1920’s had made it into the building code of major cities, including New York. An architecture firm once estimated that 75% of the buildings in Manhattan were originally built between 1900 and 1930, during the height of the steam radiator craze; chances are, if you live in Manhattan, you have a steam radiator.

The Fresh Air Movement was started by a Civil War field hospital health inspector named Lewis Leeds. His 1896 book, “Leeds on Ventilation,” claimed that stale air from the spent breath of a home’s occupants contributed to 40% of the deaths in the country, writing “man’s own breath is his greatest enemy.”

He found an ally in author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who along with her sister Catherine penned an 1869 book with the title “The American Woman's Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science; being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes,” which you can read for yourself, here. It included lengthy descriptions of how the respiratory and circulatory systems produced carbonic acid, which, “if received into the lungs, undiluted by sufficient air, is a fatal poison, causes certain death. When it is mixed with only a small portion of air, it is a slow poison, which imperceptibly undermines the constitution.”

Carbonic acid poisoning was also linked to a moral panic: “Little Jim, who, fresh from his afternoon’s ramble in the fields, last evening said his prayers dutifully, and lay down to sleep in a most Christian frame, this morning sits up in bed with his hair bristling with crossness, strikes at his nurse, and declares he won't say his prayers—that he don't want to be good. The simple difference is, that the child, having slept in a close box of a room, his brain all night fed by poison, is in a mild state of moral insanity.”

Much of what the Stowe Sisters were campaigning against were the 1-room cabins seen in this photo, with one, wood or coal burning stove in the middle and possibly no real ventilation.

Although the connection between ‘Carbonic Acid’ and moral insanity is dubious, 1920’s health officials understood there was at least some connection between stale air and the transmission of disease. Royal S. Copeland, born 1868, began his political career as the mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan. After that he occupied a position on the New York City Board of Health, where he won considerable political approval for his handling of the 1918 flu outbreak. Copeland was responsible for the open-windows mandate, requiring that everyone in the city leave their windows open, even on the coldest of days during the New York winter.

Building codes and the HVAC industry took these changes to heart and began designing buildings with this in mind. Originally, radiators were placed along interior walls. However, this led to extreme hot zones near the radiator and extreme cold zones near the windows. So, technicians started placing radiators directly underneath windows, to heat the cold air as it was coming in to the home. Around this time, boiler explosions were common, as often as every day and a half in the US, so they began to be replaced with updated units that ran on natural gas instead of coal, a cheaper and safer option. However, in an age before real industry standards, people would replace the old boilers with more efficient models that were the same size as the old ones- leading to super-powered boilers way too large for modest apartment buildings. In fact, by the 1940’s, people had begun painting their radiators with brass or silver colored metallic paint, which contained gold or aluminum particles. This special paint had the desirable thermal property of cutting the radiator’s efficiency by 20%, helping counteract the super-powered boilers.

This American Radiator Company advertisement shows a radiator directly under a window. The American Radiator Company merged with the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company in 1929 to form the American Standard Companies, inc., a link to episode 2 about American Standard, Kohler, and bathroom fixtures and past pandemics can be found here. Photo citylab.

Royal S. Copeland used the political momentum he gained from his popular open-windows mandate to make a run for the senate, winning three consecutive terms. Copeland continued his fresh air crusade and in May of 1928, the senate successfully passed a resolution, spearheaded by Copeland, to budget $500,000 on increasing the ventilation of the Senate, and looked seriously into knocking down exterior walls. Just five days later, Copeland withdrew his bill, since the Carrier Corporation had promised to deliver “manufactured weather” (today called air conditioning) to the senate for $323,000, promising to bring the benefits of increased ventilation but including temperature control, which knocking down exterior walls couldn’t do.

The Carrier Company got their start making air conditioning systems for trains, then hotels, and then their customers began to want the same comfort they found when traveling to be available in their own homes, creating the home A/C unit. A primitive built-in/window unit hybrid can be seen in this ad.

Copeland believed that the poor air quality in the senate was a contributing factor in the deaths of 34 senators, claiming that their lives had been shortened by the poor air quality in the chamber. Winter’s cold stale air spread colds, flus, and bronchitis and summer’s humid stale air “sapped members' energy and tested their tempers,” giving us some hint of a connection to H.B Stowe’s moral panic about stale air.

But today we know that Copeland wasn’t entirely wrong. I remember sitting in a sustainable architecture course in college and being lectured on the benefits of indoor air quality. Researching this article I came across study after study linking air quality to all sorts of human performance indicators. For example: “A 2018 study conducted over an academic year looked at the emotional, cognitive and behavioral challenges facing 161 fifth graders. It found that those participating in an outdoor science class showed increased attention over those in a control group who continued to learn conventionally.”

This Harvard Business Review article from 2017, titled “Research: Stale Office Air Is Making You Less Productive” speaks of a study done where scientists created an “optimized environment” where the amount of indoor/outdoor air exchange was doubled, VOC emissions from cleaning products and dry erase markers were lowered, and CO2 concentrations were brought to low levels under 600 ppm (compared to public schools, which they claim have an average of 1400 ppm).

I also found this article from the EPA, titled “Making the Business Case for Energy Savings Plus Health: Indoor Air Quality Guidelines for School Building Upgrades.” It says: “A recent report, Greening America's Schools: Costs and Benefits, reviewed 30 ‘green schools’ and concluded that green schools cost on average 2 percent more than conventional schools, but the financial benefits stemming from those investments are about 20 times greater from those buildings than the additional 2 percent in costs.”

I love these business marketing graphics about indoor air quailty, or IAQ, for those in-the-know. Look how happy the man is in the green bubble! Look how slouchy the people are in the second picture! Is the blue shirt man unhappy because his fancy tech job still doesn’t pay him enough to avoid taking on extreme medical debts? No! It must be the IAQ.

In H.B. Stowe’s time, there was a fear that bad indoor air quality would make for children who didn’t want to say their nightly prayers or comb their hair. Today’s moral panic about indoor air quality finds itself couched in the language of business cases, optimization, and efficiency. If a 2 percent increase in costs can lead to financial benefits that are 20 times greater, it would be a sin under business capitalism to let your indoor air quality system go un-optimized.

I wonder if there isn’t something here, too about the “CO2 poisoning” pseudoscience I saw in anti-mask internet memes early in the pandemic. This theory, which by calling “debunked” lends too much credit, claimed that by wearing a cloth facemask or N95, enough C02 from our own exhalations would be re-inhaled by the mask wearer, leading to dizziness, loss of consciousness, hypoxia, hypercapnia, or death. Maybe this points to a base level human fear, we’re terrified of our own exhalations, our own waste, our own contaminants and toxins, and will go to great lengths to purge them from our nearby environment; including keeping our windows open during the winter in New York and changing building codes so that radiators were moved directly under drafty windows, intentionally.

Photo NYT.

The pictures of outdoor school in this NYT article are amazing to me. It makes me hopeful to think of the ways people have come up with creative solutions to previous pandemics, and the flexibility our culture displays in the course of these events. But at the same time, I keep thinking about the ways we’ve rushed to go back to business as usual, without thinking of ways we could more creatively help people.

For example, according to the Free Geek, 75,000 Oregon students do not have a personal computer to complete their online assignments. 27% of Americans do not own a computer. And one out of ten families do not have internet at home. These were all statistics before the pandemic, before the covid-related economic hardship which has made things like purchasing computers for children and paying internet bills even harder for working families.

I’ll end this article like I do many articles, with a big shrug. It’s important to get students back into the classroom, especially since many don’t have the technology they need to succeed in a distance learning environment. However, I’m skeptical of Kate Brown’s declaration that the long-term risks outweigh the short-term risks for Oregon students, especially when one of the potential “short-term risks” is getting Covid and passing it to family members. Maybe we just have to look back at 1902 New York City- we just gotta open all the windows, crank the radiators up to full blast, and let students back inside.

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televisedbirdwatching · 3 years

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Episode 2: The Hospitalization of the Modern Bathroom

Part 1: Public Housing

In the last episode of this series, I wrote about Central Park in New York City as a piece of Public Health infrastructure, designed to give New Yorkers access to clean air and water during an era when cholera epidemics were common. I also argued that the park became a green beacon for the rest of developing Manhattan, inspiring city planners to take their first steps towards regulating housing, ensuring that all New Yorkers would get access to outdoor-facing windows and indoor toilets. These were the very first baby steps in a series of tenement and apartment reforms that would lead to the creation of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in 1934.

The fingerprints of the Cholera epidemics of the late 1800’s and the influenza and polio epidemics of the early 1900’s are all over the first buildings commissioned by NYCHA. Many of the first housing projects were influenced by the design of emerging modernists like Le Corbusier, whose clean, sterile designs free from excessive ornament represented a sort of “architectural hygiene.”

In the 1930’s, we had grown past the ‘miasma’ theory of disease but were still in the early days of understanding germ theory. But many public health officials began to recognize that one of the best tools at their disposal to help prevent future epidemics was to improve the quality of housing and living conditions for citizens.

These contemporary photos of the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem (top) and the Amalgamated Dwellings in The Bronx (bottom) are early public housing projects, although their construction was privately and philanthropically funded by wealthy New Yorkers. These brick buildings were the first steps towards “modern” materials, and represented a huge upgrade from wooden tenements.

These buildings were constructed using concrete, steel, and glass; all non-porous surfaces, to help give the buildings a clean and hospital-like feeling. Inspired by corbusian ideals, many of these projects were built in a “villa radieuse” pattern to help deliver light to all residents. I’m also curious about a link between bauhaus ideals about the minimal needs for humanity and whether those ideals are showing up here, in the early NYCHA statement that “sunshine, space, and air are the minimum housing requirements to which every American is entitled.”

The ville radieuse/garden city urban planning philosophy is evident in these photos of the Queensbridge Projects. The triangular shape of the blocks and floor plans ensure that all units have two exterior walls for windows. Queensbridge also enjoys a long history within the New York Hip Hop and Rap world; more info from Complex.

Looking to the Queensbridge Housing Project (completed by NYCHA in 1938), the buildings were also built with off-street entrances, and always near park spaces. Many tenements and apartments had entrances right at street level. Public Housing projects were entered through courtyards, providing a literal and mental distance from the “unclean” and crowded city streets.

In fact, the New York City Housing Authority took their role as public health officials so seriously that they set up pandemic-inspired “wellness checks” for all residents on a weekly basis. This way, they felt they could catch early warning signs of disease outbreaks and effectively slow the spread. From Curbed: “This way, the city felt it could stay one step ahead of any problems, including grave illness, and essentially put tenants in touch with a social worker on a regular basis. It can be hard now—with so much of New York’s public housing riddled with vermin, mold, lead paint, and broken elevators—to see these buildings as a public health success story. But for those moving out of the crowded tenement conditions, the projects were a welcome change.” Through today’s lens, it’s easier for us to understand the ways this orwellian policy could invade the privacy of residents, but as with many housing policies, it probably started in a good place from a well-meaning health official.

Part Two: Private Homes

Similar pandemic-inspired changes were brought to people’s private homes, as well; inspiring a hospital-like and sanitized aesthetic that helped deliver a sense of calm to homeowners who felt like germs and disease could be lurking in the dark, dank corners of their wooden victorian homes.

These design changes first showed up in bathrooms. Bathtubs in the late 1800’s were commonly made of wood, built-in to a wooden cabinet-type fixture, and then coated in zinc or copper. In 1883, the Kohler company invented the process for enamel-coating cast iron, creating the first enameled cast iron bathtubs. Bathtubs and toilets lost their wooden surrounds and became stand-alone units. These took off in popularity in the 1920s; accompanied by other revolutions in hygiene like white subway tiles, white porcelain fixtures, and metal faucets.

“Powder Rooms,” an 18th-century name for a half bath, fell out of style as did powdered wigs. But in the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish Flu, powder rooms made a resurgence. Architects began creating half-baths placed near the entryway of the home, creating a place for guests and delivery-persons to wash their hands before making their way inside to deliver ice, coal, or milk. The inclusion of a powder room in entryways created the same sort of conceptual distance between public and private that courtyard apartments had: they provided a transitional space between the unclean, crowded city and the safe, sanitary home.

The top image shows a model bathroom from 1884, complete with wooden enclosures around the tub, sink, and toilet. The bottom image shows an Art Deco style bathroom from the 1920′s, showing a toilet and sink that are beginning to be stand-alone objects. Also, it’s interesting to note how Art Deco served as a transitional option between two conflicting design priorities- the richness and ornate nature of victorian style, but the clean lines and brighter, whiter color palate of modern design. Photos Citylab.

Entering through the front door at Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye (1929), there’s a stand-alone sink in the entryway; but this is just one of the home’s features that highlights an obsession with sanitation. The villa itself stands on pillars, elevating it away from the detestable and marshy ground. Modernists were also obsessed with creating usable indoor-outdoor spaces like rooftop rooms, large sliding doors, and individual balconies for different rooms, helping a home’s residents get access to fresh air and outdoor spaces without leaving the actual confines of their private dwelling.

Le Corbusier, Ville Savoye and it’s entryway sink.

Many articles I read preparing for this blog post made notes of the strong connection between modernist designers and hospital-type spaces. In 1933: Alvar and Aino Alto completed the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, a tuberculosis treatment facility. Adolf Loos’ Villa Muller, 1930, featured a separate room in which to quarantine sick children. Gerrit Rietveld’s 1924 Rietveld Schröder House had a handwashing sink in every room. Mies Van der Rohe’s 1929 Tugendhat Villa was “appropriated by the communist regime as a children’s hospital, and seems to have worked well.” ‘‘Modern man,” wrote Robert Musil in The Man without Qualities (1930), “is born in a hospital and dies in a hospital — hence he should also live in a place like a hospital.”

Alvar Aalto, inventor of the kidney shaped pool and therefore a patron saint of skateboarding, designed this sanatorium for TB patients. With a few tweaks it could be a NYCHA housing project.

However, folks not entirely sold on the modernist aesthetic were still finding ways to bring hygiene and health into the designs of queen anne and victorian style homes. The 1920’s and 30’s also saw the rise of “sleeping porches,” a screened-in porch typically on the second or third floor of a home. These were designed to be special rooms where members of the family could sleep in the fresh air, believed to be beneficial for people suffering from tuberculosis. These porches were typically upstairs, mimicking corbusier’s modernist idea that the home should somehow rise above the dirt and grime of the city at the ground level.

This photo from a local Portland-area builder shows (unfortunately) that very few true examples of sleeping porches remain. Most of them were walled-in and turned into regular rooms when air conditioning was developed in the 1950′s and 60′s, negating the need for sleeping porches. I believe the same is even true at the historical Pittock Mansion- whose sleeping porch has been walled-in with real windows.

The trend towards sanitization in design continued into the 1940’s and 1950’s, even as the 1918 pandemic became a more distant memory. This article from Citylab notes that the trend of built-in soap dishes/dispensers, toothbrush holders, and stainless steel medicine cabinets were all part of an effort to replicate the hospital aesthetic in the home. Families began tearing up the old hardwood flooring in their homes, replacing it with linoleum, an easy-to-clean material; as they had replaced their wooden sink and toilet enclosures with all-porcelain versions in the past.

This lovely mint-green bathroom shows the way hospital influences continued into the middle of the century. All of those tiled-in fixtures- the soap holder, toilet paper holder, toothbrush holders- were all considered sleek (and therefore sanitary) at one point in time. Tastes change.

Section 3: Today

History is a wheel, all design is reactionary, and we’re watching these cycles repeat today. In Public Housing, Wellness Checks are making a comeback during the coronavirus pandemic. The Urban Institute reports: “Home Forward, the housing authority of Portland, Oregon, is conducting regular wellness checks with all elderly and disabled residents over the phone, as is BangorHousing, the housing authority of Bangor, Maine, and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA).” The coronavirus-related deaths of residents in NYCHA properties have led to calls for more Wellness Checks there, as well.

The financial times article I cited above seemed at least half like an advertisement for contemporary versions of Corbusier’s entryway sink, speculating that soon, entryways for homes and public buildings alike will feature things like UV Sanitizers for cellphones ($5,999) and footwear ($22,542).

For only thousands of dollars, you too could own a phone sanitizer, or install a footwear sanitizer in your hospital. Or, you can buy a cheap UV wand on Amazon that (might) blast viruses away.

Even within the recent design trend towards natural colors and textiles, houseplants, and other elements of the millennial maximalist/instagram influencer aesthetic, there are still elements of this desire: houseplants are marketed as a way to clean the air indoors; and the popular essential oil vapor diffusers have a spa-like quality to them that invokes cleanliness and hygiene.

My girlfriend and I go for walks around our city and talk about dream houses and moving in together. Something I can’t shake is the fact that I really want a second bedroom, and a backyard, and a porch; as these things have been huge mental health benefits during the coronavirus lockdown. I work from home but have enough space to set up a desk outside of my living room or bedroom. When we do socialize with friends, we can do so at a distance thanks to our large covered porch and backyard.

If you had asked me last year, a studio apartment would have seemed fine; preferable, even. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic I’m suddenly finding myself daydreaming about bigger spaces; and have to keep reminding myself that we won’t be locked down forever.

What’s the 2020 version of the sleeping porch? What is next in bathroom design that will inspire a revolution in sanitation? How will we create more transitional spaces between an outside world that is largely being seen as a source of contagion and danger, and indoor spaces that are safe, cozy and buffered from the hell of public life? How will children of this era carry forward the ideas they are learning now about the kind of skepticism, distrust of public others, and safety required to exist in cities right now?

Click below for the Liner Notes.

Architectural Digest points out that a New York City restaurant in the 1930’s made the choice to use white subway tile in their buildings to inspire a hospital-like atmosphere, which was supposed to make patrons feel safer in a time when food-borne illnesses like typhoid, botulism, and trichinosis were common. These commercial design features eventually made their way into home kitchens, too.

In an effort to slow the spread of polio, in 1907, cities and states passed strict quarantine requirements. In New York, children with certified cases were required to have a separate room for the patient and for an attendant, but neither of whom were supposed to have access to any food preparation spaces in the home. Families who couldn’t comply often had their children taken from them and placed in special quarantine hospitals. Of course, there’s a class element here- wealthier families were more likely to have the space and finances to comply with these home quarantine requirements, while poorer children would have been sent off to the special hospitals. I’m really curious how the trauma of sending your child away due to a lack space in the home would have influenced homebuyers in the rest of the 20th century. When I buy a home, will I insist on a home office in case we have another stay-at-home order in a future pandemic?

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televisedbirdwatching · 3 years

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Episode 1: Parks as Public Health Infrastructure

Portland’s parks are one of my favorite things about the city. When I first moved here, I would take myself of drives just to go check out new parks; I’d walk around by myself and make mental notes, excited to share these spaces with other people in the future.

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, those parks have become even more valuable. I remember in April, my first trip out of the house post-lockdown was to go for a walk at Pier Park in St. Johns. I remember in July, I hung out with some friends in Laurelhurst park, decompressing and enjoying the 9 PM sunset. I remember in August, hanging out with my mom and my sister in the Peninsula Park Rose Garden. These parks have always been there, but I think the pandemic has helped a lot of people appreciate their parks in new ways.

Portland’s Mt. Tabor Park.

Portland owes many of its great parks to the Olmstead Brother’s plan. In the early 1900’s, the city commissioned the Olmstead Brothers, sons of famed landscape architect and designer of New York City’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmstead, to design a system of parks for the growing city. Peninsula Park, Sellwood Park, Laurelhurst Park, Mount Tabor Park and Forest Park were all sited and designed in reference to the Olmstead plan.

An Illustration from the Olmstead Plan, which can be found in the book “Legacy of the Olmsted Brothers in Portland” by William Hawkins.

When Olmstead designed Central Park for a growing city on Manhattan island, he did so understanding that parks were a critical piece of public health infrastructure. Looking at a map of Manhattan today, it seems inconceivable that 1.3 square miles of developable land would be set aside as a park, but Olmstead’s plan found support from a New York City that was recovering from deadly Cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849 that killed over 8,500 people- bringing the issue even closer to home, Olmstead’s first child died of Cholera in 1860.

The precursor to the germ theory of disease transmission was the “miasma” theory; people believed that disease was caused by odors and vapors from decomposing garbage and sewage. It was also widely accepted that plants and sunlight were capable of sanitizing “miasmic” or “vitious” air. Olmstead’s Central Park was designed to help prevent future epidemics by purifying the city’s air and offering city-dwellers the opportunity to restore their health.

Olmstead wrote: “Opportunity and inducement to escape at frequent intervals from the confined and vitiated air of the commercial quarter, and to supply the lungs with air screened and purified by trees and recently acted on by sunlight, together with opportunity and inducement to escape from situations requiring vigilance, wariness, and activity towards other men- if these could be supplied economically, our problem would be solved.” The emergency and gravity of the cholera epidemics gave Olmstead and city politicians the political license to carry forward big ideas like Central Park, providing a public benefit and taking steps to prevent the next pandemic (although modern science tells us that plants don’t exactly sanitize the air the way they believed).

Hudson River School painter Asher Durand painted this portrait of his children in an upstate NY Apple Orchard in 1832; continuing the long-standing tradition of wealthy people escaping to their idyllic countryside homes when pandemics strike in urban areas. Given the year of this painting it’s not hard to connect it to the 1832 Cholera epidemic in New York- bet you didn’t think I was going to sneak art history into this one.

It’s worth remembering that Central Park is a completely manufactured landscape. Marshes were drained and streams were created completely artificially. From the Central Park Conservancy, “its only natural feature is the metamorphic rock, called Manhattan schist, that’s approximately 450 million years old.” The rest is a work of art- deliberately crafted from the natural medium.

The tie between Central Park and public health goes deeper considering that the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, across from the Guggenheim Museum, actually predates the rest of Central Park,* and was the first major attempt made to bring clean water to the growing city. Even before germ theory, public health officials could tell that there was some connection between water and cholera, and set about building an aqueduct to deliver water from the Croton Reservoir 22 miles to the north.

In an age when most New Yorkers didn’t have access to running water, the clean water that could be found in the park was another draw. An 1870 guidebook to the park encouraged visitors to ‘drink their fill’ from the ‘inexhaustible cisterns.’ Ornate drinking fountains were placed around the park, including one near The Mall that used underground blocks of ice to cool the water.

The Bethesda Fountain, just south of The Lake, was built as a monument to the completion of the Croton Aqueduct. This statue was the first major art commission in New York City granted to a woman. Stebbins was also a lesbian and used her partner Charlotte Cushman as a model for the statue; although in 1840′s language they were just two female best friends who lived together for many years and for some reason never married men.

The huge supply of fresh, clean water suddenly available in Central Park allowed New York city planners to begin delivering running water to homes in Greenwich Village, Gramercy Park, and Chelsea, neighborhoods that were initially upper-class suburbs created for people trying to escape the overcrowded tenements in the areas around the Five Points. An 1822 yellow fever epidemic provided the first major wave of resettlement from lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village, the second was spurred by a building boom that occurred as another wave of people tried to escape the tenements for safer living conditions during the 1832 cholera epidemic. The city spread farther north to Gramercy Park in 1842 when the reservoir was complete.

This house at 77 Beford Street is considered to be the oldest original home in Greenwich Village, depending on how you define the boundaries of the village, and depending on if you count the fact that it was significantly upgraded in 1832 as a mark against its authenticity. Rabbit hole, here.

As New Yorkers with the means to do so moved further north and closer to Central Park, the Park seems to have had a sort of “greening” influence on the rest of the city, spreading clean air and water southwards into the working class and immigrant communities in the city. In the 1860’s and 70’s, the city of New York took its first steps towards operating as a housing authority, passing laws requiring that tenements begin offering indoor, running water and at least one window to the outdoors in each unit (creating the dog-bone or dumbbell shape we know today). In an effort to bring running water and centralized sewage service further south into Manhattan, the city began tearing up the streets and installing sewer pipes. When the streets were repaved, they used materials like concrete and asphalt to allow for weekly street washing and sweeping services. City planners began including space for alleyways in their designs, so that trash didn’t have to be placed directly on the street.*

This photo by Jacob Riis from “How The Other Half Lives” was an expose on tenement living conditions. Homes were often extremely poorly ventilated, often without any kind of exterior doors or windows. Sinks were shared among many residents, and bathrooms were outdoor outhouses.

This article from the Central Park Conservancy argues that we should think of Central Park itself as a critical piece of public health infrastructure. Olmstead’s park provided clean air and water to New York residents at a time when many didn’t have running water, a window to the outside, or a way to escape the garbage and sewage in the streets. But as time went on, the Park not only provided a place to escape to, but a place that established an ideal: that clean water and air should be brought to all parts of the city for all citizens to enjoy, not just within the 1.3 square miles of park boundary- and over time, the city housing authority made steps toward that ideal.

“All these influences have a strangely powerful force,” writes an 1870’s guidebook to Central Park, about the power of a visit to the Park. “They compel the soul. It is almost impossible to do any thing in the park but rest, breath sweet air, and enjoy.”

“Do your Part” Coronavirus warning sign at Mt. Tabor over the summer.

I’m interested to see the ways in which Portland residents are enjoying those same benefits today, in light of a global pandemic. I’m also interested to see the other ways this cycle repeats. Will we see a post-pandemic return to the suburbs as people retreat from densely-populated and “unclean” urban areas? What kinds of infrastructural changes will be made to our built environment as city planners and urban designers imagine the next public health crisis?

Liner Notes:

*RE: reservoir- kind of. There was an older, rectangular reservoir built in 1842 that was later replaced in 1860 with a more organic shaped reservoir designed to better fit in with the nature-inspired elements of central park, and that reservoir has also been replaced by the one there today. I could have been more careful about this in writing but I think it’s safe to say that a reservoir (of some shape) occupied that spot (in general) in the park since 1842.

*RE Alleyways- Yes, they began making space for alleyways, but large sections of Manhattan were built before this need for alleys was realized, and they couldn’t exactly go back and put them there, so there are virtually no alleyways in Manhattan; most are in other boroughs.

I acknowledge that New York City has a rocky history with parks; see Jane Jacob’s description of parks as places that provide cover for youth to bully other youth; see Robert Moses’ time in New York City and the overt racism he displayed when choosing the locations of parks and sites for playground equipment. Even within the 1840s, there would have been race and class dynamics at play, too- not everyone would have had equitable access to a public health resource like Central Park. This warrants its own investigation and I felt like I didn’t have the sources nor the scope to include that here. If anyone has any sources that talk about access to parks in the 19th and early 20th century, I’d like to know!

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televisedbirdwatching · 3 years

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A 4-Part Series on the Built Environment and Coronavirus

Introduction:

Last weekend my sister and I went for a walk in Forest Park, a large nature reserve in Northwest Portland. A break in the rain gave us a cold and sunny day to walk around and enjoy some of the fall colors. The loop we were walking had been converted to a one-way trail, “these loops are intended to reduce the chance of visitor interactions and slow the spread of COVID-19, writes the Forest Park Conservancy. Since the pandemic took hold in this area last March, I’ve been really curious to track subtle changes like these, little tweaks to our built environment that have become part of our new world.

Installing signs along a nature trail seems like a relatively low-cost endeavor; but not all of the changes have been so easy. As Eater PDX reports, restaurant owners fighting to maintain a foothold have invested thousands of dollars into outdoor patio structures to allow for safe, open-air dining. Some restaurants have even installed air scrubbers and HVAC systems designed to improve indoor air quality. Driving around town, I’ve noticed a visible scramble in the past few weeks to winterize these outdoor patio spaces- suddenly, many of them have propane heaters and vinyl walls.

Almost as soon as these upgrades were completed, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced a two-to-four-week lockdown again, meaning restaurants will have to operate as take-out only for the next month in Multnomah County; and all those newly renovated patios will be empty.

Walking around my neighborhood, I’ve been wondering how many of these changes are going to become permanent, and I’m reminded of the ways that previous pandemics have shaped the environment around us.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a series of articles on the shared history of pandemics and urban design; covering topics like New York City’s Central Park, steam radiators, linoleum tiles, urban greenways, and ad-hoc handwashing stations for Portland’s unhoused community members. Stay tuned for more.

Episode 1: Parks as Public Health Infrastructure

Episode 2: The Hospitalization of Bathroom Design

Episode 3: Radiators, Deadly Air, Moral Panic

Episode 4: 2020 in Portland, Pandemic Infrastructure Walking Tour

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televisedbirdwatching · 4 years

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Trash, Sweeps, and Life Unsheltered in Portland

“I understand that homeless people have it rough, but I don’t understand why they can’t just pick up after themselves better.”

It was a grey and depressing Portland morning in March of 2018, the time of year when people start getting excited about the end of winter, but before the time of year when everyone’s resolve is collectively crushed and we learn to accept to our sunless future. Some coworkers and I had the opportunity to earn some bonus money from our job by spending a few hours picking up trash in the neighborhood around our store.

“I don’t understand why they can’t just pick up after themselves,” said my coworker, as he tried to lift up a wet sock using a trash-grabber.

At the time, I didn’t really have anything to say to him. It was something that puzzled me, too. Walking around that part of town, it wasn’t uncommon to have to cross the street because a camp had completely blocked the sidewalk. Often times, although the tents themselves weren’t in the way, the outward sprawl of car parts, old tarps, abandoned box springs, and bicycles made passage difficult.

As with most of the things that I’ve learned since I first started working with unsheltered folks in Portland, the answer to my coworkers question was simpler and more direct than I imagined. I should have asked, Where are they going to put their trash? And then, who would come pick it up?

This photo is from a 2017 pilot project in Oakland that helped provide large-scale camps with trash service.

For the last few months, I’ve been working closely with a group called The People’s Store. We’re a mobile, pop-up, free “store” that helps unsheltered people get access to the daily care items they need. The things we carry in the store and the services we try to provide are informed by the unsheltered people we serve. One of the things that came up a few times was the need for a way to dispose of trash.

One of our volunteers pointed me in the direction of Metro’s Bag Program, a service our regional government has been providing since 2018. From their website: “Metro's bag program provides people who are experiencing homelessness with a way to dispose of their trash. The program started as a pilot in the fall of 2018 after Metro engaged local government representatives, law enforcement officers, community health workers and people experiencing homelessness to better understand disposal challenges for people living in camps, cars and RVs around greater Portland. In addition to providing disposal options, the program also aims to reduce litter and keep our communities clean and healthy.”

Metro distributes rolls of trash bags to camps around the Portland area, and there’s a phone number printed on the side of the bag that anyone can call to have the bag picked up by the RID Patrol, a task force on illegal dumping. RID Patrol employee Juan Garcia said in this article that “people living outside often offer to help him clean up. He recalls one site where a man was sweeping with a broom he'd made himself out of branches from a bush. ‘And he was literally making piles of rigid plastic and metal to recycle,’ he adds.

vimeo

For more info on the Bag program, check out this video, created in partnership with Metro and Outside the Frame, a group that provides youth experiencing homelessness a way to tell their stories through the medium of documentary film.

The same article quoted Richard Catlett, an unsheltered person helping Garcia clean up a camp on 82nd avenue. “‘Homeless people aren't trash. We aren't worthless,’ he said as he pointed to some garbage on the ground. ‘This is a by-product of how we're forced to live.’

Beyond barriers to trash disposal faced by unsheltered folks, Catlett is right to highlight the fact that life on the streets often involves many single-use, individually packaged, and non-durable or repairable items. When I first started volunteering at Street Roots, I noticed the popularity of the styrofoam and plastic Cup Noodles ramen soups. I studied sustainability in college, and there was something deep in my brain that felt bad about handing out single-use styrofoam containers, along with single-use plastic utensils, knowing they would end up in a landfill in short order. However, who am I to begrudge someone their only calories for the day because the packaging isn’t a suitably sustainable item?

In an attempt to distribute the most goods to the greatest number of people, many of the items that folks donate or distribute to unsheltered folks are cheap, bulk buys. It’s an honorable goal to be able to distribute 50 backpacks instead of 10. However, when these items can’t stand up to the rigors of life outside, they inevitably end up as trash. Even if repair of these items is possible, it’s often not worth the time nor the money to purchase the required supplies. Coupled with the fact that there aren’t many opportunities to dispose of trash items, these things pile up.

This flyer from Portland advocacy group Stop The Sweeps provides critical information about the city of Portland’s campsite sweeping policies. One of the criteria used by the city to determine which camps to sweep first is “Has significant garbage or debris.” Without providing a robust system for trash disposal, it’s not clear how this is a fair qualification for determining which camps to sweep.

However, there’s a parallel kind of logic present in the nature of sweeps themselves as a response to homelessness. The city provides few opportunities for unsheltered people to dispose of their trash, and then judges them based on their ability to keep their camps clean: The city provides few opportunities for people to access the supportive housing, and then disperses camps of people who already had nowhere else to go.

In an article on the Metro website, Solid Waste Planner Rob Nathan was quoted as follows: “We keep hearing from our partners that the more people are moved, the harder it is to provide them with transitional services, healthcare and housing—all those things we need to get people off the street. Our partners are really excited about this (the bag program) because they see this as a tool to help keep people stable, in one spot, and complained about less.”

In Portland, we’re incredibly lucky to have groups like Metro providing creative solutions to these problems with programs like the Bag program, and to have groups simultaneously creating low-barrier jobs and provide trash services through Central City Concern and Clean Start PDX. Programs like the bag program are a critical step in making sure that people can avoid getting swept and can experience the stability required to rebuild their lives. It’s clear that unsheltered folks want to help keep their camps clean- they just need the trash bags and trash service to do it. Programs like the bag program provide this support and help close the gap between the services housed people take for granted and the services unhoused people really need.

This photo is from a Street Roots article in the winter of 2019, when ODOT announced it was ramping up sweeps on ODOT property.

A few weeks ago, I was driving through a large camp in Laurelhurst Park, after making a supply drop for The People’s Store. As I drove by, I saw a woman using a broom to sweep off the sidewalk in front of her tent.

A few days ago I learned that the Laurelhurst Camp would be subject to a sweep. Notices were to be posted shortly, and folks would have 24-48 hours notice to bring their camp into compliance with city policy on trash, social distancing, and other criteria.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC recommends that cities not clear encampments, as this can cause people to disperse throughout the community, making any kind of Covid-related contact tracing even more difficult. The CDC also recommends that cities ensure that nearby restroom facilities are available to unsheltered folks 24/7, and are “stocked with hand hygiene materials and bath tissue.”

What would Portland look like if we followed this recommendation, providing all of our community members with basic necessities like access to running water and trash disposal?

Sources, Inspiration, Further Reading:

https://www.oregonmetro.gov/news/bags-provide-garbage-service-those-without

https://www.oregonmetro.gov/news/garbage-pick-shines-light-stories-we-can-t-see

https://www.oregonmetro.gov/tools-living/garbage-and-recycling/report-dumped-garbage/bag-program

https://www.streetroots.org/news/2019/01/11/camp-sweep-comes-city-takes-over-odot-land

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