How PSU is leading Portland’s comeback from COVID-19

Written by Cliff Collins / Illustrations by Hyesu Lee

If Portland State University volunteers have anything to say about it, Portland will soon return to being the city that works. Since the COVID-19 crisis began in March 2020, PSU faculty, students and alumni have been working to tackle the city’s biggest issues, including trash, the housing and homelessness crisis, community safety and struggling businesses.

When the pandemic struck, lockdowns and safety restrictions emptied the usually bustling downtown. According to a study by the Portland Business Alliance, for every five people walking downtown in December 2019, there was only one in December 2020—an 82% drop. The question quickly became how to get them back.

Cleaning up the city

As COVID-19 restrictions started, most of the city’s clearing of illegal dump sites and roadside litter stopped. The result was trash. A lot of trash.

In a May survey sponsored by The Oregonian, respondents named a cleaner downtown as one of their top priorities for making the city more appealing, notes Kris Carico ’97, CEO of SOLVE. Carico is co-chair of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s Clean & Green Action Table, one of five committees Wheeler convened this spring to address problems facing the city. Cleanliness ranked higher at 70% than less crime (67%), restaurants, bars and theaters reopening (61%) and fewer protests (55%).

Responding to that need, the 50-member coalition led by Carico holds monthly events to support cleanup efforts aimed at improving Portland’s livability. These are focused on picking up litter, hauling away illegal dumping, cleaning streets, and removing graffiti, human waste and abandoned cars. A staff member and about 30 SOLVE volunteers attend each cleanup, she says. Usually the organization attracts 30,000 volunteers annually to cleanup events but has gained even more in 2021.

Keeping Portland clean means bringing back the original Portland I grew up with and cherish.

“This year, the number of volunteers has gone up noticeably,” she says. A few reasons: “People feel compelled to help because of the conditions the city has experienced over the last year; being able to do the work outdoors makes volunteers feel safer; and there is a tangible effect—you can see the results.” You can weigh them, too. At a downtown cleanup in September, SOLVE volunteers collected more than 2,240 pounds of garbage. At another on North Greeley Avenue, they collected 3 tons.

“I’m a native Oregonian, and it makes me proud to be part of a community that wants to be part of this,” Carico says.

Sharona Shnayder ’20 also has played a role in the monumental task of removing garbage from the streets. She is co-founder and CEO of Tuesdays for Trash, a grassroots effort turned worldwide movement that’s now on every continent except Antarctica.

Stuck at home during lockdowns in May 2020, Shnayder and fellow student Wanda McNealy decided to turn frustration into action by picking up trash on Tuesdays, first on the Park Blocks and soon across the city.

Spreading the word via Instagram, they encouraged others to get involved and turned Tuesdays for Trash into an LLC.

“Tuesdays for Trash contributed to helping Portland make a comeback by revitalizing community in the city,” says Shnayder, who has relocated to Israel and works for an environmental organization while continuing to lead the group. “Picking up trash with the movement not only benefits our environment but also the wildlife, people and businesses in the area. ”

For her personally, “Keeping Portland clean means bringing back the original Portland I grew up with and cherish.”

Shnayder’s group also has collaborated with Dirtbag Runners, a community of trail runners founded by Crista Scott Tappan. Shnayder and Tappan first met at Portland State’s School of Business, where Tappan is an instructor and content marketing manager and Shnayder was an accounting major. Tappan suggested a partnership with Tuesdays for Trash because she was inspired by Shnayder’s dedication to improving the world. The two organizations share similar missions of environmental activism, community engagement and fundraising, Tappan says.

Together, they’ve completed two successful cleanups, with a third planned. One, at Laurelhurst Park, “was a community-centered event in Portland as part of our last Run for the Planet to get participants connected in the area,” Tappan says. “Our organizations really mesh well together because they’re both about getting people who are passionate and active in their areas to raise their voices and dedicate time to care for the environment around them.”

Building safe and secure housing

Students and faculty members in the School of Architecture’s Center for Public Interest Design drew on the center’s long experience in applying design to social needs to answer the call when the pandemic underscored the urgency of supporting individuals experiencing homelessness.

The center previously had brought architecture and design services together with stakeholders to bring to fruition several tiny house—or pod—villages, a model pioneered by the houseless community, says Todd Ferry, associate director and senior research associate at the center. The model combines the security and dignity of being able to have a safe place of one’s own with a supportive community structure.

I would love to have a hand in creating Black homeowners.

During the pandemic, a new, 19-unit village opened in St. Johns using a pod design developed in one of Ferry’s architecture studios with input from villagers. Units at the Kenton Women’s Village and Clackamas County Veterans Village employ the same design.

Designing elements such as pods and seeing their impact in the real world has been “a transformative experience for students,” Ferry says.

The work on villages and pods has also informed other center projects pursued during the pandemic to support the people living without shelter: Recent student projects include structures for the Hygiene4All hub under the Morrison Bridge, led by Lisa Patterson MArch ’18; the design of a self-care station called The Groom Room where people can attend to personal needs; and a collaboration with the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative to share stories of the houseless experience during the 2020 Oregon wildfires through a mobile exhibit and engagement station.

Interest in alternative shelter models is growing nationally, Ferry says. “A lot of people are looking at Portland” both for guidance on highly technical aspects of building pods and villages, and for how they and other emerging models can foster “community cultures.”

One alum has taken a different approach to Portland’s housing challenges. Recognizing that communities of color have been disproportionately affected, both medically and economically, by the pandemic inspired Randal Wyatt ’21 to found Taking Ownership PDX.

He launched the organization last year to help African Americans resist being displaced by gentrification.

“We fix up homes free of charge so they can keep their homes,” says Wyatt, a longtime community activist and hip-hop artist. Support for the idea “snowballed, much faster than I could have imagined,” he says. Taking Ownership PDX raised $100,000 in one month during August 2020, and “since then, over $400,000. We’ve helped over 40 families with roof replacements, window upgrades, yard work” and more. Donors and supporters have included real estate agents and developers.

“We have over 100 people on our waiting list,” Wyatt says. “I’m meeting with other communities about the model I’ve used. I would love to have a hand in creating Black homeowners.” It’s been a wild ride, he says, and something he’s amazed he might be able to do for a living.

Helping businesses bounce back

When stay-at-home orders hit in spring 2020, shuttered businesses suffered, and the alumni-powered Portland Business Support Project sprang into action to help them stay afloat. Over a 26-week period, volunteers devoted more than 1,900 hours to 40 projects helping small businesses, says Jennifer Greenberg MBA ’19. Greenberg, who is also an adjunct faculty member at PSU’s School of Business, was part of the core group that spearheaded the emergency effort. Each business received help from a designated team of experts to solve problems after the shutdown.

Many faced issues small businesses regularly struggle with, Greenberg says. The pandemic made clear that a lot weren’t data driven. At PSU’s Portland MBA program, she says, students learn to think analytically about business, while considering issues around equity and sustainability. “As a group of MBA professionals, we said, ‘Let’s look at data and the market and see what’s possible.’”

The School of Business is “at the forefront” of generating and maintaining relationships with the Portland business community, and participants in the project were able to hone their own consulting skills while meeting an immediate need. “We think it’s a nice benefit to the school alumni and local businesses,” Greenberg says.

Current students have also helped with the effort. The Rose City Downtown Collective, a group dedicated to supporting downtown businesses, approached PSU for marketing advice. Their request became a project for 51 students of Jacob Suher, marketing faculty, who volunteered to form 10 teams to create marketing plans for seven downtown Portland businesses. Each team prepared a video presentation and a written marketing plan to guide companies’ strategies.

A key element of that was enhancing their ability to employ social media. That’s where tech-savvy students such as Idee Contreras Itehua could offer especially valuable advice. She says she learned that “a lot of these businesses are needing tons of help understanding social media in connection to their business. Either they lack social media presence or are completely lost trying to navigate through.”

This fall, Suher’s teams will lend a hand again, and they’re expecting to help up to 12 additional enterprises.

Members of the unarmed Portland Street Response team respond to an emergency call at an encampment in the Lents neighborhood. PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative contributed to the development of this new public safety pilot program. (Photo: City of Portland)
 

Making the streets safer

Portland State also is helping create positive solutions to overlapping problems such as those related to shelter and safety. For example, PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative has been working with several community partners to help develop and evaluate a new public safety program that provides an alternative to armed police.

Portland Street Response can help lead the way for what a new public safety system can look like.

The group surveyed people experiencing homelessness to understand their needs, concerns and preferences for a safe and effective response. The results informed a city pilot program called Portland Street Response, which sends a firefighter paramedic, mental health crisis clinician and two community health workers to non-violent 911 calls involving mental health, substance use or people experiencing homelessness.

“Not only will the program help reduce the criminalization of homelessness and mental illness, but it will also help connect people to services, housing and other support they need to address the complex traumas they’ve experienced,” said Greg Townley, research director at Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative and the lead researcher for the survey and evaluation. “At a time when cities across the country are rethinking how public safety efforts are structured and funded, Portland Street Response can help lead the way for what a new public safety system can look like.”

For now, the program is limited to Portland’s Lents neighborhood and surrounding areas with plans to scale up citywide in 2022.

Restoring people’s confidence that it is safe to return to downtown will take time, and presents a knotty dilemma, points out Kris Henning, criminology and criminal justice faculty. On the one hand, feelings of safety will be enhanced when more people visit or go back to work or school; but “that requires that people feel safe,” he says.

The reopening of PSU should be beneficial, because it means roughly 20,000 more people “will be downtown for legitimate, positive purposes. The more of that we have, the closer we will get to the point where people feel safe.”

Clifford Allen, dean of The School of Business, agrees. “When people see each other, that tends to make people feel more comfortable,” he says.

Allen serves on the mayor’s Business Success & Job Creation Action Table and worked with other members on a creative strategy to engage students as they return to downtown and help local businesses at the same time.

The group used a Portland-based payment app called Kuto to put $30,000 of federal relief funds into the pockets of 600 students specifically so they could spend the money at downtown businesses. The partnership has even grown to include a program where 30 students will get paid internships helping businesses that have suffered pandemic losses.

As Allen notes, downtown still has a lot to overcome, but if knowledge truly can save the city, Portland State is leading the way to make its comeback a success.