Héctor Rodriguez-Ruiz, MURP AlumWhen I moved to Portland in 2014, it was my first time living on the mainland and my first time being treated differently because of my accent and the way I look. I’m Borikua, born and raised in Puerto Rico, where I completed my bachelor’s degree in biology. I belong to the Latinx Queer community, and my preferred pronouns are he/him/el. After my undergraduate education, I moved to Portland by myself seeking new challenges and opportunities. In theory, Portland is a liberal city, but it was still an ambiguous environment in terms of race conversations, with an unhealthy I-don’t-see-color type of approach. After experiencing this culture shock, I decided to make Portland my own social experiment. I stayed just to see what it was like to experience being Latino in such a white city. I worked as a dishwasher in a Mexican restaurant and saw how badly people were treated because of their immigration status. The workers were afraid to speak up about how they were treated. So I started helping workers navigate the system. I researched nonprofits and different programs. I paid attention to what the immigrant community didn’t have easy access to and helped people navigate housing and programs to access jobs and or create their own businesses. Then a friend told me if I was already doing that kind of work, I should build a profession out of it.
That’s when I got into community development and had the opportunity to be part of Hacienda Community Development Corporation. I had a really good experience here. I worked with social programs that help minoritized households grow wealth and get established in their neighborhoods so they could set roots in Portland. While doing this work, I learned about Portland State University’s Community Development program, which impressed me.
Coming from Puerto Rico, I have seen how we can do things without a lot of resources. There’s a community sense that I need to help my neighbor for my own progress. People take care of themselves and each other through a communal approach.
I decided it was time to try something different. PSU’s Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program had values I shared. I got into the program, with a focus on community development, and made many good friends. We all work in different sectors of planning: private, state, city, county, and Metro. Through the program, I also secured an internship in Wuhan, China. Being abroad in Summer 2018 and seeing the planning model from another type of government compared to the United States gave me a better understanding of the good and bad practices in different political and economic systems.
After graduating with my MURP in 2018, I started my career as a planner at the Portland Bureau of Transportation, where I worked as a community service aide to help adopt the 5-Year Racial Equity Plan. Soon after, I moved to the Oregon Department of Transportation. Working with private and local sector consultants, I learned how to manage contracts and navigate the procurement process. That experience opened a lot of doors for me. I worked with bureaucracies and learned why it takes so long to really act on something.
Recently, I accepted a position as the East Portland liaison planner with the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS). Portland is moving forward and entering into new challenges, recovering from the pandemic, and implementing more equitable policies thanks in big part to the Black Lives Matter movement. The whole city is shifting its model. We’ve been asking and listening to what the community wants and needs, and now we must act on those plans.
A main challenge in moving forward is the bureaucracy we have created and to which we are held accountable, even when it isn’t working. It’s not an issue exclusive to our city. It’s every city’s issue.
Coming from Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, gives me a keen perspective on planning and colonialism. It’s like looking into a concave mirror: You can see the results of urban planning decisions quickly. It takes just four or five years to see the effects of policy decisions—and the intended and unintended results of implementing planning as one-size-fits-all instead of a process that considers the local organic community structure. This perspective helps me with the work I’m doing with BPS in Portland implementing an Equity Framework in long-range planning.
My job is to think about planning from a long-range perspective, but community members are out there day-to-day making a living, and we need things to work for them now. Community members don’t necessarily have the time to be sitting and having conversations about how to do things in 10 years. They have immediate priorities, like keeping their families fed and housed. In urban planning, there is sometimes a thin line between dreaming of utopia and creating reality.
It’s important to be humble. Just because we are planners doesn’t mean we know better than anyone else. We have codes and policies for everything. The way we plan can be very strict. We can fall into a place of arrogance and think we have all the answers on how to build communities. Instead, we must give space for communities to have their own expressions, to grow organically, and to see how people come together and make their environment work for them. I’m always watching and listening to people, just sitting down and seeing how things work around me. It’s a humbling experience to listen to people.
Coming from Puerto Rico, I have seen how we can do things without a lot of resources. There’s a community sense that I need to help my neighbor for my own progress. People take care of themselves and each other through a communal approach.
When I moved to the United States, part of the culture shock was to see how people here tend to be more individualistic. That sense of community sometimes is lost because we see neighborhoods as individual property—this is my safe place, and I don’t want anybody else to come in and tell me what to do. This standpoint can result in a barrier for innovation. I think planning needs to be more understanding of the human scale if we want to foster sustainable communities. We should allow mixed uses of our spaces to supply our needs. We don’t necessarily need a megastore on the other side of town to get our groceries just because our residential codes don’t allow anything other than houses. We should not just think about aesthetics but consider how zone restrictions impact the distance people must travel to access essential resources like food.
The more involved I am with planning, the more I want to go back to my roots and work in the community, probably in Puerto Rico. I want to work with the land and organize community. The planning profession can sometimes be a bit of a silo. I recommend always having time to travel, study, and talk to people. You can get trapped in planning work just doing the daily paperwork. You can become immersed in the technical aspects of planning, and then it’s hard to get out of that comfort zone.
I also recommend that students network. Don’t be afraid to knock on doors and talk to people, have coffee, or go for a walk. Especially after Covid, I think people have this need for socializing and getting back to one-on-one conversations. The MURP program will give you the technical tools to become a planner, but to be a good planner you need to be comfortable in your space, listen and learn, and you need a vision to help others.