EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from “ Resilience for All: Striving for Equity Through Community-Driven Design, ” by Barbara Brown Wilson, published by Island Press. In it, the author chronicles examples around the U.S. of community-engaged design led by historically marginalized populations advocating for equitable, positive change. Here, she explains how nonprofit groups in northeastern Portland, Oregon, have fought displacement and pushed for safer streets.

“On the way to the elementary school there is not a pedestrian crossing and no sidewalks. If you want to walk your kids to school, you have to share the road with the cars, and if it rains, it covers the whole edge of the street, and you do not have anywhere to walk besides the shared area with the cars. When I took my son to school, I tried to stay close to the fences where the houses were, because if a car passed it would spray me with water from the puddles. … Also, in a lot of areas there was no lighting. It was really dangerous in the summertime, because there would be gangs that would come at night and be in the dark areas. You would not feel safe to go to the park or go to the schools. In the streets it is safer, but there are lots of potholes and things that could make a stroller fall over.” —Teresa Raigoza Castillo, Cully Neighborhood Leader

Cully, a neighborhood in Northeast Portland, is among the most ethnically diverse in Oregon. It is also marked by poverty, rapid gentrification, and inequitable access to quality public infrastructure. Many green infrastructure project teams flounder when trying to couple social justice with their environmental goals, but in Cully green infrastructure provision is linked explicitly with wealth building and anti-displacement goals through a coalition called Living Cully. Living Cully is the brainchild of Verde, a community-based nonprofit with a mission to “build environmental wealth through Social Enterprise, Outreach, and Advocacy.” Using the momentum and resources in Portland’s EcoDistrict approach, but focused on grassroots, resident leadership to drive urban change, Living Cully is now a robust network of community organizations and resident leaders all working in concert to build local resident capacity, improve local infrastructure, and fight the forces of displacement those improvements might otherwise bring. One of the most powerful parts of the strategies employed by Verde and its partners was their use of resident-driven wayfinding and green infrastructure as a part of a larger antipoverty strategy.

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Cully suffers from a lack of safe, high-quality infrastructure — with flooding streets, limited sidewalks, poor street lighting, and few high-quality parks. But adding these civic amenities would likely spur resident displacement if a thoughtful plan was not in place. Verde deputy director Tony DeFalco describes the Living Cully vision:

We define green infrastructure around community wealth. If you have nice streets and nice trees, these things produce both economic and health benefits. … We are interested in how this publicly owned infrastructure can increase equity if we advocate for it as a community, if we are able to influence the delivery of the assets. And that is really important, because often what happens is you get a new street, or a new park, and there is no corollary activity around having affordable housing nearby or hiring people from the community to perform the construction.

Living Cully invests in local residents through leadership development and job training that allow lower-income residents to contribute to positive change in their communities, while also building their own capacity to stay as revitalization occurs. Early “signature projects” included gaining the development rights to transform a brownfield into the community’s vision for a public park, and installing a set of wayfinding signs crafted by the community to highlight their community walks and biking programs. The wayfinding project also helped the community in their effort to convince governmental agencies of the need for better pedestrian and bike infrastructure.

A Living Cully project map. (Map by Kevan Klosterwill)

These successes laid the foundation for a series of housing improvements, including a project that helped tenants of a mobile housing development cooperatively buy their property from the owners and a nationally significant pilot project with Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East to focus deeply on the area, including retrofitting existing neighborhood homes. Residents are also transforming an old strip club into a thriving community center and affordable housing.

Mapping Cully: The Rogue Ecodistrict

Northeast Portland’s largest neighborhood, today Cully encompasses more than three square miles and is home to more than 14,000 people. In comparison to the rest of Oregon, Cully is quite diverse; more than 25 percent of Cully’s residents are Hispanic, and almost 20 percent are foreign-born. USA Today created a diversity index based on 2010 census data, which estimated that “3 times out of 4, a person in this Census Tract had a different racial or ethnic background than another random person from that same Census Tract.” Low-income residents of Cully are at high risk of gentrification-driven displacement. A 2013 study of gentrification in Portland highlights the Cully neighborhood as a high-risk area — reminding the reader, “the key distinction between revitalization and gentrification is the negative consequence of involuntary residential displacement.” Community improvements alone do not spur gentrification; it is marked by a pattern of (typically publicly subsidized) physical improvements resulting in the involuntary displacement of its lower-income residents.

The median household income in Cully is $41,000, with more than 18 percent of the neighborhood population living below the poverty line. Therefore, when the median home price increased by more than 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, many Cully residents felt the pressures of potential displacement. As a result of activist efforts, the Portland City Council adopted a resolution in August 2012 to study and prevent displacement in Cully as they sought to encourage revitalization of the neighborhood. Living Cully continues to reference this commitment as issues arise and uses it as a platform to hold the Council accountable when asking for City support of affordable housing strategies and resident capacity building programs.

The City of Portland has gained national attention for its focus on the creation and implementation of EcoDistricts. EcoDistricts require collaboration across district-scale institutions to accelerate neighborhood-oriented sustainability. The concept originated with the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI) in 2008. In 2012, the EcoDistricts team launched a nonprofit to formalize their approach. The team created certification systems in which practitioners could be trained and credentialed, and it began consulting with cities across the globe about the best strategies for becoming more sustainable at the neighborhood scale. Verde appropriated the language of EcoDistricts that the City was using to frame its investments, but rejected the formal protocol. Verde sees this protocol as insufficient to ensure that the benefits of green infrastructure and other sustainability investments result in positive outcomes for low-income residents.

Making Green Infrastructure Accessible to All

The Living Cully coalition formed to ensure that low-income residents receive equitable access to the benefits of ecological restoration in the Cully neighborhood. This is not a huge conceptual leap; green infrastructure improvements create jobs, provide public health benefits, and are often implemented along with streetscape improvements that increase pedestrian safety. In practice, however, the employment opportunities rarely benefit local residents, and the streetscape improvements are not done with respect to the local cultures. Rain gardens and other green infrastructure elements often appeal to more affluent, white investors. They can cause real estate values to rise, which often results in involuntary displacement. Good civic investments should, at minimum, attempt to build the adaptive capacity of the most vulnerable community residents to the stressors that might result. Ideally, local knowledge will inform the public infrastructure improvements; thus the space will reflect the values of the community and make residents feel welcome. This is what the coalition of groups that make up Living Cully set out to do. The Living Cully network is managed by Verde and includes resident leaders as well as local community-organizing entities, including Hacienda Community Development Corporation and Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East, Portland State University, and other groups invested in supporting the positive transformation of the Cully neighborhood with and for its lower-income residents.

One of Living Cully’s wayfinding workshops. (Credit: Verde)

Verde is a Cully-focused nonprofit organization with a mission to “build environmental wealth through social enterprise, outreach, and advocacy.” Founded by Alan Hipólito in 2005 as an offshoot of Hacienda Community Development Corporation, Verde uses a place-based, coalition-building approach to implement its mission. Hacienda is Oregon’s largest Latino-led, Latino-serving organization, and the oldest affordable housing provider in the neighborhood, building and rehabilitating more than 380 units since 1992. Prior to founding Verde, Hipólito worked for Hacienda for five years, supporting affordable housing agency programming such as microenterprise and workforce development, and the partnerships between the two remain strong today. Verde operates two social enterprises: Verde Landscape (which implements and maintains green infrastructure projects like rain gardens) and Verde Builds (a licensed general contractor that develops environmental infrastructure and weatherizes homes).

The Living Cully coalition helps Verde identify community capacities and local and regional needs around which viable businesses can be built. Verde then uses the social enterprises as a mechanism to invest deeply in resident capacity building. Subsidizing these businesses through grants and donations, Verde is able to offer its employees on-the-job training, professional certifications, classes in English as a second language, general education development test preparation, and individual development accounts for financial planning — all based on an individualized learning plan that is developed for each “crew member” at the beginning of his or her tenure with Verde.

In 2008, Verde began working with Portland State University to conduct background research that would aid in accessing needs and community capacities in order to craft a place-appropriate antipoverty strategy for the Cully neighborhood. Methods employed in this community-university partnership range from more traditional statistical analysis of demographic change to community walks to workshops to photovoice activities with neighborhood children. Photovoice is a particularly useful tool; residents are trained on photography techniques and image analysis for community-driven research efforts when the lived experience of local people will solicit knowledge not available elsewhere. In this case, the Cully PHOTO (Photography cHanneling yOuth To cOmmunity) Project, provided a platform for youth to capture the challenges in their built world that contribute to health disparities and contributed data to the ongoing Living Cully efforts. In the Portland State class partnership, statistical analysis, community workshops, and interviews lead to the development of the Living Cully Anti-Displacement Plan. Portland State students benefit greatly from engagement with Verde staff, so much so that the university is now working with Verde’s deputy director so that he may be compensated directly for the teaching he does.

Living Cully is the primary mechanism through which Verde conducts its outreach and policy work, although Verde does much of the base-building, resident leadership development work to ensure that resident leaders have the capacity to guide this advocacy work. In 2010, Verde created the Lideres Verdes Leadership Program, an eleven-month leadership development program for Cully residents. The program provides participants with child care, transportation, stipends, and translation services as needed to facilitate their full engagement.