From: ellmyer@macsolve.com
Subject: Round Two - Public Housing Visibility?
Date: May 19, 2004 2:57:56 PM PDT
To: hapzonewatchers@macsolve.com

Hi Tom Potter, Jim Francesconi, Sam Adams, Nick Fish:
Congratulations on making it to round two of our election process on the path to Portland's City Hall. In the next five and a half months you will have ample opportunity to discuss and debate the one major subject noticeably and disturbingly absent from the first part of your campaigns, namely, public housing.

You are all aware that more than two hundred million public tax dollars are spent a year on public housing in Multnomah county. You also know that the results of spending the FY 2004 public housing budget of $217,500,000 will be to concentrate public housing clients in a few select neighborhoods which, as you also know, directly contravenes Portland's public policy goal of distribution. You MUST tell the voters how you plan to deal with this.

Tom and Jim pay close attention here. The mayor of Portland has direct statutory control over ALL public spending for public housing. The mayor, that will be one of you, has the sole power to both nominate and remove appointees to the Housing Authority of Portland and the Portland Development Commission. The mayor has control over the Bureau of Housing and Community Development. The mayor of Portland holds ALL the public housing cards. Neither of you can ignore your potential future role in public housing policy. Because one of you will have ALL the power to determine the direction of public housing expenditures you both MUST tell the voters what you intend to do with that power before you get into office.

The city of Portland has contributed millions of dollars to the remodeling of Oregon's largest public housing compound, Columbia Villa. Yet during the campaign, not one of you said that you were outraged or even mildly concerned to learn that NOT a single one of the more than three hundred and fifty structures to be built at Columbia Villa is scheduled to undergo an environmental review by either the United States Green Building Council, Portland General Electric or any other qualified third party. Surely you all believe that government must take the lead in green building even when the project is for low-income pubic housing. You MUST speak to this issue before they start pouring the concrete.

Once again, I offer my time to personally discuss with you the issue of public housing policy during your campaign and beyond. Here are the three major elements:
1. Neighborhood map based accounting must be immediately established as the basis for public accountability and policy making.
2. The Portland City Council must adopt the public housing policy goal for all of Multnomah county's 117 neighborhoods that establishes SIX PERCENT of the total population of any and every neighborhood to include public housing clients with no neighborhood having fewer than THREE PERCENT and no neighborhood having more than NINE PERCENT of public housing clients.
3. The goal should be established and a plan devised to transition responsibility for public housing to the Metro regional government by January 2009.

For the next five and a half months HAP Watchers commentaries will focus on what each of you say and do and what you do not say and do with regards to public housing policy. I encourage the press to aggressively pursue the candidates responses to public housing policy. And I ask those readers of HAP Watchers to write to me over the next few months with first person stories about how you observed the candidates responding to questions of public housing especially as they speak publicly about how much they support strong neighborhoods then neglect to include the effect of public housing on the making and maintenance of those neighborhoods.