Editors note: This is my first piece for Rebel Metropolis, a new writing endeavor of mine that will chronicle the ongoing struggles of people to protect urban space and wilderness, the current bicycle resurgence against capitalist car culture, and the Right to the City movement.  I look forward to continuing to contribute to Mismanaging Perception for years to come while cultivating this new project alongside the talented, brilliant minds here at MMP.  Solidarity!

What is the Right to the City movement?  Where did it come from?  Where is it going?  Who are the actors and organizers sculpting this new social structure?  In asking these questions and studying their answers, it’s impossible to not recognize one’s own role in this current wave of civil unrest across the globe.  If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been involved in the Right to the City movement for some time.

In Turkey, a battle to save the last public green space from the private development of an upscale mall has mushroomed into a national upheaval.  In San Francisco, a similar resistance was so inspired by current events in Istanbul that activists renamed the gardens they hope to save from destruction after the now famous Gezi Park.  The 2008 film ‘The Garden‘ chronicles a community’s heartbreaking struggle to save 14 acres of urban farmland in Los Angeles from a developer hell-bent on proving that nobody should have a free right to land.

Yet beyond street fights over land use, Right to the City encompasses broader circles of urban autonomy.  Here in Portland, a recent scheme orchestrated by high paid lobbyists and so called ‘health’ consultants aimed at dosing Portland’s pristine water supply with fluorosilicic acid was crushed by a popular voter revolt.  Most noted was the fact that the vote against fluoridation was overwhelming in the very communities who allegedly were suffering from a “dental crisis” that only fluoride would fix.  With the fluoridation fight seemingly over, a new front in the water wars has emerged.  Communities are organizing to obtain a waiver that would prevent Portland’s open-air reservoirs from being covered and converted to underground tanks.  Left unchecked, this federally mandated move would pose a series of health risks to Portland’s pristine Bull Run drinking water, and would cost taxpayers over $400,000.00 for the initial construction contract alone.

Condo resisters near Gezi Gardens, San Francisco.  Source: The People’s Record

Like Portland, many cities have seen rapid increases to rent well beyond inflation.  Due to foreclosures and unaffordable increases to housing costs, blue collar workers and people of color are being forced out of their homes.  In response, organizations like We Are Oregon, FUREE, and many Occupy chapters are empowering people to resist evictions and gentrification.  To date, community activists have thwarted repeated eviction attempts by police and have helped keep foreclosure resister Alicia Jackson in her home for over a year.

As Gihan Perera, director of the Miami Workers Center puts it, “We are fighting to create new cities from the disaster of the outdated current economic and ecological regime. People are taking matters into their own hands. From workers’ cooperatives amongst taxi cab drivers, day laborers, caterers, and child care providers, to housing cooperatives taking land and rents off the market, people are developing their own productive economic relationships based on principles of mutual aid, shared resourcing, and local control of the means of production. This is a trend toward what academics are now calling ‘practical utopias’.”

Neoliberal policies have seen land and housing designed for poorer working communities replaced with capitalist condos that only the upper class elite can afford.  While gentrification is often seen as a side-effect of development, it is in fact most often the goal.  More profit can be derived from exploiting already marginalized communities with low property values and flipping them into something shiny and expensive.  Gezi park has been criticized as being run down and dirty, the perfect site to ‘redevelop’ as yet another luxury shopping center for the ultra-rich.  From the moment the people of Istanbul said ‘No!’ and began to fight back, the eyes on the ground knew how to articulate the story of what was happening.  The need to correctly frame their conflict within the Right to the City movement was imperative.

A commandeered heavy excavator is used to tear down police barridaces in Istanbul. Source unknown.

Published on the independent Jadaliyya, writer and Punks Against Apartheid founder Jay Cassano explained, “The protests began with approximately seventy Right to the City protesters in Gezi Park on 27 May when demolition of the park was set to begin. These activists successfully stopped demolition. Throughout the day, activists planted seedlings in the park as a token of resistance. Numbers swelled and 150 people slept in the park that night as the state regrouped. On 30 May Turkish police gave the occupiers a five in the morning wake-up call in the form of tear gas. In case the message was not clear enough, they also set fire to occupiers’ tents. What likely would have blown over with no lasting impact suddenly ignited into one of the biggest mobilizations in recent Turkish history. But this protest is the latest manifestation of a movement that has been stirring for some time now. The shopping mall is only one component of a plan to entirely redesign Taksim Square into a more car-friendly, tourist-accommodating, and sanitized urban center.”

Now with the world’s eyes on Istanbul, many felt that their voices would be marginalized if it appeared their street insurrection was about saving a small bunch of trees.  In response, media and memes were launched to affirm that this “wasn’t about a park”, that instead “this is about democracy.”  To correct this, urbanist writer Ivan Blecic countered brilliantly, “There is nothing wrong had it all been only about a park. It’s perfectly ok, even more than that.  [This is] an attempt of appropriation of the common goods through forms of modern enclosures where public spaces, places, the environment are taken away from the sphere of the public and are subjected to the logic of private profit-making.  As long as they are commons, they provide some public service and are by definition under some societal jurisdiction.  The question of the commons is the question about the quality of our democracy.  So, the slogan could’ve well been: ‘This is about a park, therefore this is about democracy.’”

When we think about what makes a city, usually the first thing people think of is tall buildings.  Skyscrapers.  Skylines.  The view.  Many developers tend to see the city from a godlike perspective, looking down on maps and models picking the choicest place to build something brand new.  But so often they fail to grasp the scale and scope of life on the street, where people share space, perusing small shops, walking, laughing, exploring.  These socially cherished spaces have diminished greatly as cars have taken over streets and the affordability of living in dense urban centers has become less attainable for the majority of citizens the world over.  Rapid urbanization as a growth machine has maintained the goal of generating more wealth for the rich, not building better cities for those already living in them.

Source: The People’s Record

People love their cities.  The city offers the vast richness of human experience in a concentrated area.  While cities exist out of economic goals, the cultural connectivity is what truly draws us together despite the grit and pollution we suffer.  What truly drives us mad though, is the feeling that we cannot control the direction of our lives within these spaces.  Feeling that we cannot even control what chemicals our city forces us to ingest, too, continues to inspire many unpolitical people into activism – eager to fight against systems of corrupt capital to regain authority over body and life.

As with Gezi Park, the title of solidarity for San Francisco’s Gezi Gardens points to the connectivity that urban activists are developing in a digital age where images from Istanbul are witnessed globally in real time.  We sense we are together in this struggle for our cities.  That it is the people who fight to make urban fabric pleasurable and unpredictable that outshine the glimmering towers developers so fetishize.

What’s more, the Gezi Gardens occupation shows how much of a threat direct action truly can be to the capital growth machine.  From The People’s Record: “Gezi Gardens was an autonomous open green space for providing food for the surrounding neighborhood & was recently sold by the city to a private developer to create 180 luxury condominiums.  Although the developer has mentioned building low-income housing, investors usually put that money toward shanty housing in other parts of the city to further gentrify neighborhoods and kick out poor people of color to make way for things like trendy upscale boutiques.  The gardens were supposed to host a Liberate Our Land festival this weekend, complete with hydroponic workshops, basic gardening teach-ins, local music, and food.  But in the early hours of Thursday morning, more than 100 riot cops stormed the farm with batons & guns drawn. Citizen journalists were threatened with arrest for filming the raid as four occupiers were arrested.  Yesterday, Gezi Gardens supporters marched around the farm, shutting down two intersections during rush hour. The National Park Service was also called to the space after hummingbird carcasses were found, as well as nesting crows in the eucalyptus trees, so the construction and demolishing has been halted (for now)!”

Defiant Turks flash victory signs and middle fingers.  Source: Jenna Pope

‘Rebel Cities’ author David Harvey asks the question “How do you organize an entire city?”  The answer, it would appear, is simply show up.  If we make a loud enough noise with a big enough crowd, the media will be there.  If we push hard enough, change will happen.  It is inevitable.  For too long the decisions about how our cities are built and maintained have been made by those in power with little accountability to the people.  Their mandates have controlled our lives because in part we did not resist.  But recent local and world events have made it clear we have more power than we’d previously thought.  Instead of being products of our environment, we can make our urban environment a product of us.

As the anonymous quotation goes, “We occupy everything because everything is ours. We demand nothing because they have nothing to give us.”  This is true on so many levels.

Our rights to the city are what we make them.  We can choose the quality of the water we drink and what kinds of homes we want built.  We can prevent the destruction of our parks and use our streets the way we choose.  We are the city and the city is us.  Our rights to the city are in every way the rights of the city.  We can revolt against neoliberal capitalist agendas.  We can resist corporate developers and their systems of gentrification.  People powered politics must take the reigns of our city before Portland becomes a sterile wasteland of condos and BMWs.  We can build on our historical successes.  We can create a rebel metropolis.

See you in the streets.

In spite of relentless hazing from local mainstream media sources, the people of our metropolis chose to preserve our drinking water the way it is, unpolluted, abundant, and without the addition of mandatory medication.  For months, an all out online war was waged, with some articles posted netting over 1,000 comments each.  Yet so overwhelming were the voices speaking out against fluoridation that calls went out nationally to recruit pro-fluoride comments, as well as an acknowlegement that the opposition was better at responding despite having no central system of organization.  From pro-fluoride organizer Linda Rosa of Colorado:

“The anti-fluoridationists are most effective, however, when they respond online to local media stories whenever “fluoride” or “fluoridation” is mentioned. These local stories are usually about proposed or pending action to stop [fluoride] in a particular city. Pro-fluoride activists would love to see concerned citizens, who have a bit of time during the week or each day, counter the anti-fluoridationists’ distortions and misinformation when and where it arises in online local media...”

In an interview with TIME, Rosa demeaned people opposed to ingesting fluoride chemicals as being “Luddites“.  Rosa’s husband, Larry Sarner added that those opposed to fluoridation ‘rely on small voter turnouts’, “They’ll sneak in a victory and then tout it in the next place.”  Quite to the contrary, here in Portland pro-fluoride lobbyists met with city council behind closed doors off the city’s calendar hoping to prevent any public vote from happening at all.  Rosa and Sarner are likely baffled at the turnout and the results here in Little Beirut.  They certainly aren’t the only ones.

Despite this landslide victory, local media insults have now mushroomed into outright anger from national news sources eager to jump on the “What’s the Matter with Portland?” band wagon. Adrian Chen, a staff writer for Gawker who has previously labeled those who oppose fluoridation as “quacks” threw a fit.  Embarrassingly out of touch with Portland values, Chen insisted he knew the real reasons fluoridation failed in “infuriating, selfish” Stumptown.

“Hopefully the anti-fluoride folks have mellowed out after their victory, and all that pot.  The logic that defeated fluoridation lies on the slippery slope down which one slides into the foul pit of anti-vaccination activism…[and] is fed by conspiratorial anti-government thinking.  It is a close cousin to the dumb shrieks of death panels that marred the Obamacare debate. There many[sic] great things about Portland, Oregon, but the fluoride rejection shows its worst: the tendency among progressive of that city (and many others!) to reframe the decades-old politics of selfishness as some hyper-enlightened liberalism. So they rationalize getting exactly what they want, all of the time.”

As I’ve written previously, what Chen and other East coast writers bewildered by widespread opposition to fluoridation seem to have trouble with is this:

“Evidently, they can’t conceive that Portland is a city with a large number of very non-political people who enjoy gardening and simply don’t want fluoride being sprayed on their food.  Instead of hurling out hippie insults or making lame Portlandia references, they should look up what bioregionalism means and learn a bit about the Free Cascadia movement if they truly want to understand why HKHP got buried.

What they also don’t seem to understand is that this victory was about far more than fluoride.  Portland politicians have ridden the coat tails of Tom McCall and touted a stale green-washed brand while cuddling with big-money interests like the Portland Business Alliance and the City Club.  Almost all our current city representatives are in office due to one man, Mark Wiener.”

Seemingly un-content to let the national press dog-pile on Portland from afar, the Oregonian doubled down after the vote to get a few more jabs in at the people who ran a flawless campaign.  In a guest op-ed that mirrored the Oregonian’s endless hostility towards clean water lovers, Eric Walsh likened  a brigade of bicyclists on a No-Fluo-Ride that I personally organized to Rush Limbaugh and climate-change deniers.

“As I watched a phalanx of 20 bicyclists sporting blue “no fluoride” T-shirts ride by, I thought about stopping them. I wanted to tell them how much they reminded me of Rush Limbaugh.  I grew up in the 1950s in Baltimore drinking fluoridated water. Floored[sic] was also in the water in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, etc. No harm has come from the fluoride in the water of those millions and millions of people over more than 60 years.  Both the anti-fluoride group and Limbaugh use misleading language. Limbaugh talks about “global warming.” The correct term is “climate change.”  The bicyclists were long gone, down the road, before I could let them know.”

The Portland Tribune’s editorial board also lashed out, demanding that the people who blocked fluoridation now make it their mission to solve dental care issues.  This despite the fact that single-payer health insurance and the increased access to dental care it would provide have been repeatedly blocked by fluoride proponents like Kaiser Permanente.  Ironically, no similar demands have been issued by fluoridation opponents asking ‘Healthy Kids’ or Upstream Public Health to solve the problems of pollution via the Superfund site, proposed coal exports, or toxic clouds emitted into the air by ESCO or Precision Cast Parts.

While the print media was busy having a temper tantrum over the failure of their unanimously endorsed fluoridation campaign, a few new stories came out last week.  The first was titled ‘BREAKING: State Public Health Director to Step Down‘ by the pro-fluoride Portland Mercury.

“Oregon’s public health director Dr. Mel Kohn is leaving the position, amid a threatened lawsuit and accusations the agency colluded with pro-fluoride advocates on the release of an oral health report.  Kohn today sent an e-mail out to colleagues at the Oregon Health Authority, saying he’ll step down as head of the OHA’s Public Health Division. As is often the case with these kinds of messages, neither Kohn’s e-mail, nor another from OHA Director Bruce Goldberg, nod to some of the strife the public health department’s seen in recent weeks and months.”

It would seem that there was a fair amount of finger pointing going on inside the pro-fluoridation camp in an attempt to comprehend how they misjudged Portland so badly.  The second story also came from Portland’s other pro-fluoride weekly, the Willamette Week, in the form of an interview with Clean Water Portland chair Kim Kaminski.

“I knew nothing about fluoridation. I grew up with it. I assumed it was fine. I believed everything that I was told. I didn’t question it. I also had a son, who was 4, and I thought it was something I should look into. When I did, quite honestly, I was shocked. Even if we were to assume water fluoridation is good for our teeth, there are enough causes of concern about how it affects the rest of our body, and about how it affects our environment.

There’s a difference between dose and concentration. We are not only drinking water, we’re making our soup with it. Babies who are drinking formula that is made with fluoridated water are hugely susceptible to fluoridation harm. The bottom line is that there’s a lot of things we don’t know. And certain things that we always thought were safe, like leaded gasoline and paint, DDT, asbestos, that were promoted since the ’50s, are now being shown to be not only ineffective but unsafe. Fluoridation is the last remaining remnant of that era.”

When asked by the Willamette Week about the grassroots campaign that brought Portland’s wealthiest political machine to its knees, Kaminksi broke it down:

“Everyone was telling us, ‘You can’t do it, you’re going to be outspent, you’re going to be outdone.’ They tried to portray us in the media as tinfoil hats and Dr. Strangelove and all of that stuff. People [in opposition] were popping up all over the place, on Facebook – all very disorganized. We created this organization from nothing. The other side already had the City Council locked in place. They had all their groups ready to endorse. There was a definite turning point in the campaign—the debate at the Kennedy School, and the next night was the Multnomah County Democratic debate at the Matt Dishman Center. The other side, their message was, “We know what’s best for everyone.” It was condescending. People saw through that. At the Multnomah County Democratic debate, so many people were there, they had to call the fire marshal. People were turned away. It was just an outpouring of community to speak truth to power. It’s humbling to see how so many people came together. When you think about it, it was kind of a miracle.”

Kaminski went on to talk about the possibility of state lawmakers trying to force fluoridation through in Salem, a proposition that has failed repeatedly.  While the chances of such an endeavor are slim this session, few doubt that the Democratically controlled house and senate would refrain from doing so in the years to come.  If and when they do, the activists of Clean Water Portland have a blueprint for success plotted by an army of volunteers – exhilarated, and itching to continue the fight to preserve our drinking water.

The threats to our water are numerous.  It was recently reported that city hall had caved in to a federal order demanding Portland bury it’s iconic open water reservoirs, much to the dismay of clean water activists.  The Nestlé corporation continues to scheme ways to steal public water to sell it back to us at a profit.  Proposed freeway expansions and coal exports threaten to add even more toxic pollutants to our air and water.  Where Clean Water Portland will choose to direct its energy remains to be decided, but at a recent gathering of CWP organizers and volunteers, it was clear that helping other communities stop or remove fluoride from their water supply would remain part of their focus.

While there may be new fronts in Portland’s fluoridation battle, it would appear, at least for now, the fight is over for 2013.  This chapter has ended.  What remains, and what I will remember and treasure the rest of my life, are the smiles and the hugs on election night, May 21st when it became clear who had won.  In the face of the biggest political long-shot of a generation in Portland, a rag-tag group of inexperienced activists and citizens stood up to a machine that simply does not lose.  The elation and love in the room that night was unlike any campaign I’ve ever worked on.  I am privileged to know such passionate, dedicated, intelligent people.  Our city is a better place because of them.

See you in the streets.

•••

All images and video copyright Hart Noecker and ANTIPHON FiLMS.

Look, I hate the term ‘commuter’.  It sounds like a resignation of wage-slavery.  Even the term ‘cyclist’ sounds pithy and elitist.  You’re imagining yuppies covered in REI rain gear, admit it.  That image of the Portland cycling commuter you just manifested always invokes a bit of eye-rolling, it’s okay.  Thing is, those people are happier than pigs in mud.   Think endorphins.  Think liberation.

Cars are cages.  Cars are coffins.  You’ve heard this, you know it deep down, yet still you find excuses to drive.  It’s cold, it’s wet.  Who wants to be cold and wet?  You do.  It’s not that bad, even without any real rain gear, (I own like, none rain gear). Plus, you’re going to stay warm as long as you have layers and keep moving.  And really, rain never hurt anyone – putting a dent in our climate crisis is going to make it worthwhile, I promise.

Not convinced?  This should be easy to understand, but I appreciate your skepticism.  Every gallon of gasoline burned to provide your cars’ movement creates about 25 pounds of carbon dioxide that goes straight to work trapping the excess solar energy that’s driving extreme weather and ocean acidification.  Everybody’s whining and complaining that government won’t take bold action, well of course they aren’t, they need to make sure you have gasoline for your automobile!

Not anymore.

You’re going to take some personal responsibility and you’re going to make that bold action by waging a little revolution of one – you’re going to kill your car and you’re going to stop contributing to global warming as you travel about your fair city.

Don’t tell me you’re scared to ride in traffic, you are traffic.  Same roads, same rules and all that.  It’s not dangerous.  Don’t let those safety-patrollers with the rearview mirror sticking out of their helmet fool you, biking down the road is safer than driving and walking combined.  You belong on a bike, your bike belongs in the street, period.  Also, don’t be scared of your bike, you have time to learn about each other.  You don’t need to know what all the parts on it are called to be a serious rider. If you go into the nearest bike shop and some jerk mechanic makes you feel small for not knowing something, go to the next shop down the street, they’re way nicer anyway.

Illustration by Michel Losier.

Oh, also you’re going to start hosting and organizing group rides.  I don’t care if they’re just for the funs or have some form of political goal in mind, we need you to start using your bike as a tool for stitching together more socially connected neighborhoods.  Food Not Bombs is a good model.  They haul plant-based meals on human powered wheels, and they do it year round and they love it, just like you’re going to.  Think food justice, think street liberation.

Or you can team up with any number of the other organized groups out there, check out the Shift calendar – almost everything happening worth knowing is there, and every bike shop in town has their own bulletin board.  Point is, ‘commuting by bike’ is a blast, but not nearly as emotionally rewarding as ‘community by bike’.  Meeting new comrades and working for social change with the bicycle as a unifying force will literally change your life forever more.  You’re going to love it, and you’re going to love it so damn much you’re never going to let it stop, not even when the rain starts back up next winter.

Trust me.  You can do this.
Your city and our Earth thank you.

See you in the streets.

You’ve probably lost a fair amount of sleep trying to figure out how in the hell a grassroots campaign with far less experience who struggled to raise $280K was able to take in three votes for every two of yours when HKHP raked in an estimated  $1 million+ dollars in corporate and political cash.  How could such an insurrection happen?  Why didn’t the lobbyists at Upstream Public Health and the strategists at Winning Mark see this coming?  How did the people get away with forcing a vote on fluoridation in the first place?   It’s going to be okay.  Take a deep breath.  This will all make sense soon.

For anyone unfamiliar, the current fight over fluoridation went public when it was reported that the lobbying and public relations firm Upstream had been meeting with city hall in closed-door sessions that were tellingly left off the city’s calendar.  Red flags were raised and alarms were sounded, but despite heated public hearings, mayor Sam Adams and the rest of the city commissioners voted unanimously in favor of adding fluorisisilic acid to public’s drinking water.

The argument put forth for this un-democratic action was that since most other US cities dose their water with this chemical, it’s high time Portland did the same, and we can’t trust the public to agree with us.  In reality, few other developed nations outside the U.S. practice fluoridation.  Almost all of Europe refrains from fluoridating its water.  Last month, the nation of Israel joined Europe in yanking mandated fluoride over health and environmental concerns.

In response to city hall’s poor behavior, a coalition of concerned citizens shifted into high gear to bring about a referendum and let the people vote.  Some 20,000 signatures needed collecting within just 30 days.  The newly formed Clean Water Portland (CWP) and it’s volunteers blew that target away by turning in over 43,000 signatures a day before the deadline.

The citizen insurrection underway, Upstream, the NW Health Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, and several other interested parties launched ‘Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland’ (HKHP) which purported to be the authority on what they termed a “dental crisis” currently being suffered by Portland’s lower income families and communities of color.  Their website listed dozens of “trusted” organizations consisting of national health industry institutions and several smaller community-based groups.

HKHP wasted no time blitzing the airwaves and Youtubes with saturated media citing figures showing Oregon has an untreated tooth decay rate of 40%.  Yet they conveniently ignored that Portland’s rate is half that at 20%.  What’s more, when compared to state by state figures, Portland ranked 15th best.

Still, with so many ‘health’ groups asserting their authority on the matter, it was difficult to counter the narrative that fluoridation was the only way to provide dental health to disadvantaged  communities.  Yet if the issue was better dental health, why had fluoride supporters like Kaiser previously fought against more equitable access to actual universal care?  Why had institutions now preaching ‘dental equity’ moved to close free clinics that used to operate throughout our region?

The more one looked into it, the less this issue appeared to be about health care at all.

When Columbia Riverkeeps, Food & Water Watch, and the local chapter of the Sierra Club issued coordinated press releases opposing fluoridation citing concerns over adding toxic fluorosilicic acid to our drinking water, HKHP could no longer assert with any seriousness that citizens questioning their plan were simply conspiracy theorists.

After it was reported that HKHP had given away over $120,000.00 in “grant” money to groups representing ethnic minorities, it was clear they didn’t hold the amount of sway they’d hoped for.  Shortly after, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission’s executive director and the local chapter of the NAACP both came out against fluoridation.

HKHP had a serious problem on its hands.  They now had to face the fact that communities of color were speaking out against  fluoridation.

When the first public polling released in May showed that fluoridation was supported by only 30% of African Americans and less than 10% of Latinos, critics wondered if Upstream or HKHP had even bothered to ask people of color what they wanted at all.

Meanwhile, Clean Water Portland was waging a quiet ground game unlike anything seen here in a generation, according to several longtime PDX activists.  Building on the momentum from the referendum signature gathering, CWP did with volunteers what it lacked in funds.  The few donations they had were spent on yard signs as soon as possible, so that friends and neighbors could have a visual reminder of solidarity in the face of  large organizations claiming authority on fluoridation.

CWP chose calm blue tones for it’s apparel and media in smart contrast to HKHP’s blood red campaign materials.  While red has been proven to convey a sense of superiority, many people on the Clean Water campaign remarked that it seemed to denote emergency and panic, hardly consistent with the kind of happy cartoon tooth images they were also presenting.

While HKHP made sure you couldn’t use Facebook or Youtube without viewing their repetitive ads, CWP was sending out dozens of foot soldiers every day, having face to face conversations, letting people know that outside the U.S. there is concern about the safety and ethics of mandating the ingestion of fluoride.

At a debate sponsored by the Multnomah County Democrats, CWP representative Rick North drove this point home, “We know fluoride can cause harm.  Regardless of the PPM, once introduced into drinking water, we can no longer control the dose.  If we cannot control the dose, we cannot control the harm.”  His counterparts from HKHP could not refute this fact and appeared more and more frustrated as the evening wore on.

Still, Healthy Kids reminded the public ad nauseam that they’d secured endorsements from most newspapers in the city.  The Oregonian, Willamettte Week, and the Portland Mercury used their pages to relentlessly mock those opposed to fluoridation as being on the fringe, hippies, stoners, Burners, anti-science, paranoid, selfish, racist, or just plain stupid.

CWP never took the bait, and neither did their supporters.  The back-and-forth over fluoridation raged online for months, yet early on it became known within the activist community that HKHP was paying people to troll forums harassing anyone who didn’t support fluoridation.  It seemed their strategy was to antagonize people into threatening them in order to paint the opposition as emotionally unstable.  If this was their plan, it failed entirely.

More and more people being insulted by HKHP’s paid internet commenters got involved off-line.  They organized events, they knocked on doors, they made countless phone calls.  Many credited HKHP’s online media coordinator for being so hostile and demeaning as to motivate and mobilize far more people to join CWP than would have otherwise.

Despite HKHP having the local print press locked down, Clean Water Portland was doing positive outreach to local broadcast journalists.   On air reporters seemed far more interested in actually listening to Portlanders concerned about the negative health and ecological effects of fluoridation.  Far from the caricatures of tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists that HKHP tried to brand the opposition as being, these faces appearing on the news spoke intelligently and compassionately.  They looked like normal people, they were mothers and fathers.  They talked about issues of consent.  They talked about what fluoride can do to people with diabetes.  These citizens were not fear-mongering, they were expressing reasonable doubt and applying the precautionary principle.

In the final days of the campaign, polls were showing that fluoridation was losing favor.  More reporters were attending Clean Water events than ever before.  Nobody wants to report on a losing team.

Then a bomb fell on HKHP.  KATU reported that after two freedom of information requests, it had obtained information that showed that fluoridation provides less than a 1% rate of improvement in tooth decay when averaged across the country, and that Portland -with no fluoridation whatsoever – faired far healthier than this average.

What’s more, it was reported that a statewide survey that proved HKHP’s years-old statistics hid recent improvements in dental health had been delayed by the pressuring of Upstream employees.  Even more damning, it appeared that some health officials had done campaign work while being paid by the state of Oregon with taxpayer money.  A string of emails showing evidence to this wrong-doing was turned over by Clean Water Portland, and is currently being reviewed to determine whether these officials broke the law while working for the pro-fluoride campaign.

If you worked for HKHP, hopefully you’re starting to understand what went wrong.  Yet still, days after the dust has begun to settle, there are those who claim Portland voters were somehow tricked into doubting health industry officials’ insistence of the safety and benefit of fluoridation.  One HKHP staffer claimed the NAACP had been lied to, as though the organization was somehow incapable of looking at all the available information and arriving at their own logical conclusions.

There’s apparently a lot of head-scratching going on among Portland’s wealthy political elite and across the national blogosphere.  The fact that a vast majority of Portland voters would reject fluoridation of their drinking water is a  narrative that seems to confound many east coast writers in particular.  Evidently, they can’t conceive that Portland is a city with a large number of very non-political people who enjoy gardening and simply don’t want fluoride being sprayed on their food.  Instead of hurling out hippie insults or making lame Portlandia references, they should look up what bioregionalism means and learn a bit about the Free Cascadia movement if they truly want to understand why HKHP got buried.

What they also don’t seem to understand is that this victory was about far more than fluoride.  Portland politicians have ridden the coat tails of Tom McCall and touted a stale green-washed brand while cuddling with big-money interests like the Portland Business Alliance and the City Club.  Almost all our current city representatives are in office due to one man, Mark Wiener.  This city once had a proud history of citizens fighting city hall and winning.  That kind of rebellious spirit has been sorely lacking for far too long.

On Tuesday, May 21st, Rebel Portland came back with a vengeance.  No longer can corrupted politicians assume Mark Wiener is an unstoppable wrecking ball in local government.  We’ve proven that throwing more money into politics is no promise of power, that with enough passion and legwork, grassroots operators can crush city hall.

Sometimes the good guys do win.

The fight to protect Bull Run fresh water is not over.  Already, there is talk of Oregon state politicians plotting whether to challenge the will of the people with legislation in Salem that would nullify Portland’s voters choice on fluoridation.

Let them try.  There is now a network of ecologically conscious and politically networked activists in this city capable of stopping big-business interests cold.

As the Tribune pointed out, there are two city commissioners up for reelection who claimed their support of fluoridation would not hurt them.  Now, they have something to be afraid of.

We know how to win.  See you in the streets.

•••

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I think that, on the surface, it’s great that Crew is supposedly coming out against standardized testing, but my intuition tells me that it’s merely a PR move to counter the bad press that this type of “calibration technology” (a ridiculous euphemism for assessment) continues to receive from almost every angle. Everything Crew writes later in this article points to continued standardization and obsession with quantitative assessment, and the language he uses exposes his hard neoliberal ideology.

As we work to strengthen Oregon’s schools, we must ensure that our teachers have the tools to deliver an education that will assure our students graduate ready for college, their chosen career, and a life in a global economy.

College. Career. Economy. That’s the trajectory. That’s the point of schooling. Nothing about happiness or civic engagement. If school is meant to make students little more than debt slaves, wage slaves, and cogs in an imperialist machine, who needs it? Do we really have to keep asking ourselves why kids drop out of school? When this is how they hear people talk about their future? They don’t get a say. No one is asking the future generations what kind of world they want to live in. Education is an unbelievably disempowering force, not an ameliorative one.

In 2013 there is no reason why authentic assessment, in coordination with the proper technology, cannot assist teachers in identifying critical learning blockages and help them deliver the best learning prescription available.

This 21st century tool would remove the single greatest hurdle that keeps struggling teachers from being good teachers. We can remove it from the equation altogether and authentic assessment is the lingua franca that will make the technology work.

Software can track bugs in complex programming code, automate and trigger split-second stock trades in markets on the other side of the globe, and tell people within seconds which fantasy football league player is injured. Education technology should be as capable to quickly tell teachers where there are bugs in their planning process…

First of all, I take issue with the obsession with technology in the classroom. What teachers need to properly and “authentically” (!) assess their students is smaller class sizes and the corresponding increase in time spent with each pupil. No technology can be more authentic than basic human communication. We would do a lot better to direct our shrinking budgets toward human capital rather than software (why the hell is software tycoon Bill Gates directing education policy in this country?). As a student with more than a passing interest in education, I find it shocking that anyone – ANYONE – would take a person seriously who compares assessing the needs of another human being in the highly complex process that is higher learning, to stock trading and fantasy football. But that’s the point: schools today aren’t meant to teach higher-level thinking, or, more to the point, they’re intended to direct that thinking only in certain ways. When I hear the word ‘technology’ anymore, it registers in my brain instead as ‘social control’. While the current form of standardized testing may not be in vogue anymore, the above statements from Crew make it clear that the result of the proposed technology in the classroom will still be further interruption of teachers’ professional autonomy. And “personalized learning technology” makes it sound as if kids will not only be enjoying similar style assessments everyday, but their every move will be tracked in a system that Kris Alman called “cradle to grave information gathering”. This type of information is generally not used in ways that benefit the user.

Still, I imagine Crew will receive mostly favorable reactions to this piece. What is really alarming to me is that we now have a whole generation of adults (roughly my age, 30) who are so reactionary that they respond to words like ‘economy’ and ‘technology’ as though they were ideologically neutral concepts, and, worse, as if they were always positive things. There is no more thought than that; my generation might as well be a pack of Pavlov’s dogs (or Nazis). As a society, we are not asking children to think about anything worthwhile, and we act as if questions that are highly moral and complex were simple and value-free. This is not just wrong; it’s really fucking scary.

I really hope that Steve Buel takes a seat on the school board. So many people (Gonzalez for example) enter politics perhaps even genuinely thinking they will make a difference and instead get so seduced by power that they end up trying to rub shoulders and build a reputation to grease the wheels for their next career move. What kids really need are role models – in other words, adults who actually have some balls and are willing to stand up to these assholes and say something real. Those are the only people who ever end up making any difference at all.

As livable neighborhoods activist Jane Jacobs observed long ago, in order for neighborhoods to be livable, they must consist of mixed-use spaces, meaning that commercial spaces and residential spaces coexist in extremely close proximity (hence the term ‘walkability’) – as opposed to single-use districts that are currently almost guaranteed by traditional zoning standards which brand certain geographic urban areas either ‘commercial’ or ‘residential’ exclusively. As Jacobs notes, single-use spaces lead to a host of social problems, which, although incredibly difficult to measure, manifest themselves most obviously and measurably in area crime rates. Single-use spaces are problematic because people, for the most part, leave residential areas during the day and enter into commercial spaces (typically where they work), which are overwhelmingly vacant at night. Because the simple presence of “eyes on the street” acts to deter crime, vacant spaces become havens for criminal activity: empty residences become targets during the day while everyone is working, and commercial spaces are more dangerous at night while most people go back to their residential space. This by-design movement from one type of space to another all but ensures that people will choose (is this really a choice in the real sense?) to drive cars and that they will inevitably have weak attachments to the communities in which they live; they tend to not know their neighbors, and their social relationships are marked with low levels of trust and reciprocity. In order to have true communities, we must have those things. It may be over-simplistic to suggest that automobiles lead to higher rates of crime and lower levels of social solidarity; but I do not for a moment think this statement is inaccurate.

The hegemony of single-use space and the corresponding urban design based on automobile travel has guaranteed that a carless existence is impossible in many areas. Most towns and small cities consist of concrete and strip malls as far as the eye can see; on the outskirts are shoddy low-rent apartments or (depending on what side of town you’re on) “middle-class” housing developments that are, in actuality, nothing more than middle-class ghettos, separate from all other aspects of everyday life: you must leave your “neighborhood” to do anything: to buy groceries, to go to school or church, to go to the movies or a restaurant, etcetera, etcetera. These are not even neighborhoods at all in any real sense. Large cities look much the same, except in historic urban centers where contrary infrastructure already exists and cannot be easily changed on a large scale.

What we’ve been witnessing with most new development schemes has been a fracturing of our social lives through the destruction of the neighborhood proper. Our spaces are increasingly fragmented and discontinuous. In effect, we LIVE nowhere; we live a little bit over here and yet another little bit over there. We are hardly complete humans, let alone communities.

Small, locally owned businesses (ideally, cooperatives) and neighborhood schools and community centers (and/or churches, if that’s your flavor) are vital to the re-creation of actual neighborhoods. We must have spaces where we can live ALL aspects of our lives in order to be truly healthy individuals and families, and to have truly livable neighborhoods. This largely negates the need for the family car (certainly no one needs a three-car garage, the behemoth monster of greedy, capitalistic, car-centric culture) and ensures a neighborhood that is more walkable and safe – because in addition to measurably lower crime rates, increased safety is achieved simply by the removal of huge numbers of (now almost entirely unnecessary) cars from our neighborhood streets. As Portland’s Sunday parkways have shown, tens of thousands of grandmothers, parents, children, and others, will get out into the streets and cycle once the danger of car traffic is removed. We must correct the (mis)perception that riding bicycles is dangerous; it is precisely dangerous because cars are dangerous. In this way, Portland’s “Share the Road” Program is dangerously misinformed and misleading; we are pointing to precisely the wrong goals, and we should not consider this acceptable. As long as the hegemonic form of transportation (“gas-guzzling death machines”) is allowed to make our streets dangerous places, livable neighborhoods will have a hard time putting down roots, let alone blossoming. While car-free neighborhoods are taking off in parts of Europe, the United States’ (supposedly) most sustainable city (that’s Portland) has elected to build an expanded lane bridge over the Columbia River (the Columbia River Crossing, or CRC) and spend much of its transportation budget on fixing potholes rather than elaborating upon its (far less expensive!) bicycle infrastructure. (Thanks a fuck-ton, Charlie Hales!)

Lest I stray too far from my argument about mixed-use spaces being essential to livable cities (which in reality consists of continuous livable neighborhoods) and into the rabbit-hole of an anti-car rant, I’ll simply point out that the main argument against mixed-use space is the problem of parking spaces. (In Portland, we’ve eliminated the requirement to build parking spaces in high-density residential areas, at least; but without a corresponding increase in public transit incentives – Trimet fares continue to rise annually while simultaneously cutting services – we’re unlikely to see a significant reduction in car use to accompany this reduction in parking. Instead, nearby homeowners will have to share or forego their street parking, and their “neighborhood” will become an ugly clusterfuck of metal and their streets will become more hazardous, especially for young children.) The short-term return on profit associated with single-use design as opposed to the higher long-term yields of mixed-use design is another common argument against mixed use. This shortsightedness is a major facet of our current economic system; this fact alone ought to tell us that we have not yet reached the preposterous “end of history” whereby we have achieved the perfect system, that is, liberal democracy and capitalist markets. Shortsightedness is not a virtue; it is destructively idiotic. Again, I will return to the problem that our culture’s main form of transportation continues to be the automobile, a horribly out-of-date technology that relies on the extraction of fossil fuels, the combustion of which is one of the single greatest contributions to global warming and which damages the earth and human health at all phases of extraction. Fossil fuels, of course, continue to be profitable, and continue to be a primary investment for most retirement funds and even universities – including Portland State, which deceitfully markets itself as sustainable and innovative.

I, of course, am probably telling you nothing you don’t already know. And I, for one, am really sick of being told that we have to wait, that we have to “transition” from a car culture to a livable one, that we must be “more reasonable”. I cannot imagine anything more unreasonable than an insistence on retaining car culture in light of everything we know about its devastating effects, which can only leave room for further disaster capitalism in its wake. Furthermore, this “transition”, this “compromise” is an outright lie when Portland’s budget continues to favor the automobile over the bicycle and mixed-use development. One could point to the unholy alliance between City Hall and the Portland Business Alliance, or do an about-face and point to the continued apathy of the public at large. I believe we have to look both ways before we proceed.

On the bright side, it may be that Portlanders are waking up to the corruption of their local government – and the side-stepping of democracy that dictates so much public policy – with the Portland City Council’s failure to railroad water fluoridation through without a public vote. If we are to have a city where we can live in a way that makes us healthy and happy, we must take charge of public policy in other ways, to involve our energies in other “issues”. Moreover, we must stop being single-issue voters and begin seeing the public policy process as problematic in its current form; we must move toward a more participatory form of urban governance. Neighborhood governance structures with actual decision-making power (unlike the current structure of neighborhood organizations), where citizens directly make the decisions that dictate the planning of their immediate environments, would be a good place to start. This will not be possible without massive public pressure and a huge fight, the results of which would be well worth the collective effort.

Just months after angry parents, students, and teachers forced Portland Public Schools (PPS) officials to back down from closing several neighborhood schools, PPS has found a new target: teachers. Negotiations between the school district and Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) began this month with such enormous differences between their two proposals, that the local media is already raising the possibility of a strike next year.

Given the widespread attacks on teachers nationwide, the decimation of the public school system in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit, and the relative success of union-bashing in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, PPS evidently believes now is the time to seize as much control as it can.

District officials recently appropriated the language of the Chicago Teachers’ strike in an Orwellian letter to the community that claimed their proposal was “updating” the teachers’ contract to give “our students the education they deserve.” In particular they point out that their proposal removes work rules that “have prevented many high school students from taking eight classes.” This letter reveals that until parents pressured the district in recent weeks to add teaching positions in order to provide a full eight classes to students, the district originally hoped to simply force high school teachers to teach another class. Their contract offer would allow this because it eliminates all restrictions on teacher workload in the contract—including the limit of 180 students per high school teacher negotiated last year.

But how is eliminating a cap on the number of students in a teacher’s classes supposed to benefit kids? Do the math. If, say, a history teacher assigns an essay to all of her 180 students and devotes just five minutes to reading and commenting on each of these—an impossible task, in itself—this would take exactly 15 hours of outside-of-class time. Or, say, a science teacher wants to spend 10 minutes talking to each student’s parent about how to best serve a child’s needs. At the 180-student limit that the district hopes to eliminate, this would add an extra 30-hour workweek for that teacher.

And while the district hopes to erase parts of the contract that put any restraints on the amount of unpaid labor teachers do outside of the school day, they also want to increase the “official” teacher workday and reduce the time teachers have to get non-instructional work accomplished during that day. With language that could have been written in the 19^th century, the district’s proposal increases the official teacher workday from 7.5 hours to “generally” 8 hours. At the same time their offer cuts high school teacher planning and preparation time from 90 minutes to 60 minutes per day, a reduction of 2.5 hours per week. Does the district really believe that the education Portland students deserve is one where their teachers have little time to plan engaging curriculum, give students meaningful feedback, and develop individual relationships with them?

The Portland Association of Teachers’ proposal, on the other hand, recognizes that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. PAT’s contract proposal asks the district to reduce class size and caseload over the next few years setting goals for 2018 that are based on national research. The proposal also calls on the district to “work with the Association, parent groups, student groups, business groups, City, County, Metro, and State elected officials to secure adequate funding to achieve these goals.”

Another part of the district’s offer the community should be concerned about is the removal of language that prevents teacher evaluations from being based on students’ standardized test scores. How can the school district claim to be fighting for the “education our students deserve,” while increasing the emphasis on flawed high-stakes tests? In fact, Portland students have recently launched a campaign to protest high-stakes standardized tests. Does the district think these students don’t understand what kind of education they deserve? In contrast, PAT’s proposal asserts that “standardized tests shall only be used in a manner supported by the test methodology and testing frequency” and that “standardized tests should only be one tool used for assessing student learning and growth.”

The school district will also likely try to paint the union as self-interested because PAT is asking for cost-of-living raises that keep up with inflation. In its offer, the district wants a four-year wage freeze and a cap on district contributions to health insurance so all future costs pass directly on to educators. But is the education Portland students deserve one where their teachers find it hard to focus on teaching because they are worried about paying their bills?

The truth is that PPS’s initial contract offer is more about union busting than it is about providing students a quality education. This is why their proposal excludes temporary employees from the union, eradicates the role seniority plays in determining layoffs, gets rid of union members’ ability to grieve evaluations while removing restrictions on when principals must complete those evaluations, and eliminates the ability of the union to grieve discriminatory practices based on race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, and political activity.  In fact, the district’s initial offer deletes more than 30 pages from the teachers’ contract. According to the PAT, PPS’s proposal includes over 70 take-backs.

At a recent bargaining session, district spokesperson Brock Logan was clear about their intention to use the erasure of PAT contract language to vastly expand management’s rights while stomping on teachers’. According to Logan, “If the contract doesn’t specify it, management can do whatever they want.”

Fortunately, PAT is standing strong and genuinely attempting to advocate on behalf of students and parents in addition to teachers. As Susan Nielsen, writes in the Oregonian, “Their proposal reads less like a standard contract than an education manifesto written by your favorite teacher. We want smaller class sizes, the union says in a six-page preamble (http://bit.ly/PATpreamble). We want more electives for kids! We want every child to have access to a full curriculum that includes music, art, PE, world languages and staffed libraries. We want less time spent on endless standardized testing and more time spent developing the whole child.”

The PAT preamble titled “The Schools Portland Students Deserve,” is an intentional effort to incorporate the inspiring example of the recent Chicago Teachers’ Union fight into the union’s bargaining proposal. The preamble attempts to codify the spirit of the recent school closure fight into the teachers’ contract demanding “priority shall be placed on maintaining enrollment in neighborhood schools instead of school closure” and that “a school closure due to under-enrollment is a last resort and shall only be done in the most extreme circumstances.”

In one of the boldest sections of the preamble PAT flips the script on “accountability” in education by demanding that administrators, not just teachers, be held accountable. They ask for “creating a mentoring/feedback program for administrators” that includes “feedback surveys from students, parents, professional educators and mentor administrators.”

The preamble also calls for a coalition of parents, students, and other supporters of public education to push back against reforms that limit curriculum and wrap-around services and to work to find new sources of revenue that restore electives and services and lower class sizes.

Such a coalition will be needed now if there is any hope that the union’s vision of the schools Portland students deserve wins out over the district’s. Just last year three Oregon Education Association locals—two just east of Portland, were forced to strike by districts that used the economic crisis as an excuse to decimate teacher contracts. If those struggles are any indication of the battle ahead, the PAT will need all the support it can get. Representing nearly 2,800 teachers, the PAT is the largest teacher local in Oregon and its fate will determine the tide of education reform in the region.

The pro-fluoride lobby is represented by a well funded group called ‘Healthy Kids Healthy Portland’ (HKHP) that formed after a failed attempt by Upstream Public Health to pass fluoridation through city hall without a public vote.  These closed door lobbying sessions were kept off the city’s calendar.

HKHP argues that Portland is in the midst of a “dental crisis”, and that fluoridation of our drinking water is the best way to combat this problem.  Yet Portland’s rate of tooth decay is half that of Oregon’s statewide statistics, and far below the national average where a majority of municipalities are fluoridated.  In fact, according to a KATU News investigation that required two Freedom of Information Act requests, fluoridation produces almost no reduction to tooth decay statistics.

This isn’t the first time fluoridation has been proposed in Portland.  Three times in the last 56 years Portlanders have rejected fluoridation of Bull Run tap water.  Fluoride proponents have repeatedly argued that since chlorine is added to drinking water, adding fluoride chemicals should be acceptable as well.  However, chlorine is added to remove bacteria and make our water potable, not as a form of medication.

In this case, fluoridation is being marketed as the prescription to provide ‘dental equity’.  But what about the issue of consent?  And what about those people who have prior conditions that would make them especially susceptible to a bone-damaging fluoride overdose called skeletal fluorosis?

The argument could be made that in some circumstances, compulsory medication is warranted.  Vaccinations for highly contagious, life-threatening diseases like smallpox are a good example of when such a policy makes sense.  This cannot be argued for fluoridation.  Cavities are not, and never will be contagious.  Can we then honestly say that mandatory ingesting of fluoride in our drinking water without consent is ethical?

Many organizations are also concerned with how accumulated fluoride effects our soil and waterways.  Recently, Food & Water Watch, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission’s executive director, Columbia Riverkeepers, and the local chapter of Sierra Club all articulated their opposition to fluoridation.

From Sierra Club:
“Sierra Club opposes fluoridation because it would degrade some of the purest drinking water in the world.  Kids are already bombarded with multiple toxins from plastics, pesticides and air pollution.”

From Columbia Riverkeepers:
“What we add to our drinking water, we add to our rivers and our salmon. Fluoride is a toxic pollutant that harms salmon and other aquatic life.  At a time when many families continue to rely on the Columbia’s fisheries as an important source of nutrition and employment, we are concerned about a new source of toxic pollution into the Columbia River.”

From CRITFC executive director Paul Lumley:
“The City of Portland estimates that 215,000 pounds of fluoride will be added to the water supply each year. The Columbia and Willamette systems are already facing water quality concerns. Adding another component to an already degraded system is a step in the wrong direction.”

Fluoridation proponents cite the fact that some tap water contains trace amounts of naturally occurring fluoride as proof that adding more is safe.  However, fluorosislic acid is not the same as naturally occurring fluoride.  Fluorosilicic acid is actually an industrial byproduct of fertilizer production.

We’ve been told that people of lower income and minorities are at a higher risk of tooth decay.  While this may be true, many people of color are also at risk for other health issues that fluoridation could worsen.  Last month, the local chapter of the NAACP chose to formally oppose fluoride as well.

From NAACP:
“Children growing up in communities of color already face risks from many different environmental chemicals.  They do not need more chemicals added to their drinking water.  People with diabetes would be affected by adding fluoride to the water.  African-Americans have a higher rate of diabetes.”

Proponents claim there is scientific consensus about fluoridation in the United States, however, the vast majority of European nations do not add fluoride to their drinking water due to health and environmental concerns.  Just last month, the health minister of Israel decided to end the practice of mandatory fluoridation over similar safety concerns.

Clearly there is not consensus, as more and more nations and organizations oppose fluoridation.  In such a situation, applying the precautionary principle is the logical conclusion.  At a recent fluoridation debate hosted by the Multnomah County Democrats, Clean Water Portland representative Rick North cautioned, “We know fluoride can cause harm.  Regardless of the PPM, once introduced into drinking water, we can no longer control the dose.  If we cannot control the dose, we cannot control the harm.”

There are smarter, more responsible ways to achieve dental health. Fluoridation is a potentially risky, nonconsensual practice. With so much doubt and division within our community over an issue of such importance, the ethical choice is clear.  Portland deserves better. Please vote NO to fluoridation.

Ballots are due by May 21st.

The Eastside CL loop has been open less than 1 year, and serves as a ‘local circulator’ for the businesses and apartments in this neighbor. Having ridden the CL line several times, I’ve found it to be an enjoyable, cheap way to move up and down MLK/Grand Ave.  Some have criticized the streetcar, saying it doesn’t go fast enough.  This isn’t the point of streetcars.  Moving quickly  across town is the job of buses and MAX light rail.  The streetcar functions as a means to move people short distances within denser urban areas where automobiles are ill-suited.

There’s just one problem.  MLK/Grand are the busiest surface streets in the city.  Separated by one block, MLK and Grand each have of six lanes, four for moving vehicles, two for parked vehicles, for a total of 12 lanes devoted to large, dangerous, polluting cars and heavy semi-trucks designed for hauling freight across continents.  The streetcar shares right of way in the right lane of each boulevard, and has to stop for red lights the same as other vehicles.  It does not have the signal prioritization that allows MAX to move quickly and efficiently across town.

A year ago, Kathryn Rickson was crushed to death by a man driving an 18 wheeled semi-truck while she rode her bike on downtown Madison street.  The outrage over her killing sparked much dialog.  Citizens called for removing vehicles this large and dangerous from the city, but to date, little effort has been made to ban mega-trucks from our surface streets.

From Bikeportdland.org – memorial gathering for Kathryn Rickson.

Portland is a city planners like to brag about and aspire to emulate when it comes to livable streets, bikes, and public transit.  The NY Times loves to gush about what a ‘green’ ‘sustainable’ metropolis we are.  Yet cities like LA, Chicago, and NY City are rapidly surpassing Portland as a leader in these fields.  You’d think with overwhelming evidence of the harms that motorized traffic causes us, we’d be waging an all out war on the automobile to reclaim our streets to use them as we have for thousands of years.

Some people have already gotten the message.  Cities in Europe have vast networks of streets where no motorized vehicles are allowed.  Pedestrians enjoy moving about without having to breath in poisonous exhaust or fear for their lives while crossing the street.  Copenhagen is reducing the number of parking spaces for cars by 2-3% each year.

Carfree.com

Here in Portland, a program called ‘Street Seats‘ encourages and permits businesses to build small ‘parklets‘ in spaces previously used for space-hogging cars.  More and more store owners are realizing they can increase their profits by increasing the space for their customers to sit and relax with food or a drink.  Replacing 1 car with, say, 8 seats makes good business sense.

The initial pilot project has been such a success that now numerous businesses have applied for the permit to join the renewed ongoing  program.  You’d have guessed in a city so beloved for livable streets, nobody in their right mind would have a problem with this.  Unfortunately, the Portland Business Alliance (PBA) is rarely in their right mind.

Recently, the PBA by way of their affiliate ‘the Downtown Retail Council‘ (who allege to be “the voice for downtown Portland’s consumer business”) effectively halted the permitting process for businesses in the downtown corridor pictured below.  How they were exactly able to do this is unclear, but suffice to say that the PBA has enough money to throw around that when they talk, politicians listen.  In a press release the Retail Council absurdly claimed that the Street Seats program “could negatively affect business vitality by reducing the shared resource of on-street parking and loading zones.”   That’s right, we don’t want to diminish all those wonderful shared resources that a parking lot provides.

The always wrong Oregonian couldn’t help adding their idiocy by asserting that cars bring “urban dynamism” to our city, whatever that’s supposed to mean.  The 1950′s mindset of both the Oregonian and the PBA seem to become more cringingly out of touch with Portland’s values every day.

Portland’s “urban dynamism’ in the early 1960s.

So it was in light of these recent events that the radical livable streets activist group Veloprovo decided to have a little bit of parklet fun of their own.  Studying similar activists around the world, it’s become increasingly clear that real change only happens when you start breaking the rules.  Make your law-breaking look fun and inviting enough, and the powers that be start trying to co-opt your actions and implement them on a broader scale.  The often cited Build A Better Block organization started out just this way; by trying to break as many laws possible while generating a maximum amount of fun.

Permanent parklets usually consist of a deck flush with the curb, seats, tables, plantings, and visual markers for motorists maneuvering their bulky vehicles around them.  On Saturday, May 4th, the cyclists of Veloprovo carried little more than a mobile sound system, live instruments, some framed photos to hang, and a slingshot with bags of flower petal ammunition.

Being that MLK blvd is such a traffic sewer, and in light of the recent collision, Veloprovo rode to an intersection along this boulevard .  The storefront had been empty for years.  No vehicles were parked on this block.  Cones were set out to delineate the space that would serve as our improvised ‘street seat’ location, but with the cacophony of traffic spewing noxious exhaust just inches away, it was hard to feel comfortable for too long.

An impromptu jam session broke out that included washboards, a mandolin, and an accordion, plus several other various percussion instruments.  As enjoyable as this was, the sonic assault of engines racing by became unbearable.  The decision to move on to a better location was unanimous.

The group headed east up Belmont Ave to a block that looks virtually the same as it did in the 1930s.  The only major difference is the streetcar that used to move Portlanders up and down this commercial district is long gone, replaced with a constant stream of lumbering motor vehicles.  Once again, we situated our guerrilla parklet in front of a vacant store front, and purchased several coffees from the next door cafe.

Here, casual conversation flowed more comfortably.  Many shops and bars line this block, and people walking past would stop to talk to the group about what we were doing.  The slingshot and flower petal ammo were a big hit, as several passing strangers asked if they could fire a few rounds, helping to scatter bits of floral color across the otherwise bleak, oil-stained pavement.  More live music and singing commenced, as sewing needles emerged to begin work on a small patch of fabric and yarn.

Plans for future guerrilla parklet days were discussed.   While the cones alone mark off the space well, planters, a rug, seating, and overhead banners of some kind were all considered as future amenities that would create an even more inviting street space.

As the afternoon progressed, the group felt satisfied that the trial run of it’s unpermitted parkletting had been a success.  From here, we rode to nearby Laurelhurts park for continued discussion and more sun-soaking.  While we were nowhere near the Portland Business Alliance’s no-parklet zone of ‘urban dynamism’, Veloprovo spoke about someday bringing the fun downtown to the PBA’s doorstep.

If we want to continue building a city that deserves livable street praise, we’re going to have to challenge regressive corporate mindsets falsely claiming the car is king.  If our politicians are too compromised to get the job done, then direct action will escalate until Portland begins to once again move in a progressive direction – to truly become a ‘green’ sustainable city connected with human-scaled streets built for social stimulation and an economy of well-being.

The next Veloprovo Guerrilla Parklet Day is June 22nd, event page HERE.

•••

All images copyright Hart Noecker except where noted.

The world’s shortest march, in silence. Protesters covered their faces with masks & tape. Photo by Jason Sayre.

You might call it the world’s shortest march. You might call it a real-life trolling of the police state. Both the police and the corporate media had learned of this event via social media… just as we had intended. Unfortunately, we weren’t there to sate their desire for tragedy, but rather, to have a conversation as concerned citizens. Corporate media reporters, descending on the scene in expectation of a replay of last year’s police violence, kept asking, “When is something going to happen?”

This time around, we were assembled to protest the FBI’s simultaneous harassment of activists in Portland, Oakland, Olympia, and Seattle, just prior to this year’s May Day. That, and them driving an Armored Personnell Carrier full of federal combat police through SE Portland, with similar militarized deployments in those other three cities. An over-arching theme of our protest was the right (and necessity) of silence in the face of state repression, so we covered our mouths, with masks or with tape, to signify this. I admit it — I referred to the APC as a “tank.” Somebody on Twitter split hairs about the difference… I swore at him in my reply.

Corporate media cameras swarm. Officer Sarah Westbrook, right, approached me to make the usual subtle implied threats if we didn’t stay on the sidewalk. In keeping with the day’s theme, I only responded by asking if I was being detained. Photo by Jason Sayre.

We marched in silence in the street just long enough to raise the police state’s hackles — and then, just as quickly as we had taken to the streets, we were suddenly assembled in silence in front of the Federal Building. The police showed just how ready & willing they were to swoop in with overwhelming force. But, they didn’t have the opportunity to hurt or arrest anyone. And, to me, they looked quite foolish, as they stood around, in great numbers, doing nothing… for the entire hour.

The world’s shortest march route, from Terry Schrunk Plaza, to the corner of SW 3rd & Madison, to the middle of SW 3rd & Madison, to the front of the Federal Building. Sourced from Google Maps.

Surrounded on two blocks by local & Federal police, I observed, in conversation with the Oregonian reporter, that there were some obvious ways that the city could make up for its budgetary shortfall. She asked if I had seen the report of the PPB’s $100,000+ salaries.

A protester stands in front of the row of bicycle police, flanking us on SW Madison. Her sign reads, “Proof the cops have too much money.” Photo by Hart Noecker.

I was informed by those monitoring the police scanner that there were multiple units of cops staged in various locations throughout downtown, as far away as Voodoo Doughnuts. It sure did seem like overkill for a crowd of 50 people.

Federal and local police also watched us from across the street, on SW 3rd Ave. The PPB’s SERT “ice cream” speaker truck was out, further down on 3rd. Photo by Hart Noecker.

Our silence was lifted, and the protest transformed to a dance party, by the “surprise!” arrival of the music of bike swarm.

Nicholas Caleb arrives with music, transforming our silent protest into a dance party, before leading us to O’Bryant Square. Photo by Hart Noecker.

Finally, we marched from the Federal Building to O’Bryant Square, to meet up with the May Day main event. We walked right past the bicycle cops, waving, continuing along the sidewalk in front of the Justice Center. We ended up remaining on the sidewalk the entire route, given that our small group was tightly escorted by a small army of bicycle & motorcycle police.

We concluded our protest by marching to O’Bryant Square, to join the main May Day event. Photo by Hart Noecker.

While the Oregonian did vaguely pick up on the message about FBI repression of activism (sorta), none of the corporate media outlets that reported on this event said a damned word about the tank. The corporate media reporters seemed to lose interest when it became clear that no activists were going to get beaten or arrested. A disappointed KOIN reporter was overhead telling his colleague to go elsewhere to seek some exciting footage — but promised to stay just in case this protest got “rowdy.”

A “friendly” escort of motorcycle police, to augment the bicycle police. Separate units followed us a block away. Not overkill in the slightest… Photo by Hart Noecker.

Media coverage:

• Ustream coverage by Mungen Cakes
• Ustream coverage by Kevin Takalo — part 1 & part 2
• Ustream coverage by Joe Freedom — part 1, part 2, part 3, & part 4
• Filter Free Radio — May Day 2013 Our Roads Are For Revelry Not For FBI Tanks
• Oregonian — May Day: Demonstrators, police prepare for a busy afternoon in Portland
• KOIN — May Day marches bring awareness, results
• KGW — May Day marchers in downtown Portland
• KATU — Workers’ rights supporters march downtown for May Day

Protesters visually demonstrating the right — and necessity — of silence, in a society that criminalizes dissent. Photo by Hart Noecker.