Lee Perlman and Mike Warwick

Lee Perlman and Mike Warwick Interview Transcript
Interviewed and recorded by Arlie Sommer

0:00:00.0

Mike: ...beat up old pick up truck and was using it to do some landscape stuff up in our neighborhood up in the west hills, she parked it on the street and 2 days later had a ticket. You know, you can live in your car in Eliot for months on end and nothings going to happen to you, you know, so-it's-they-you know, there's real disparating(???not a real word I don't think) code enforcement, you can call these people until you're blue in the face and they just-they won't-won't respond. And unfortunately part of that has to do with the people they assign to the neighborhood you know, I mean the people they put out here are not the best and the brightest. And the fact that they don't do their job very well, you know, but as we're seeing with some of the stuff that's going on in the papers today, some of the people that get these jobs are given a pass for other reasons, and-and so, that's just kind of characteristic of-I think the nature of the bureaucracy's relationship with the black community, and people of color generally, which is not very good (unclear) aggresive about stopping the red lining even though it was going on, or haven't been very aggressive about, you know about the genderfication(???) displacement when they could of acted but didn't and they've actually abetted it in cases in both the Rose Quarter and Emanuel where they, you know as far as I'm concerned it was ethnic cleansing, you know. And like I already indicated (unclear) is basically designed sort of like Lee says to buy people off, the trouble makers off so that they could-could sleep well at night, but it didn't do anything for the community, so I think it's-it's a very very mixed bag, I'd say generally I'd give them a D as a score, at best, you know I think there's some good intentions but execution's been really really bad.

0:01:45

Lee: Well, again I would say, you know, my thing would be it would be a little bit too broad to give the city a score because it would be like giving a score to an entire class. But, you know, there's enough there to validate what Mike said. I comment about, you know, design review in this neighborhood, it's nowhere near what I would like to see. However, you know, Bill Reed, he wouldn't say he's a good designer, but he-somebody once said "You should see what he builds in neighborhoods that don't have any design review". He has houses where the only exterior entrance is the garage, so one way of looking at it is if somebody is determined to build something ugly they'll find a way. The other is you can make it a little less ugly than they would on their own. You know, I was-they had-last year they had a 50th anniversary celebration of PDC and they-it was just, you know, how wonderful it was etc. etc. You know, all-they didn-they didn't lie, but all the bad stuff was missing. And there was a-here's a nice one to-this will be the end for me but Lillian Hellman the playwright once wrote "We are not a people who like to remember our past. In America to remember the past is considered unhealthy, to talk about it neurotic, to dwell upon it psychotic".

Mike: Yeah, that's a nice place to end. I think that's really-one of the kind of disturbing things about it is if you look at the broad expansive of the history of-of east Portland, in Albina neighborhood, our neighborhood, I mean it started out as you know, working a port, big industrial mostly, you know, wood processing down on the waterfront and lower Albina with-in the railroad yards with the people who worked for the railroad and worked in the mills living up on the hills up here, if you go back and look at the census data you'll see that until the '40's there weren't a lot of black people here but the black people who did live in the city were scattered all over the place. In-one of the things I did do as part of my model cities work that was kind of interesting is I worked with one of the long established black social organizations called the-what the hell were they called-they were called Royal Esquires, and it's very interesting, I worked-the people I worked with on in model cities were all black and there was a schism between the black people who lived in Portland before the '40's and who were like everybody else who came, you know, came west. They were all kind of pioneers, they were entrepreneurs, they were self-starters, and it was a big contrast between the people who moved in to run-to work in the shipyards, yeah, were both from the south, they were basically just people wanting to be workers, they weren't entrepreneurs, and they came in-because they were black they integrated into the black culture but not very well. The Royal Esquires were trying to find a way to survive which I don't think they did, there are probably some remnants still floating around, but, you know, all those people were getting old and there weren't that many to start with and they'd all been really displaced by these southern emigres(???) who-very different culture and it was-there was a lot of conflict within the black community between these 2 subsets which I don't think people know about, that's pretty interesting, but one of the things is that set them apart was, you know, before the shipyards the people who-you know, the black entrepreneurial class were largely considered professionals. You know, it was a profession to be a steward on the railroad, or to be a chef in a hotel or on the railroad. And to be a business person was a pretty esteemed position so the black middleclass, the white middleclass, they were middleclass on the same basis. With the industrialization that came with the shipyards and everything else, that all changed, so there was a big erosion there in addition to all these people who then didn't have jobs after the shipyards shut down were still here, so it really changed the character of both the black community (unclear) northeast because that's where they lived. And unfortunately there's been a lot more focus on that, kind of post 1948 when Vanport happened, history of this community and the black community then on the stuff that preceded it which I think is really unfortunate. And thank God for people like Kathy Galbraith who are saying we need to preserve some of that stuff before then, but-but it's not getting it's due I don't think in a lot of this discussion of genderification and all the rest of that because I think it's really missing, you know, like Lee says, the dynamic nature of this neighborhood. Some of which was dynamic because it got pushed by urban renewal and some of it was just-it's just the nature of urban development, but there's way more to this picture than I think people are hearing and seeing because the people who were-who could tell you about what happened in the '20's and '30's, they're not around anymore.

0:07:36

Lee: One more by the way-

Arlie: Alright.

Mike: We're not going to stop.

Lee: No, is that, you know, we have a, you know a whole nother subset was social services. For many many years the neighborhood, you know, under the Millers and so forth, were very very welcoming to social services, and you know, transitional housing, that sort of thing. To the point-at one point we said "Wait a minute, how many of these things are gonna locate in the neighborhood?" We came to the conclusion that they were-there was no limit to the number that wanted to be here, and there was a finite limit to the number that it was a good idea to be here. For one thing, the land they were occupying was largely residentially zoned. The question is, for every one that locates here, that's housing that can't be here and there's a virtue to having a res-a critical mass of resident people, you know, rather than people who are cycling thru a 90 day community program, however worthy that may be. And there-that was on that basis that we resisted the Volunteers of America Men's Center, which is now well established on Martin Luther King between Sacremento & Brazee. It was less that it was-there was something inherently wrong with that, although we had quibbles about it among other things, they were making it up as they went along, but it was also that it was more than one too many. And, you know, we had-that one we lost on at City Council, among other things, then Mayor Clark said "As far as I'm concerned, anything that anybody wants to build in that neighborhood is a great thing" wonderful, you know, that's, you know, if we're the repository of what nobody else wants, you know, that's gonna be our legacy.

0:09:56.7

Arlie: (unclear)

Lee: We as the Eliot Neighborhood Association. These days it's we is Lee Perlman, you know, victim of multiple personalities disorder, but you know, it's-

Mike: I don't really reinforce what Lee said, you know, one of the reasons that we are getting a lot-a lot of these things located-there are 2 reasons. One is, historically, and even still today, although a lot less so, the land has been cheap. There's been large parcels of land like these old auto lots that somebody could move into and build a new service facility like-well, Planned Parenthood is not a good example because PDC dissembled that land, but certainly McCoy Village where they had a big chunk of land they could move into, and some of the people who have been looking at the lots at MLK and Fremont, are looking at them because they are one big chunk of land that could be used for some social service agency, or some big low-income housing project. But Irvington fought the location of these things tooth & nail and they don't have any of them in their neighborhood, but they were all very supportive of the City Council of putting them in our neighborhood. And in fact, some of the people who head the organizations that direct these things places, live in Irvington and are all just keen to have these things located nearby so they can say we are doing our part for the poor people, but not in our neighborhood, not in our backyard. Which is, of course, a big source of irritation to me, but the other thing that is interesting about it is that when you protest these things, one of the responses you get, and we heard this from VOA and I'm going to use them as an example "Oh, well, there's a big need for that in your community", and when people say "community", "in our community", they mean among the black population. But if you go-

0:11:47

Lee: Multnomah County.

Mike: Yeah, right. But what they really mean is not-they sell it to you as "Oh, it's serving the people in your community". The black people that do have drug addictions, yeah, absolutely they could use drug treatment, no problem with that, agree with that. But, if you go-I mean I walk by the VOA thing every day adn when I go by to get my coffee, they're out doing their walk, if you look at who's going to that facility it is 95% white people, it is not people from Eliot. It is not even people from inner NE, it's people from the larger Multnomah County area. So people are putting these facilities in our neighborhood not to serve the people who have been displaced historically, not to serve the people who are here who could use the services, but to serve people from outside. And that's what I think-that's what we did react to. We reacted to the fact that people are importing their problems and not importing anything that's going to improve the neighborhood. And we're still probably 60% rental housing and more rental housing has been added to this neighborhood than new single family home owners stuff by a long shot. So again, it goes to my other pet peeve about genderification is I don't-I don't think so. We probably added at least 2 or 3 units of low-income housing for every quote unquote genderified(???) condo or houses being converted back to owner occupied in this neighborhood than not, so if you want to point to genderification there's lots of places to point to, but I wouldn't point here first.

0:13:22

Lee: One of the-by the way, one of the real bad stories that was Project Network which was a program for young pregnant African-American mothers-to-be. A very very worthy program, needed, no doubt about it, but they took a fully occupied 35 unit hous-apartment building and told the people who were living there "Sorry, you got to go". And it was-those people were treated like crap. And that's, you know, that's-that's one of the rawest(???) examples but you know-but you know, that's where, you know-it sounds great if you eliminate some of the-part of the equation.

0:14:26.8

Arlie: (unclear)

Lee: I-I gave mine.

Mike: We could go on all day since she's got the room, but we're not going to.

Lee: I cannot go on all day.

**Thanks are given for Mike & Lee's time and there is miscellaneous conversation about other possible interviewees. End of interview**