Review - Portland 2-11-25 Homelessness and Housing Committee Meeting

Hi Homelessness and Housing Committee:

Your organizational meeting was a good start. Here are some thoughts that I hope will help you establish your committee’s credibility with the public.

A. The public’s priorities regarding homeless policy and actions are:

#1 Get all those illegally camping on public property removed from those properties.

#2 Provide immediate temporary shelter followed eventually by permanent Public Housing for the homeless as resources and the public mood and values will allow.

The top priority of your committee should reflect an understanding that the top priority of Portland voters is immediately removing illegal camping, including RVs, from public property. This requires a sense of urgency and an understanding that the optics of this situation, the perception of that reality, is everything in politics. The mayor seems to understand this. This committee should take immediate legislative action to establish a reservoir of good will with the public. Your next meeting would not be too soon. There is no excuse for delay. Seeking information is important but it should not overwhelm nor delay the job of the committee which is to produce legislation in a timely manner which is forwarded to the whole city Council for a vote. This is the path to public credibility on homelessness and housing issues.

B. Without individual and committee foundational housing goals and policies conversations and deliberations can have no focus. They will devolve into meaningless meanderings sucking up valuable time without forward motion toward the established goals. The optics will appear to the public as wasting too much time in the weeds with no product. Time is always of the essence. You can’t have perfect knowledge nor do everything at once. You cannot get to your individual and committee destinations if you don’t publicly say where they are. NO Housing Goal = NO Housing Policy = NO Housing Plan = NO Executed Housing Plan = NO ACCOUNTABILITY.

C. Public trust requires a balance between humanitarian concern for the homeless and the rights of everyone else in our community. Today’s meeting demonstrated a tremendous imbalance almost ignoring the rights of the majority of Portland voters, citizens and taxpayers who are not homeless. You need to address this quickly and publicly.

D. You cannot fix nor even have a meaningful conversation about housing if you don’t understand the language and the process of how housing development works. This committee cannot be successful if some of its members deliberately misuse affordable housing for public housing. The terms Public Housing and Affordable Housing are NOT the same and are NOT interchangeable. When you use these terms incorrectly you are deliberately misusing language to feel good about yourself, not to communicate. Misusing the term “Affordable Housing” for “Public Housing” is the easiest, most fundamental way to assure NO ACCOUNTABILITY.

E. Some members of this committee recognized the need to make their housing legislative proposals giving due consideration to Multnomah county, Metro and the legislature. What was missing was a recognition of a report that has overarching authority on housing in Oregon by the Land Conservation and Development Commission, namely, the Oregon Housing Needs Analysis Methodology December 2024, a revision of Housing Goal 10.

I look forward to meeting with each of you in the near future.

Good luck and good health.

Richard Ellmyer

Portland resident since 1975.

Oregon Voter since 1971. NAV, Non Affiliated Voter. Citizen Activist.

Campaign manager and legislative assistant to state senator Bill McCoy 1980-1981.

Campaign manager and senior staff to Multnomah county commissioner Gladys McCoy 1981-1984.

Celebrate North Portland award 2016 for Volunteer Work and Service with Political and Social Issues Impacting North Portland.

Certified Oregon Change Agent by Governor John Kitzhaber 2011.

PSU Senior Adult Learner, Spring 2021 - Public Participation GiS, 500 level class

PSU Senior Adult Learner, Spring 2024 - Planning and Housing Markets, 500 level class

Author of more stories on the politics, players and policies of Public Housing in Oregon over the last twenty-three years than all other journalists and elected officials combined.

Project Champion and Data Wrangler - Metro/Oregon Public Housing Location Maps https://www.goodgrowthnw.org/m...

GIS for Activism conference, May 23, 2022, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

Richard Ellmyer - How I, A Citizen Activist, Used GIS To Effectively Tell A Necessary Yet Unavailable Truth About Public Housing

30 minute Video https://media.pdx.edu/media/t/...

Lifelong Learning at PSU by Jennifer Jordan-Wong.

LET KNOWLEDGE SERVE THE CITY [Section] “Richard used a course he audited at PSU to create a citizen activist mapping tool to benefit Oregon residents, stakeholders, and policy makers…His interest in mapping as a tool for change began when he noticed that public housing was not being distributed equitably”

https://psucollegeofed.wordpress.com/2022/09/23/lifelong-learning-at-psu/?fbclid=IwAR3S9Pff0mBGeT6Ha8dQeAqL0nAqU7QzZ-0pJC_oTQJxBWlAb2fdXzdE0w4

Author of The Ellmyer Report, a newsletter that informs, educates and influences on public policy. Its target audiences are elected officials, journalists and civically engaged citizens. Facebook, Portland Politics Plus. Contributor: Patch news.