Monday Mailing - July 13, 2020

Monday Mailing

Year 26 • Issue 43 13 July 2020 1.

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Quote of the Week:

“Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better.”

- Tom McCall

Oregon Fast Fact

On July 13, 2002, a series of electrical storms passed over southwestern Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains. Lightning strikes ignited five separate fires that coalesced into the Biscuit Fire that burned for four months. More info.

Postcards from the Pandemic: Latino Businesses Maintain Community at Portland Mercado Feds Nix Plans to Reintroduce Grizzlies to Washington’s North Cascades (Katie McFall) Oregon Appeals Court Backs Right to Legal Nonbinary Gender Designation (William Sullivan) Northwest Forest Threats Include Climate Change, Insects, Disease and Wildfire (Katie McFall) I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing (Erik Orta) Tribes Struggle to Meet Deadline to Spend Virus Relief Aid To Understand a City’s Pace of Gentrification, Look at Its Housing Supply In Migrant Worker Camps, Wifi is a Basic Utility Ranchers Say They Can Graze Away Wildfires. Environmentalists Beg to Differ.

Mobile Recreation for Fun, Health and Wellness Black Historic Places Matter WEBINAR – Still Open for Business: Working With MinorityOwned Rural Firms Through the Pandemic (Eva Kahn)

1. Postcards from the Pandemic: Latino Businesses Maintain

Community at Portland Mercado

Heading down Portland’s Southeast Foster Boulevard, you can’t miss the Portland Mercado. The city’s first Latino public market pops with bright colors. A mural depicting a guitarist and a dancer swinging her dress welcomes you inside to a juice bar, a cafe, a small grocer and a neighborhood bar. A wooden pergola tops a patio full of tables and red, green, blue, and yellow food carts serving cuisine ranging from Mexican, to Colombian, to Peruvian. Music is playing. Music is almost always playing.

The Portland Mercado celebrated its five-year anniversary in April. But 2020, of course, has been no ordinary year. An anniversary video on the Mercado’s website, showing its business owners at work, is full of people wearing face coverings and protective gear. One vendor, Amalia Sierra, stands before her Oaxacan food cart Tierra Del Sol and says, “con el COVID diecinueve, el invernio ha sido muy largo: with COVID-19, winter has been very long.”

To access the full story, click here.

2. Feds Nix Plans to Reintroduce Grizzlies to Washington’s North Cascades The federal government on Tuesday decided to scrap plans to reintroduce grizzly bears to the North Cascades ecosystem in Washington state.

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U.S. Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt told a meeting of community members in Omak, Washington, that his agency will not conduct the environmental impact statement needed to move forward with the plan.

"The Trump Administration is committed to being a good neighbor, and the people who live and work in north central Washington have made their voices clear that they do not want grizzly bears,'' Bernhardt said in a news release.

"Grizzly bears are not in danger of extinction, and Interior will continue to build on its conservation successes managing healthy grizzly bear populations across their existing range,'' he said.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Oregon Appeals Court Backs Right to Legal Nonbinary Gender Designation

The Oregon Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday in favor of a person’s right to legally change their gender to nonbinary.

The ruling requires circuit court judges to grant nonbinary as a gender marker if a person has legally followed the process to make that gender change.

Oregon birth certificates and drivers licenses already have a nonbinary option. But those are administrative, not legal, changes.

The appeals court sided with Eugene resident Jones Hollister, 53, whose petition for a nonbinary gender marker in 2019 was denied by Lane County Circuit Court Judge Charles Carlson.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Northwest Forest Threats Include Climate Change, Insects, Disease and Wildfire

Pacific Northwest forests face increased threats from severe wildfires, insects, disease and climate change, according to a new assessment released Wednesday by the U.S. Forest Service.

The Bioregional Assessment evaluated 19 national forests and grasslands across the Pacific Northwest. It found that the Northwest Forest Plan and other directives were not fully achieving desired outcomes when it comes to the forests’ potential social, economic and ecological benefits.

Under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, management plans changed dramatically for federal forests from the Canadian border into Northern California. The plan, adopted by the Clinton administration, curtailed logging and aimed to protect imperiled northern spotted owls and other species that depend on old-growth forests.

“The world we were in 1994, when the Northwest Forest Plan amended most of these forest plans, so much has changed ecologically, socially, the economy was different,” USDA Public

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Affairs Specialist Wade Muehlhof said. “So, it was time to really take a hard look at all the things that have changed, figure out what can do better, what we need to retain.”

To access the full story, click here.

5. I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing

As coronavirus lockdowns crept across the globe this winter and spring, an unusual sound fell over the world’s metropolises: the hush of streets that were suddenly, blessedly free of cars.

City dwellers reported hearing bird song, wind and the rustling of leaves. (Along with, in New York City, the intermittent screams of sirens.)

You could smell the absence of cars, too. From New York to Los Angeles to New Delhi, air pollution plummeted, and the soupy, exhaust-choked haze over the world’s dirtiest cities lifted to reveal brilliant blue skies.

Cars took a break from killing people, too. About 10 pedestrians die on New York City’s streets in an ordinary month. Under lockdown, the city went a record two months without a single pedestrian fatality. In California, vehicle collisions plummeted 50 percent, reducing accidents resulting in injuries or death by about 6,000 per month.

As the roads became freer of cars, they grew full of possibility. Rollerblading and skateboarding have come back into fashion. Sales of bicycles and electric bikes have skyrocketed.

But there is a catch: Cities are beginning to cautiously open back up again, and people are wondering how they’re going to get in to work. Many are worried about the spread of the virus on public transit. Are cars our only option? How will we find space for all of them?

To access the full story, click here.

6. Tribes Struggle to Meet Deadline to Spend Virus Relief Aid

As the coronavirus rips through tribal communities, it is spotlighting longstanding inequities and creating fractured priorities for sovereign Indigenous nations across the U.S. They must decide how to spend millions in federal virus relief money, and they must do it quickly to meet a deadline that also requires state and local governments to spend the money on emergency needs. And in many cases they face a collapse of traditional funding sources they’ve long relied on to pay the bills.

In Oregon, Councilman Michael Langley of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde said the pandemic and the tribal budget are inseparable. The tribe has continued paying the wages of its casino employees, and it provides law enforcement services outside its reservation, he said.

Unlike states and local governments, tribes have no tax base and rely on tribal enterprises to generate revenue.

“To have this parenting thing where ‘We can’t trust you with your money’ is somewhat insulting,” Langley said of the restrictions that come with federal funds.

To access the full story, click here.

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7. To Understand a City’s Pace of Gentrification, Look at Its Housing Supply

Gentrification is a hotly debated subject, with conversations centering around what happens to neighborhoods’ income and racial mix as new buyers move in and how that affects current residents. Although the impacts of gentrification are still being studied and debated, it’s important to understand what increases the pace of gentrification, which we define for this analysis as how fast high-income homebuyers move into low-income neighborhoods.

We combined two datasets to examine the movement of high-income borrowers into lowincome areas and the varying pace of this movement across different metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Our analysis focuses only on income because homebuyers’ race or ethnicity was not available at comparable levels of granularity in the two datasets.

Our examination reveals that, in many MSAs, high housing costs—resulting from a lack of available housing—cause affluent buyers to look for homes in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods. That means cities’ housing supply can determine how fast gentrification may occur. Boosting the supply of housing can slow the pace of new buyers moving into lowerincome neighborhoods.

To access the full story, click here.

8. In Migrant Worker Camps, Wifi is a Basic Utility

Spanning both states of Oregon and Washington, the Columbia River Gorge is a place of striking natural beauty. Annually, the Gorge produces over 225,000 tons of apples, pears, and cherries.

Between 10,000 to 12,000 migrant and seasonal farmworkers come to the Gorge each year to harvest fruit, traveling north from Mexico through California in one of the country’s major migration routes. This year, Covid-19 presented unique challenges to the workers.

Long before the annual fruit harvest began this year, local public health officials and community leaders were discussing how to support farmworkers and their families during the quarantine.

While most conversations focused on housing and personal protective equipment, it quickly became clear that the internet would be critical for two reasons: accessing non-emergency Telemedicine services and providing education for children of farmworkers unable to attend their usual in-person summer classes.

In April, Ashley Thompson, Fruit Horticulturalist at Oregon State University Extension Service in Wasco County, administered a survey to local orchardists to gauge interest in wifi hot spots.

“Some orchards have had wifi for a long time,” said Ashley. “Some don’t know about it, or can’t afford it, or they’re just in a topographical zone that doesn’t lend itself well to the carrier that they typically use.”

To access this resource, click here.

9. Ranchers Say They Can Graze Away Wildfires. Environmentalists Beg to Differ.

In a new proposal, the Bureau of Land Management is giving Nevada ranchers more time on federal land to graze away the grasses that fuel wildfires. It may make things worse.

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Eight years ago, lightning struck a remote corner of northwest Nevada, and started a fire that tore through canyons and ridges at a brisk clip. Rancher Carolyn Dufurrena watched in horror as it devoured dry brush and bunchgrass. Three weeks later, after the Holloway Fire scorched over 462,000 acres, her family, which had been ranching in that area for four generations, had lost about 95 percent of the grass they needed to feed their cattle and sheep.

“When you have a few dry years, that grass becomes tinder,” said Dufurrena, who previously wrote about the fire for Range magazine. She suspects that if her livestock had been allowed to eat more of it, the fire would have slowed down. “If the cattle could get to it at the right time of year, and really hit it, they would make it much less of an issue.”

To access this resource, click here.

10. Mobile Recreation for Fun, Health and Wellness

Urban planning professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris was perhaps ahead of her time when she said in a 1995 article that “the ever-changing urban form and social ecology of neighborhoods calls for a flexible rather than rigid park design and for spatial layouts that can be easily changed in response to future needs.... One can even think of mobile parks — spaces whose equipment and furniture can be transported to other parts of the city if the need arises.”

As a park planner, I know firsthand how expensive and time-consuming it can be to acquire land and build new parks. It typically takes years before new parks can be provided due to financial, bureaucratic and political issues, and other constraints. Mobile recreation may sound strange at first, but it may be an appropriate strategy to meet the urgent need for additional recreational opportunities in underserved areas.

To access this resource, click here.

11. Black Historic Places Matter

The recent approval of the National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation (MPD) of Portland’s African American Resources and the National Register nomination for Billy Webb Elk Lodge (Williams Avenue YWCA) marks a significant milestone towards more inclusive historic preservation efforts. Produced in partnership between the Bosco-Milligan Foundation: Architectural Heritage Center and the City of Portland’s Bureau of Sustainability, with assistance from the State Historic Preservation Office, the MPD represents a comprehensive architectural and cultural study of the African American community in Portland from 1851 to 1973.

The late Cathy Galbraith, the founding director of the Bosco-Milligan: Architectural Heritage Center, in her seminal work, entitled the Cornerstone of Community: Buildings of Portland’s African American History, began an enormous effort of identifying African American historic buildings. Building on Galbraith’s work and others, the MPD serves as a National Register of Historic Places umbrella document that make it easier for individual property owners to list their property in the National Register.

To access this resource, click here.

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12. WEBINAR – Still Open for Business: Working with Minority-Owned Rural Firms Through the Pandemic

July 22, 2020 – 11:30am PDT Racially and ethnically diverse populations comprise 21 percent of rural America—but produced 83 percent of its growth between 2000 and 2010, a trend that has continued since. Along with that, enterprising Latinx, Black and Indigenous entrepreneurs are launching businesses bringing new life to many rural communities – and creating better livelihoods for their owners and employees. But what has happened to these firms during the COVID-19 crisis? And how are rural development organizations adapting what they do to help these firms to get through the emergency and recover?

In this first Rural Opportunity and Development (ROAD) Session, rural minority business owners will detail their recent experiences, in partnered conversation with the regional intermediaries who have been helping them with technical assistance, funding and advocacy. Join us for the their exchange in the first hour – and stay with us, if you wish, for 30 minutes of small-group peer-sharing and advice.

To sign up for this webinar, click here.

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