Neighbors for Healthy Communities

03/09/2024

From the St. Johns Neighborhood Association:

Greetings!

Let’s talk BottleDrop. As you may have seen on our social media, the Board voted at its last meeting (held on Feb. 28) to officially oppose a BottleDrop facility at the old Dollar Tree on Lombard St.

That is different than the full Neighborhood Association opposing the development. That can only happen at a general meeting and is a topic we’ll be sure to discuss.

We are finalizing a draft of a potential letter of opposition that will be reviewed at our general meeting on Monday, 3/11. We will share that draft with you via email on Sunday evening so there are at least 24 hours for people to review.

Monday’s meeting will be unique as we will have two physical locations and a virtual option. The main meeting will be held in the James John Elementary School auditorium starting at 7 p.m. We will have a satellite location at El Antojo Botanero on Fessenden Street, as well as our traditional Zoom meeting with live translated captions.

The details are still being confirmed, but multiple city and state elected officials have expressed interest in attending the event to listen to our thoughts and discussion. We will also update you on that front with our email Sunday evening.

We look forward to seeing everyone and to a friendly and productive conversation.

Meeting zoom link:

03/09/2024

03/01/2024

Stop the BottleDrop!

02/28/2024

OBRC has shown time and time again that they either can’t or won’t manage their centers so they are not detrimental to surrounding areas and businesses where they are located.

Their landlord in Delta Park has been trying to evict them for years- so their new strategy is to purchase property to avoid having to answer to a landlord.

St. Johns already has lots of places that accept cans and bottles. BottleDrop is not welcome here.

Neighbors gathered on Tuesday to stand in solidarity against the potential plan, saying they are afraid of the potential for increased drug use and crime in the area based on activities at other BottleDrop locations around town.

02/24/2024

Copied from someone else’s post the St. Johns Portland, OR Facebook group.

Stop the Bottle Drop

The earlier post by Scott Gibson speculating on Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative’s OBRC plans for the old Dollar Tree store at 7740 N Lombard was correct. OBRC has started the land use approval process to turn this store into a full service bottle drop. https://www.portlandmaps.com/detail/permit/2024-011428-000-00-PR/5012239_did/?p=R156052

I view this as an existential threat to the safety of our neighborhood. Every other Portland Bottle Drop has become a huge magnet for camping, drugs, and crime. Many of you are familiar with the Delta Park Bottle Drop, and some have speculated that the Dollar Tree location is meant to replace it. That seems likely, considering that the landlord has sued OBRC over all of the crime and trash that the Bottle Drop as attracted:

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/10/portland-developer-files-300k-suit-against-bottledrop-claiming-recycler-drew-trash-crime-to-delta-park.html

Delta Park isn’t an outlier. The other OBRC full-service Bottle Drops in Portland, and in other cities, have had huge impacts on neighborhood livability. The Hazelwood location has created a huge increase in noise, camping, drug use, trash, and crime:

https://www.koin.com/news/portland/its-not-safe-ne-portland-neighbors-fed-up-with-homeless-blame-bottledrop-center/

Willamette Week (usually noted for their progressive editorial positions) recently published a feature on efforts to repeal the Bottle Bill due in part to the deplorable conditions surrounding bottle return centers:

https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/02/07/fentanyl-threatens-oregons-cherished-bottle-bill/

The time to act on this is now. If we allow Bottle Drop to open, it will be nearly impossible to remove, and we know that we can’t count on the City for any help addressing crime or neighborhood impacts. I’m a lawyer, and I’m planning on filing suit on behalf of myself and anyone else who would like to join the suit as a plaintiff. I’d also like to help organize efforts to rally our elected officials and candidates for office. However, I can’t do this alone. Please email me at [email protected] if you’d like to lend your support.

As lawmakers prepare this month to consider a major expansion, some people question whether the Bottle Bill has drifted off course.

10/29/2023

Kenton Women's Village

St. Johns Village

Peninsula Crossing Trail (chosen after the City spent YEARS taking no action to stop the massive illegal campsite there- even after extreme violence was occurring)

Bybee Lakes Hope Center (formerly Wapato jail- rejected as a site because it was studied and found to cost at least double per bed of what other sites cost- PROMPTLY RAN OUT OF MONEY RECENTLY and went begging to the county for taxpayer money, which was given. Apparently the rich real estate developers who hand-picked and funded this site ran out of money to support it once it was running?)

Newly announced sanctioned RV site on N. Portland Blvd.

What do these sites have in common? When city officials think about where they want homeless people to go, they always think North Portland and St. Johns.

At various points as each of these projects were developed, people advocated for them because they thought if they came together around models they could support, the City would look elsewhere for the more experimental unproven models. They were wrong. Many lies and half truths were told to get support for each of these projects, such as the fact that they were for veterans or that background checks would be completed for residents.

This is not the end: the city will continue to load up St. Johns and North Portland with as many of these sites as they possibly can, even though this area has almost nothing in the way of treatment or services that can actually lift people out of homelessness, and transit access to those services is extremely poor. Has camping in this area actually been reduced as a result of the outsize number of these facilities?

Here's a challenge to name one other neighborhood outside of St. Johns that has had more than one of these sites opened in the last few years.

06/07/2022

Reminder: Do Good Multnomah is the same nonprofit running the St. Johns village.

An investigation says the agency moved too slowly and should have kept a closer eye on the groups with which they contracted to run the apartments.

05/07/2022

Sounds familiar

The 2300 Naito Parkway Stakeholder Group said the city and county have ignored their concerns that villagers won't be subject to a background check.

08/05/2021

The St. Johns Neighborhood Association is conducting a survey about the city’s proposed sanctioned homeless camps.

North Portland and St. Johns are greatly overrepresented on the list of proposed sites. More than 10% of the sites proposed in the entire city are in St. Johns.

Please make your voice heard.

Contact city hall directly(Dan Ryan is in charge of this project): [email protected]

St Johns Neighborhood Association (SJNA) wants your feedback! (St Johns Neighborhood Association (SJNA) quiere sus comentarios. Para una versión en español, póngase en contacto con [email protected]) The City released a list of approximately 75 potential locations for emergency shelters a...

05/28/2021

This is an interesting rewriting of history.

The city and county decided to put this project in St. Johns, then ignored and steamrolled the neighborhood, even refusing to attend neighborhood association meetings to which they were invited, and never answering specific questions about who would be allowed to live in a space that is right by an elementary school.

The church took a lot of heat because their pastor specifically told people that the church had no plans to support this project in any way besides inviting the residents to attend their church services and potlucks. This was a cash grab for a failing church that is now collecting over $3000 per month in rent from taxpayer money. The budget for this project is high enough to provide each resident with over $1000 in rent each month. When asked why that wasn’t possible or better, Chris Aiosa (whose nonprofit got the contract to manage this) said that the residents would be likely to be evicted which would be another barrier to housing.) Neighbors were even more concerned at what they saw as as admission that the residents could get themselves evicted for issues that had nothing to do with paying rent, and presumably everything to do with following rules and being good neighbors.

Yes, a small very vocal group of people mostly with no children and some of whom have opted out of the nearby neighborhood school supported this project. Many others didn’t. Despite many efforts, the church, city, and county would not make a single concession about who would be allowed to live in this space or what the rules would be. In fact, their material specifically stated that people recently released from prison would be allowed there. Church leaders were totally unresponsive to neighbors after lying and smearing us in the local paper, while privately calling our concerns legitimate.

Neighbors were completely shut out and almost every immediate neighbor to the project moved away.

I understand if the county wants to tout some sort of success in getting people off the streets, but to say this was a successful process and the project is now uncontroversial is beyond the pale. People were absolutely willing to have this type of project in the neighborhood, but not adjacent to our schools, especially considering that the idea was to uproot the entire Hazelnut Grove camp and move all the residents to St. Johns, which is not what the people in Hazelnut Grove wanted, but very much what the Overlook Neighborhood Association wanted.

This project divided the neighborhood and created a lot of acrimony between neighbors. The backers of the project created a private petition in support of the project that garnered maybe 150 signatures after heavy promotion for months.

This petition got 400 signatures in a couple of weeks.

This is a cautionary tale for other neighborhoods, if anything. (But something tells me that neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and Irvington won’t have one of these villages installed ever.) When the Joint Office for Homeless services makes a decision for your neighborhood, they don’t consult the neighborhood first and do the absolute minimum public process just to check the box. Then they put out self-congratulatory articles like this one.

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no-homeless-campvillage-near-schools-and?fbclid=IwAR3PqDBQuQiqk8bl3XKzliKrYeIyokd1OoGFXuBjR_-S-HxZPUvGveRWfWc

Along with some 50 businesses who donated time and work, more than 120 volunteers — including members from the grassroots St. Johns Welcomes the Village Coalition — provided 2,500 hours of service.

12/21/2020

Should the city be in the business of catering to one neighborhood’s demands to ship the homeless elsewhere?

The people who live in Hazelnut Grove do not want to move.

The Hazelnut Grove Tiny Cabin Village has provided stable, long-term permanent housing for dozens of people for more than five years. As the pandemic ravishes our community and as the Center for Disease Control encourages all people to be allowed to shelter in place, the residents of the Hazelnut Gr...

10/01/2020

Tonight’s your chance to voice your opinion and ask the mayor about his plans to relocate Hazelnut Grove to St. Johns at the Neighborhood Association Meeting.

Is he still planning to allow active addicts there? Felons?

Via Video Conference Only - Login Information Below

7:00 Call to Order and Opening Remarks- Mike Vial

7:10 Discussion and vote on SJNA Board letters to Joint Office of Homeless Services, St Johns Christian Church, Do Good Multnomah, and the St Johns Center for Opportunity

7:25 Discussion and vote on NP Joint Statement on Homelessness

7:40 Local elections candidate forum

8:30 Meeting Adjourned

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