Cycle Advocacy: How Police Brutality Killed Portland’s Critical Mass Rides

Aftermass: Bicycling Post Critical Mass in Portland

Directed by Joe Biel (2014)

Film Review

This documentary relates the painful history which has made Portland Oregon the most bike friendly city in the US. Part relates to federal and state enabling legislation, and part to two successful lawsuits filed by Portland residents. However most relates to the massive Critical Mass rides that took place between 1993 and 2008, despite the brutal physical, legal, and psychological harassment by the Portland Police Bureau.

As of 2014, when the film was made, over 6% of Portland residents used bikes to commute to work. At the time, roughly 20,000 bikes crossed Portland’s city center bridges daily.

Enabling Legislation:

• 1971 – Oregon Bicycle Act requires every state and urban roading project allocate 1% of their budget to cycling access.
• 1973 – Oregon Land Conservation and Development Act creates framework to establish urban growth boundaries (to prevent sprawl) and limit construction of big box stores (eg Walmart).*
• 1990 – Clean Air Act amendments sets strict toxic air emissions limits, forcing Portland (which violated the new Act at least twice a week) to reduce vehicle traffic.

Lawsuits

• 1974 – grassroots coalition wins lawsuit blocking construction of Mount Hood Freeway through downtown Portland. Funds allocated for the freeway are invested in Portland’s light rail network.
• 1995 – Portland’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BLA) wins lawsuit against city for failing to include designated bike lanes in their roading projects.

The majority of this film consists of footage of Portland’s Critical Mass bike rides held the last Friday of every month between 1993 and 2008. Critical Mass first started in San Francisco and quickly spread around the world among activists seeking to promote cycling as a carbon neutral alternative to fossil fuel vehicles (our local bike advocacy group has organized them here in New Plymouth).

They spread to Portland in 1993. The ultimate dream of early participants was to pressure the city to build a cycling infrastructure, comparable to those found in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and other European cities, to safely separate them from motor vehicles. In survey after survey, prospective cyclists consistently identify the risk of injury (or death) from motor vehicles as the primary obstacle to using bicycles as their primary form of transportation.**

For most of us, the best part of Critical Mass rides is they allow cyclists to ride in total safety for the few hours a month they take over the streets from cars.

As depicted in this film, the extreme brutality Portland police subjected Critical Mass cyclists to (extensively documented in this film) is truly horrifying. In addition to being clubbed and manacled by cops, they had their cameras confiscated and were subject to repeated arrest. Although courts dismissed most of the charges, being summoned to court monthly seriously disrupted work and other obligations.

The rides were also infiltrated by police informants (which was illegal at the time), who repeatedly urged other cyclists to break windows or bash cars and who lied in court about other cyclists alleged criminal activities.

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*Preventing sprawl is essential to developing cost effective public transport networks, and blocking box box stores helps preserve neighborhood businesses that residents can access via bicycle or on foot.

**Because cycling is so safe in Amsterdam that one third of all trips are made by bicycle.

Anyone with a public library card can view the full film free at Kanopy. Type Kanopy and the name of your library into you search engine.

 

 

Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland Oregon

Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland Oregon

Directed by Cornelius Swart (2016)

Film Review

As of 2015, Portland was the most “gentrified” city in the US. The term “gentrification” describes the large scare displacement of African Americans from their traditional inner city communities. It typically occurs when city authorities create significant amenities in Black neighborhoods to lure white residents back from the suburbs. This new trend reverses a 100 year process in which whites migrated great distances to avoid living near Black people.

Growing demand from white professionals for inner city homes, leads to exponential increases in house prices and rents that make homes unaffordable for low income African Americans.

In Portland the first area to be gentrified was Albina, a neighborhood just Northeast of downtown Portland. During the fifties and sixties, it was a thriving Black community with flourishing Black-owned businesses where most residents knew one another. In the 1970s, as manufacturing jobs moved overseas, economic conditions in Albina tanked and criminal activity increased.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Portland city authorities began investing in Northeast Portland by building a light rail service and funding various redevelopment projects. More than 1100 African American homes and scores of Black businesses were demolished for an Interstate hub, a sports stadium, and a major hospital complex that was never built. At the same time, city authorities enacted a ban against landlords renting to federal Section 8 subsidy recipients.

The mass displacement of Albina’s Black residents reached its peak after the 2008 economic crisis, which resulted in an epidemic of subprime mortgage foreclosures in many low income communities. Ironically the current house price bubble means the majority of white working class residents are also being displaced from Portland. At present 49% of Portland residents live in rental housing, and half of them spend more than one-third of their income on housing.

Fortunately since 2013, there has been significant organized resistance to continuing gentrification. It’s now the number one issue for city government. In 2015, activists forced Trader Joe to withdraw from a city-subsidized scheme to demolish yet more rental housing for a huge shopping complex. The same year, city authorities passed a right to return law, ending the ban on Section 8 housing and granting former Albina residents preferential access.

The Revolutionary Mud House Movement

First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture

Directed by David Sheen (2010)

Film Review

First Earth is about the growing movement to build homes from wood rather than word or concrete. The film is divided into 12 segments, providing an intriguing glimpse into the 50% of the world who already live or work in mud structures. A growing number of third world leaders are highly critical of industrial society’s efforts to colonize them by destroying their cultures and dragging them into a cash economy.

Part 1 Intro Any civilization that continually consumes its non-renewable resources will eventually destroy the land base that supports it. According to the US Department of Energy, wood and concrete buildings consume 40% of total global energy and 40% of the raw materials the world consumers. In North America, 75% of the trees felled are used in construction.

Ravaging our forests in this way is responsible for approximately 200 species extinctions every day. Replanting trees is ineffective in preventing extinctions because it doesn’t replace the delicate forest ecosystems which have been destroyed.

Part 2 African Earth visits a Ghanaian village where every member knows how to build their own house from free locally sourced materials.

Part 3 American Earth explores the history of Pueblo architecture, based on adobe bricks and plaster, and the US permaculture movement, which is studying and teaching how to build homes out of cob.*

Part 4 Why Earth argues that cheap energy has allowed westerners to move building materials long distances. Building with locally sourced mud is far more sustainable, as it requires no fossil fuel energy and produces no end of life waste. Mud is also an ideal (free) insulator for homes relying on passive solar heating.

Part 5 Empowering Earth describes the history of the cob building movement, which started in Oregon and now offers courses across North America.

Part 6 Another Earth is Possible discusses the ins and outs of obtaining building permits and mortgages for a cob home.

Part 7 European Earth describes the spread of the cob movement to the UK.

Part 8 Arabian Earth describes the long history of earth building in Yemen, which uses mud bricks to construct high rise buildings and has mud brick structures standing that pre-date Islam (600 AD).

Part 9 Urban Earth explores how the earth building movement and similar experiments in sustainability are helping Portland residents improve civic engagement and regain their sense of community.

Part 10 Inner City Earth explores how African American activists in Oakland are fighting gentrification by engaging community members in earth building projects.

Part 11 International Earth is about bringing the cob movement to Thailand, where it’s reducing local villagers’ reliance on cement. The move 30 years ago to cement (from traditional bamboo and thatch) has caused a massive debt crisis in many areas of the country. Thailand now has 18 earth building centers teaching around 600 people a month how to build homes out of free, locally sourced mud.

Part 12: The Future of Earth – epilogue.

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*Cob is a natural building material made of subsoil, water and some kind of fibrous material (usually straw)

The Growing Coal Train Movement

Momenta

Directed by Andy Miller and Robin Moore (2014)

Film Review

Momenta is about the growing grassroots movement to stop the coal trains that are creating environmental havoc in the Pacific Northwest. The movement owes its diversity to the devastation the trains create in nearly all the communities they pass through.

Hurt by the rapid shutdown of coal-fired power plants (for environmental and economic reasons), the US coal industry is seeking to cut their losses by selling as much coal as possible to China. Coal exported to China via Pacific deep water ports comes from Montana’s Powder River Basin. The coal trains carrying it it follow a circuitous route through Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. They endanger the health and livelihoods of hundreds of communities along the way. Including Montana ranchers facing catastrophic water shortages as the mining companies deplete the Powder River Basin aquifer.

The number of coal trains varies between 18 and 120 a day depending on the community. The trains are uncovered and each sheds 31 tons of coal dust daily. The coal dust contains high levels of mercury and arsenic. This is in addition to the heavy metals contained in diesel particulates given off by the train engines produced by train engines. The latter substantially increases residents’ risk of asthma, heart attack and stroke.

In urban areas, such as Billings, Spokane, Portland, Longview, Seattle and Bellingham, the trains always travel through the poorest neighborhoods. In more sparsely populated areas, they contaminate pristine waterways essential to recreational fishing, water sports and tourism.

The documentary also emphasizes the need to reduce global reliance on coal to reduce overall carbon emissions. The coal industry is indifferent to these so-called “externalities.”

They refuse to cover their trains to reduce the spread of coal dust and are only willing to pay 5% of the $500 million infrastructure necessary to accommodate the increased train traffic. According to one activist, “all they care about is squeezing the last bit of profit out of a dying industry.”

The documentary concludes with a discussion – and a tour of a Marysville solar panel factory – of the beneficial effects of the renewable energy industry on the US economy. The latter creates far more jobs than exporting coal to China and is less dependent on fluctuations in the Chinese economy.

For more information on the anti-coal train movement go to http://www.powerpastcoal.org/