Burnside

So, it says very good for you. You know what I think? What do you think of it? You will see that. Some people should come to your lab after she didn't come out. You know what I think? What do you think of it? You will see that. Some people should come to your lab after she didn't come out. You know that I want something to say. You will see the end of the high-quality line that says you know what you do. I enjoy all the time very much. I like the shops, I like the old buildings. The historic gas specks of it are real nice. To be true for not to, it's not to appealing to me.

I don't feel too good about going into a whole town. Being raped, being mugged, anything, even being bothered, bothers me now. You really have to focus on not what's going on. I just go there and back. It's not really pleasant to say like the Galleria or this part of town. This area north of Portland's financial district is just blocks away from busy downtown shops. But most people are reluctant to come here. This is where Portland's homeless live, the drug addicts, the alcoholics, those with simply no other place to go. This may be Portland's skin road, many. But to developers, this is prime Oregon real estate. Locals call it Burnside. The developer is hoping to do it that way. Who is? Why are you bringing your local business? One or time, you may have a new way. Burnside, you're getting old terms.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. More than one shot is at the closing stores. There's the neighborhood, the storage business. That's our idea. The rest of town is just one thing. What we've seen here are areas in other cities. We've come as the clean market place in Boston. And we thought that this problem is going to go away. Well, it's still here. Restaurant owner Marilyn Jackson joined other business owners to form Burnside merchants and corporate it. A group dedicated to changing Burnside's image. It's the alcoholic that's passed out on the street. This person is a visual black business. And also this person is played upon by jack growers that come down here and beat these people up to get the money. So they even draw in another element, which is again another problem. The first problem is business continues to move in.

One Pacific Square, home of the gas company, and the new Rose Festival headquarters, along with an assortment in the fashion of the clubs and restaurants, are all drawing new business. They're on the street as well. Burnside bombs or no. The land here is just to evaluate to developers, to be left to the city's homeless. This is the future side of the first light rail transit stop, west of the alignment river. Two years from now, 20,000 commuters are expected to pass through here every day on their way to and from work. The area will be a ready-made boom town for business and property owners. But for people who live here, it's a different story. Dr. Larry King has studied Skid Rose across the nation. He says what's happening in Portland is not at all unusual. So gradually, as the old town movement is taking root here in the Portland area, we'll find that there are fewer missions, fewer check rooms, things like this.

The men are losing some of the services that they've always turned to, second hand stores, all the things that cater to people who don't have a lot. And what is occurring is that some of the people then are drifting into other areas. It looks like some of them are drifting into the northwest with, you know, there's no clustering there, it's just kind of a general scattering. I don't get to get all these fancy-looking people around, you know, they ain't going to want these Skid Roadbombs around. Yeah, I believe eventually, within the next three or four years, I'll be across the road. The missions are ready to start moving. I know I'll be able to move. I've blown the doors, moved across. Sister Roach is in process moving across. The toss is over there. I think eventually you'll see more of them. And that may not be all bad, according to at least one prominent Portlander, mayor Frank Ivancy. Where do you stop in something like this?

You know, you could set up extra-ordinary hotel space and shower rooms and medical clinics and counseling services, job placement services. For the whole western United States here in Portland, Oregon. And you'd attract more. I think we should divide this social problem up a little bit with other cities. And not make port and not to attract the place for these people ourselves. I think we have to let the economics of the area take care of itself. Encourage good planning there, which we have. And the solid people that live there, that have lived there before will stay there. The transient place will be gone to some other place, either in the city or west post. I don't know where, probably Spokane. But the problem of what to do about the city's homeless is not that easily solved. Studies show that while they may often shift locations within a city, transients seldom leave completely.

And Portland's homeless show no signs they're going to go away. Only a century ago, the Salvation Army moved in to help the vagrants on Burnside. Since then, dozens of social agencies, missions, dropping centers, clinics and low rent hotels have gone where they need it and set up shop here. There is a sense of permanency in the tone of those who run the services. And if they choose not to move, their clientele will stay put as well. I think it takes a real strength to live in the Burnside neighborhood. It's a pretty harsh and dreadful way of life. Sisters of the road serve Skid Row with cheap meals. Or you can all go to Skid Row. I mean, what I see are people who are looking for work and have been looking for work for years and are having a hard time getting it. I look at a culture that isn't creating jobs for people. Not everybody is highly educated. Not everybody is ready for a technological, computerized world. Andy Robison directs the Burnside Consortium, a group of businesses and citizens committed

to the maintenance of low rent housing. We own some property in this area. We're not going to sell for speculation. We have very, very strict long-term leases on other property. We will not allow that property to be turned into other uses. We fought very, very hard to get things like floor area ratios, height limits, and other development restrictions on this neighborhood that would not cause speculation that would displace people who live here. There will be changes. There will be real changes. But I don't think there is going to be the tear it down, pave it over, build new office building kind of development here within my lifetime. A new study of the city's estimated 2,000 street people shows that almost half are elderly and retired and over half have been in Portland more than five years. Many that call the street home do not drink and are more likely to be victims than criminals. They are dependent on social security, subsidized housing, and soup kitchens for survival.

Many, too, are late-stage chronic alcoholics and de-institutionalized mental patients. All are homeless. It is the side of these drunk or dazed wanderers on the streets and in the doorways that slows business and wears on the patience of the local merchants. What if all of a sudden they just started hanging out here during the day? Then I'd probably get a hand truck and when I found them passed out I would load them on a hand truck and take them up to City Hall and dump them on this council person doorstep. That's my next plan. But at City Hall, the tone is not sympathetic. I've exhausted myself talking about this subject. I think a lot has to come off from the merchants in the area and the business people and others. We all know how this can be improved upon and I think enough has been said on a subject. I know how he feels. It's a large problem. I feel that it's going to take merchants, social services,

City and County working together to clear up this problem. For the first time merchants and social agencies are sitting down together to talk. But answers to the problems of the homeless may be costly. They're all concerned about getting the chronic alcohol out of the street but it's not a simple solution because that involves a treatment center and of course it involves funding. Where's this money going to come from? And also if the police are going to pick them up, are they going to go to jail? There's not enough jail space. There aren't enough police down here to pick them up. It's a very complex issue. What made you go out on the street? No job, no work, no place to live. Too many poor people, that's what it is. Thank you. Are you going to start down here?

Okay, bro Cameron, two, three, one, four, one, five. Ladies and gentlemen, it's wonderful to see all of you here. So many pillars of the community. For years the networks have relied on independent producers mostly in New York and Los Angeles to develop much of their television programming. Show such as Hill Street Blues or Cheers or St. elsewhere are written and filmed by independent production companies under contract to the networks. But the local stations in most cities have been reluctant to establish the same kind of relationships with independent producers in their own area for a couple of reasons. One is the expensive production and the difficulty a single station has in spreading the cost over a limited audience. And the other is the nagging perception that local means yokel. That the talent isn't there to produce something of quality. But the persistence of three Portlanders active in the dramatic and arts communities have broken the ice in Portland at least. Evelyn Hamilton, owner of a computer design company

and an active supporter of the arts in Portland, read the series Pillars of Portland that ran for a year and a half in the Willamette Week newspaper. Written by former baseball pro Larry Colton, the series was a satirical soap opera about Portlanders who were thinly disguised with such monokers as Laka Swigo, Alameda and Foster Poe. She went to her freelance film director friend Tom Chamberlain and the long uphill journey began. Tonight, they're a little closer to being back together than they have been through the rest of the series. That's going to be the first scene and that will be over by the table over there. We held auditions and then we shot some footage on the initial investment that Evelyn put up and a friend of mine by the name of Rick Wise and we took that and we...