Portland's Unreinforced Masonry Building Owners Receive Some Good News

In an email to unreinforced masonry (URM) owners in Portland this week, the group Save Portland Buildings announced that Mayor Wheeler has removed the city's list of URM buildings and map from the Internet last week.

The group had sought the removal of the map and list due to inaccuracies, inequities, and burdens.

Over the past weeks the organization has expanded its coalition to include the NAACP, Portland Business Alliance, Music Portland, Masonry Building Owners of Oregon, the Old Town Hospitality Group, and the Hawthorne Boulevard Business Association.

The organization indicated that Pastor E.D. Mondaine of the NAACP took the lead in the request, by sending the following letter to the Mayor:

5/1/2020
Mayor Wheeler and Commissioners: 

In 2014, the City of Portland created the Unreinforced Masonry Building (URM) Seismic Retrofit Project to “develop a policy to require the mandatory retrofit of all URM buildings in the city and develop methods to assist building owners to implement the policy.” This initiative was led by the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM) in collaboration with the Portland Bureau of Development Services (BDS) and Prosper Portland. 

The City hoped to identify funding to mitigate URM buildings, in part to help building owners retrofit their buildings to improve building performance during an earthquake, avoid displacement and to protect Portland’s historic buildings. 

On June 13, 2018, during a City Council meeting, a resolution was passed to require—effective March 1, 2019 —the placement of placards on URM buildings. The placards would include a warning to visitors in 30-point bold type that the building may be unsafe in the event of a major earthquake. Along with the placards, the City insisted upon recording a document for each affected property containing very problematic language regarding its URM status. As the Council is aware, a coalition of building owners took The City of Portland to court and on May 30, 2019, a federal judge issued an injunction against the placarding requirement. 

The Court concluded that the ordinance did not compel purely factual information because it falsely identifies some buildings as unreinforced and erroneously identifies some non-URM buildings as URM. While we are grateful the ordinance was stayed, we find that the issue at the core of our coalition’s complaint has not been fully resolved. The City-maintained URM database list was hastily put together and includes many buildings that, due to upgrades or being falsely identified, should no longer be classified as URMs. For building owners to confirm that they’ve adequately improved the safety of their URMs, it can be prohibitively costly to have an engineer assess the property. 

The list is a burden for building owners, making it difficult to secure loans and discouraging investment in the structures. The City of Portland acknowledges the database to be inaccurate and unable to predict building performance in an earthquake, but still requires “conclusive evidence”—a prohibitively high bar—that a building is no longer a URM in order for it to be removed from the list. Thus, the judge stated, “Some buildings, including those owned by two of the plaintiffs, remain on the list despite having been retrofitted with safety improvements.” 

The NAACP asks plainly that the City-maintained online URM database list be abolished. The inherent limitations on its accuracy acknowledged by the City render it an irresponsible means of tracking this issue. Judge John Acosta, who presided over the URM placarding case wrote, Plaintiffs have demonstrated that they will suffer imminent irreparable harm if they are required to comply with the Ordinance, and that the balance of equities tips in favor of the Plaintiffs and it is in the public interest to prevent the violation of Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights." 

Although we are not being ask to placard our buildings, the list still poses a threat to all building owners. 

Especially at this time, during a global pandemic and pending depression, our communities are hurting. People are afraid. People are Dying. Sick. Out of work, and overwhelmed. The trajectory of a potential recovery remains uncertain. As such, the call to abolish the online URM database list has become part of our larger call for government, organizations and residents to pull together and have each other's back. 

The effects of the pandemic will be with us for years. Efforts toward helping renters and small businesses will be ineffective if building owners walk away and buildings remain shuttered. No amount of relief or aid will help the recovery of our residents and small businesses if there are no buildings open to house them. 

And, of course, the disproportionate effect this will have on the Black community through the acceleration of gentrification and displacement remains a looming threat. As the NAACP has pointed out before, the existence of such a list “exacerbates a long history of systemic and structural betrayals of trust and policies of displacement, demolition, and dispossession predicated on classism, racism, and white supremacy.”

The NAACP calls—unequivocally—for the leadership of this city to remove any and all burdens on these property owners and any obstacles to their recovery from this crisis. The existence of the list acts as a modern-day redlining. This regressive action by the City cannot be tolerated under normal circumstances, but is especially intolerable during an economic crisis. 

Abolish the list. 

 /s/

E.D. Mondainé
VP - NAACP AWOSAC / 
President, Portland NAACP

Coalition Partners: 
Portland Business Alliance
Music Portland
Masonry Building Owners of Oregon
The Old Town Hospitality Group
Hawthorne Boulevard Business Association & Save Portland Buildings

The Portland Business Alliance also sent the following letter:

May 7, 2020

Mayor Ted WheelerCommissioner
Jo Ann HardestyCommissioner
Chloe Eudaly
Commissioner Amanda Fritz
City of Portland
1221 SW 4th Avenue
Portland, OR 97204

RE: Database of unreinforced masonry buildings

Dear Mayor Wheeler & Commissioners,

The Portland Business Alliance (the Alliance) is greater Portland’s Chamber of Commerce and represents the largest, most diverse network of businesses in the region. The Alliance advocates for business at all levels of government to support commerce, community health and the region’s overall prosperity. We represent more than 1,900 members, from 27 counties, 13 states and virtually every industry sector. More than 80% of our members are small businesses.

We write today to express our support for the request from the NAACP Portland Chapter, and several other organizations, to abolish the current city database of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings. The Alliance has supported, and continues to support, the concept of maintaining a well informed and consistently updated database of building conditions based on shared agreements. However, the current list has so many problemsand exacerbates harm from past injustices and inequities, we believe the city needs to take the actions called for by the NAACP and start over.   

The problems with the current URM database are numerous, including the following:

1. The current list appears to go directly against the city’s policy of applying a racial equity lens to policy decisions and implementation. The very purpose of maintaining such a list must be clearly communicatedand be in alignment with the city’s racial equity goals, which it clearly is not in its current form.

2. If the purpose of this list were to be developed and agreed upon - with equity at the forefront - between the city, impacted stakeholders, and the community, there would also need to be a plan to develop the initial list, ensure it is “ground truth” and based on clear criteria. This list should also be regularly maintained and updated on to ensure its accuracy.  This does not currently appear to be happening. This only reinforces the perception that this list targets certain communities. Additionally, building owners have told us they have non-URM buildings, or buildings that were reinforced to past standards on the list, but the process to remove them is very difficult to fulfill.   

3. The maintenance and publication of this list with no specific plan to provide financial incentives and assistance to local building owners to upgrade their buildings gives the strong impression its only current purpose is to shame building owners into taking action many simply cannot afford.

The Alliance is strongly committed to continuing to be a partner in the city’s vital emergency preparedness planning work. Clearly, the entire community has a vested interest in developing a plan to ensure the entire inventory of buildings in Portland are improved to meet minimum standards of earthquake safety as quickly as possible. This is not a problem that can be solved by one sector alone. We must do the difficult work to develop a strong private, public partnership – including help from the state and federal government – to bring URMs up to modern standards.  In our last communication to the city, dated 5/15/18, we expressed our opposition to the placarding proposal (which we appreciate was put on hold), and suggested alternative forms of public disclosure that would be tied to a financial plan. 

The Alliance would consider supporting the development of a new list, one that is tied to a robust set of financial incentives and assistance, and tracks shared progress on a city-run, public-private retrofit program, with improvements listed, and anticipated dates of completion. This would be a much more positive, community-focused approach with shared accountability and metrics. We will also continue to advocate for state and federal assistance in solving this problem with Oregon’s leaders and congressional delegation.

We are committed to working in partnership with Rev. Mondaine and the Portland NAACP on this issue and will follow his lead on any further discussions regarding the URM list. We urge you to work with the coalition of organizations who joined their call to abolish the current list and begin again. 

Sincerely, 

Andrew Hoan

President & CEO 

While the list has been removed from the Internet, the organizations are awaiting a clarifying statement from City Hall.