When developers announced plans for a new 38-bay diesel truck transfer station on the grounds of a long-abandoned K-Mart department store, East Portland, Oregon, residents who’d hoped it might become a grocery store instead quickly collected more than 6,600 signatures in opposition and worked to stop it. The 260,000-square-foot warehouse sat just a javelin’s toss away from the fields where the Parkrose High Broncos practiced football, baseball, and soccer. Dozens of kids walked to Parkrose high and middle schools each day along NE 122nd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard. Parents filled city meetings, worried about their kids breathing in diesel fumes while running cross-country or dodging 18-wheelers as they hustled toward class each morning. Students studied environmental justice and submitted alternate environmental plans for the site, along with photos from their bedroom windows that overlooked the lot where trucks would spew exhaust, sometimes as close as 15 feet away.
No one listened. City leaders felt no need. Portland’s four-member city council lived far from these neighborhoods, sometimes derided by locals as the faraway “numbers.” Wealthier areas, the business community, the city’s trendy downtown – those interests were always heard. But East Portland? It had no one on the city council. Not now, and only twice in the council’s history has a member lived anywhere to the east of Interstate 205.
