Sameer Kanal for City Council in North and Northeast Portland (District 2)
Sameer Kanal is running for City Council in North and Northeast Portland (District 2) to ensure our future City Council reflects the priorities, hopes, and goals of the people of Portland. A native Portlander with a history of organizing around challenging but important issues, Sameer will bring community voices into the Council to put the power back where it belongs: with you.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Sameer Kanal. He is running for city council in North and Northeast Portland, District 2. We are old friends. He has been an incredibly effective organizer for Model United Nations conferences across the Pacific Northwest for probably about a decade and a half. I know he has a lot of leadership potential and has raised whole–literally–generations of people in international affairs and relations. As a side note, how do you think those skills build into this sort of governmental platform, running for Council?
Sameer Kanal: Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me. I really appreciate you taking the time to interview me. I think that Model United Nations is really relevant for a lot of the skills development and experiential development that you need to be effective in almost any role. The ability to speak coherently, to edit your ideas into something that the audience can absorb at once, and nothing that’s too long or too complicated to be persuasive is the obvious part. I think researching and developing ideas and understanding what other countries have done in the context of Model UN or in my work at the city, as well as what other cities do, is really valuable, too. The ability to build and develop networks, talk to people quickly and develop an understanding of who another person is with limited time, how you can work together, whether you can work together, and how to make things a win-win.
Because ultimately, in Model UN, if you’re a participant anyway, your goal is to develop something that a majority of people can get behind and eventually vote for, which is a very similar skill set to being a member of a city council, state legislature, Congress, or anything like that. And doing it with not a lot of direct interaction time, but making that time matter. And then in terms of leadership development and personal growth, maybe, that’s a little more indirect, but it certainly helped me and a lot of the folks that I work with who have Model UN experience to try and learn about who you are through this activity and develop a better sense of self and become more of who you want to be.
Jacobsen: And then a lot of people owe you a huge debt of gratitude for just volunteer work, basically, and all that work, including myself, over many years. So thank you for that. More to the platforms now. Your focus, obviously given the Model United Nations experience, has been oriented around human rights. So, international, universal norms of ethics and conduct. Why is community safety for all one of those four pillars of your platform?
Kanal: Yeah, so, I started working in the city of Portland in September 2021. I started out working as the project manager for a group of volunteers called the Police Accountability Commission in 2020. During the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, also during COVID, one of the actions taken by the city government was to create a new system of administrative accountability for Portland police.
The voters amended the city charter, which is basically the constitution of the city, in fall 2020 to create a new police oversight board led by community members. And then they set up this commission, not to do that work, but to help develop the details of the work. And my job was to, in a limited amount of time, work with these volunteers and get that to happen. So the reason community safety is the first issue on my platform is largely because that’s the area I work in, and it’s the most important issue that I hear about from Portlanders. It’s also a place where, through the work I’ve already done and the work that I intend to do as a member of the city council; I can apply those principles from international human rights law and practice in a way that benefits everybody.
The “for all” component of that titling, community safety for all, is about ensuring that we’re not doing any harm as we’re doing things to make people safer. It is also a way of ensuring that “do no harm” in large part includes protecting people’s rights because there are a lot of different types of policing, a lot of different types of public safety interactions beyond policing, and interventions beyond policing. Some of them are particularly likely to involve infringement upon people’s rights, whether it’s the rights that you have under international human rights law or here in the United States, our constitution, a state constitution, our local city charter, and other bodies of law.
So finding ways to be effective and also ensure that people’s rights are protected and upheld, not because we have to, but because we want to, is really important. And in the context of human rights law, we’ve got the right to protest as one aspect of it, the right to life as another, right? We have issues around both of those. We have the rights that you may have around your property or freedom of movement. And so ensuring that all of those are upheld while the government is implementing broad-scale plans to keep a safe city is a really big part of what we do in my current job and what I want to do on a greater scale on city council.
Jacobsen: What about infrastructure for all?
Kanal: Yeah, infrastructure for all is also about transportation. So, I’ll get a little theoretical here. We all have the right to freedom of movement. But if we’re rationing that movement based on one’s ability to pay, are we really fulfilling our obligation as a government to ensure that every person in Portland has freedom of movement? Because if you don’t have the ability to pay right now, or you don’t have a driver’s license, or you don’t have a car, depending on where you live in every city around the world, it varies whether or not you really have the ability to quickly and easily access the rest of the city, just physically getting around. Where I live in North Portland, I live off of Lombard, which is one of the major East-West streets in North Portland.
Its parallel road is Columbia. There is no light rail along that East-West corridor. You get to the major cross street that sort of is near the dividing line of North and Northeast Portland on the interstate. There is a North-South light rail. But if you’re going to the airport or something, you need to take either a series of buses or go kind of into downtown and then out and around to get to the airport, when there is a road that would take you right there if you had a car.
And a lot of folks that I live near work at the airport or regularly work near the airport. So, getting out to that area is a very different experience, whether you have a car or not, we also have major pedestrian and bike safety issues along those two parallel roads, Lombard and Columbia, as well. So where the human rights aspect comes in is that when something is a human right, and I’m very careful about saying whether or not something is a human right, I don’t throw that around casually.
Because human rights create obligations and duties for the government. And if we say transportation is a human right, that means there is an obligation of our various levels of government to ensure that people are able to get around even if they have a low income, even if they don’t have a car or a driver’s license. And to that end, I’m both calling for fast, frequent, and fareless or free public transit.
We have done this before in the downtown core. It went away about a decade ago, but I’m calling to bring that back and to expand our light rail so that people in North and Northeast Portland can get East-West from St. John’s, which is the furthest part of North Portland, all the way over to the airport on light rail. We have a great light rail system, which just doesn’t cover that area. So I think that’s where the obligation comes into play, and trying to ensure that we’re able to serve everyone. That’s one way of framing it in the local government context, but serving everyone means upholding their right, in this particular case, to freedom of movement.
Jacobsen: What about housing affordability and homelessness?
Kanal: Yeah, this one’s great to talk about in the context of human rights because housing is a human right. And that is a slogan in the US, but it is also a fact. And when you get into that, what that means is the government has an obligation to ensure that there is housing stock available. We’re not building enough new stock at the rate of population growthstatewide here.
We are behind the curve. And even when we have major plans to expand our housing stock, it doesn’t necessarily catch up to the curve of population growth, let alone build for the future. So, we’re always one step behind in catching up. When we build, it’s not necessarily affordable. That has to do with zoning and permitting that make more luxury apartments than we need because that is profitable for developers.
We’re making less on the affordable and subsidized side. We’re also not currently building social housing, which is something I support, to build across all levels of rent. That’s just the stock side of it. On the policy side, we’re not doing enough to make stock available. With real estate prices going up so much, it can be profitable for someone to buy a rental property, never rent it out, hold it, and sell it later. But that takes that property out of circulation.
There has been a lot of conversation around vacant property taxes. Having a long-term vacant property tax, which was just implemented in Minnesota here in the US, is one policy lever that can be used. Finally, we’ve got to make sure that people can stay in their homes. This is just the part about keeping people housed and the part about housing affordability. I haven’t even gotten to the homelessness part yet, but keeping people in their homes is really important. That’s why I’m a day-one signer of the renter’s bill of rights, which prevents evictions for late rent if you have a child in the home during the school year or if you’re a teacher. It also prevents evictions for late rent during extreme weather emergencies. In Oregon, 86% of evictions are based on late or incomplete rent.
We’re not talking about those special cases where someone is running a drug operation out of the home. There isn’t a prevention on eviction for things like that. But for cases related to low income, poverty, or unexpected circumstances, we’re protecting folks from eviction and keeping them in their homes. It is both more humane and a better protection oftheir right to remain housed. It is actually cheaper to keep someone in their home instead of letting them become houseless and then trying to get them back into permanent housing.
On the homelessness side, we have to provide places for people to go before we tell them they can’t be where they are. When someone is houseless, they may be in shelters, sleeping in a business doorway, in a tent, or in their vehicle, which is a very undercounted part of the problem. We need to ensure we have somewhere to take someone when they say, “I don’t want to be here on this corner or in this doorway,” and help them get from here to there. Community groups can help fill in the gaps and give someone a ride, but the government also has to ensure that there are shelters available and that we’re moving people into them efficiently.
Once a person is in a shelter, we need to help them get into permanent housing. This brings us back to whether we have housing stock available at the income level that a person can afford. There’s a high growth rate of the percentage of houseless people in the United States who have jobs. It’s not that they’re completely unable to afford anything; it’s that what is available is usually unaffordable, or they’re unable to be connected to it. The human rights angle of this is understanding our responsibility as a government to be part of the solution and ensure that people have the ability toaccess housing. This doesn’t have to be luxury housing. We can have nice things without them being huge mansions. They can be a place where a person can live, what we’ve often called a starter house or a starter apartment.
This can help people get back on their feet, or if they’re a younger person, to get on their feet for the first time. From there, they can build stability so they can thrive and eventually afford a different place.
Jacobsen: How does this all come together under good government for all?
Kanal: We are all entitled to a government that is responsive to our needs. Put another way, you deserve a government that listens to you. It’s not an illusion; it is something you are entitled to. Good governance is the implementation of that. It’s about listening. The way I put it is that our city slogan at the city of Portland is “The City that Works.” Before we can be a city that works, we need to be a city that listens because a city that listens is safer and more prosperous for all of us. What that looks like is that I live in the Portsmouth neighbourhood, I know where there needs to be a speed bump, a crosswalk, or a stop sign better than a member of the current city council who doesn’t live here.
Not because they’re uneducated but because it’s not their expertise. And wherever they live, they know better than me. We will never know all the details of every street intersection and every pothole that needs to be filled in all 95 neighbourhoods of the city. But the people who live there would. And sometimes, we just don’t listen. Sometimes, we don’t even ask. But when we do ask, we often receive information and then do a different thing in the city. And that ultimately is an experience I’ve had as a city employee whose job is around community engagement. I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of people about hundreds of different topics at this point.
Getting that information, I see that there are a lot of folks in the city who engage in community activities. We collect it, summarize it, synthesize it, document it, and pass on both the summary and the full thing to somebody higher up the chain. And that should be the beginning of the story, but it’s the end too often. I’d like to make it the beginning of a story of co-creation of policy where the government is not a separate entity from the people, but the government is the people’s expression of collective action.
Where we are coming together through this structure to say, “Yeah, here are the things we value, here are the things we want to prioritize.” Sure, there may be limited capacity. We can only fill 20 potholes a day, so put these 20 first and these next 20 the next day and all that. There is some prioritization that needs to happen, but either way, we’ll fill the potholes. Ensuring that we’re doing that not because the government employees think it’s the most important thing, but if they do, it’s because the underlying reason is that the population thinks it is.
Potholes matter a great deal for safety, for effectiveness, for your bottom line, because of the maintenance on your car when you have issues, or the maintenance on the buses leading to higher fares, or your safety as a pedestrian or a bicyclist when the car or the bus swerves to get around the pothole. We also have a lot of miles of street without a sidewalk, so you’re not even protected by the curb. So that’s where it comes into play.
It’s also some very basic direct things in governance. We have city council meetings exclusively during the workday. They do a work session every now and then or a listening session for the Council outside of nine to five. But if you work nine to five, you can’t get to a city council meeting where a real decision will be made. I grew up between Portland and a suburb of Vancouver, which is across the river, Vancouver, Washington. It had its city council meetings once a month, or it did then, in the evening, on Monday nights. Part of that has to do with whether the city council is a full-time paid position, but part of it has to do with just being accessible to people. And certainly, not everybody works nine to five, but a lot of folks do. Having a structural change where some of our meetings are going to be nine to five and some aren’t, and most of our major legal changes have to be considered at two different council meetings, so you can come to one and make your voice heard. That’s another part of good governance, too. It’s about making it possible for you to be served by your government directly or indirectly better because, again, you are entitled to that. It is not gravy; it is the meal itself.
Jacobsen: Substance use is an issue across the United States. How are harm reduction and prevention policies and programs be effective, or could they be more effective within Portland?
Kanal: Yeah, so this is a complex issue that I have worked on a little bit. I don’t want to tell you I’m an expert on it. And that’s a big part of, I think, good governance, too, is admitting when we don’t know everything there is to know and consulting experts. What I do know is that in harm reduction nationwide, there are a lot of studies showing how effective it can be in terms of both doing no harm itself and helping to reduce the harm that exists outside of government intervention from the use of a lot of these drugs, to begin with. In Oregon specifically, there was a ballot measure that was adopted that decriminalized a lot of drug usage. It didn’t legalize it, but it did decriminalize usage and possession.
It also put in place some assistance programs for folks who were users. And it didn’t do those at the same time. It decriminalized immediately with the treatment centers and things being delayed in their implementation. This led to a backlash and the state legislature, that was years ago. Then, the state legislature implemented a new law that effectively undid a lot of that. The way in which they did it was by recriminalizing it at different levels in terms of felony and misdemeanour. They also had deferment programs and funding for other types of centers through the counties, which the state distributed to the counties to help bring these online.
Although the delay was not as significant, there was also a delay between those two things: the recriminalization. So, part of the solution is less about the ideology. Do you believe in decriminalization or not? Part of it is about writing good policy and understanding the consequences of each action. If we do this thing, what will happen? And do we have a plan in place for the portion of the consequences of the first action that are negative? Obviously, we’re doing the first action for the positive consequences, but there might be a negative impact, too. Have we thought of that? Do we have something ready on that day to handle it? And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case for either of these two actions.
Locally, we’ve seen a lot of open-air drug use downtown. It is a problem. It’s something that we have to solve through a variety of interventions. We can focus on the people who are here now, using now, selling now, possessing now. And we have to do that. We also have to look at the root causes and understand why people are using drugs in the first place. And I actually think this is something that your outlet, Good Men Project, has talked about in a couple of places as well. We don’t often talk about why there is an increased sense of despair. That’s not a mainstream conversation in the way it should be: why there’s increased drug usage. And I think in America, there are root causes that we can address for that. They don’t have immediate impacts, so we also have to do things to address the people using drugs today, especially open-air drug use and the other most unsafe parts of that problem. However, addressing the underlying issues will be cheaper, more humane, and more respectful of folks and their agency.
Why would a government allow someone to have a problem that they could stop and then solve it later when you could just prevent it in the first place? It doesn’t make sense. And if we’ve got a minute, I’d love to talk about why that is, why I think it is, because I think that’s really important, why these things are happening on a greater scale.
Jacobsen: Why are these things happening on a greater scale?
Kanal: Thank you for the question. Great question. I think, and I don’t know how you experience this in Canada or how a lot of other countries experience it. In the United States, there is an inherent precarity to your situation at any given moment, primarily economically. You are never going to have three good months and become a billionaire here, but mostpeople are three bad months away from being in a pretty dire economic condition, possibly being houseless themselves.
That has to do with a lot of different factors: how we save, wage growth lagging behind both productivity growth and housing cost increases. Housing costs, in general, are the largest line item in most people’s budgets, and the way in whichthat has gone up is healthcare costs. All these different things align to create a situation where most people are precarious. The social expectations of being successful are really important, too. And I think that helps drive what we often call the deaths of despair, but the symptoms that are not necessarily death that relate to despair as well — the feeling that I will never get ahead. A lot of policy failures have led to this point.
There are cultural aspects that follow from that, too. I think what we often call millennial nihilism is largely a cultural phenomenon that derives from the feeling and the actual truth of being unable to get ahead economically as a generation. And what are the cultural patterns of who we talk to? We often talk to folks in our own generation who all share the same feelings. And so, seeing that these are policy failures in a lot of ways, we can make policy solutions. One of them is about reducing housing costs because, again, that is the biggest single line item in people’s budgets. It’s being supportive of labour, whether you’re a union member or not, but certainly through supporting unionization and the right to unionize so that people can get a bigger share of the massive profits that we see in a lot of industries here.
Ensuring that workers are fairly paid and compensated for what they do. Those two things alone would help a lot, but there’s a lot more. It’s ensuring that there is healthcare, not just emergency care after you’re hit by a bus, but ensuring that you have single-payer insurance, either through Medicare for All at the federal level or through the universal health plan that’s under development, which is effectively the same thing on the state level here in Oregon. Trying to reduce precarity to make the worst thing that happens to you not as bad and also ensuring that the day-to-day life here is more conducive to people thriving is really important, I think, to reducing the constant precarity, which often also relates to safety, like open drug use. And then certainly, there’s a lot of things that we need to do as well in terms of just preventing drugs from getting to this area that are coming in from other places as well.
Jacobsen: How will you scale up shelter services? Where will the source of that funding come from?
Sameer Kanal: Yeah, so, that’s a great question. Shelter services is a program here in the city that combines safe rest villages and temporary alternative shelter sites, which are both different types of places along the shelter continuum of services. Different types of folks are better served by each one of those and several other programs that exist. It also has street outreach where folks go and talk to people who are houseless and try to get them to come and stay in a shelter. The success of that program often comes from patience and talking to someone, the same person, twice, three times, five times as needed, from saying, “Hey, this is real, and you can trust it,” because a lot of houseless folks have been told, “Here’s a shelter that you can go to,” and it’s really just to get them out of the place they’re currently in.
Or yes, you can go, but when you get there; you can’t keep your dog. You can’t keep your stuff. You can’t keep your family together. So, there is a broken trust there. It will take time to fix that trust. I’m a firm believer that the government has to take the first step when there’s a broken trust between the government and the people. It’s unrealistic to expect people to start trusting you before you move in, especially if you’re trying to earn it back. Shelter services are very effective at that.
We’ve got some data coming out showing that relative to the programs it replaced and its new approach, just within this small part of the city’s work. It has over tripled the rate of placement of folks in shelters. Again, this is relative to its predecessor, not necessarily relative to other interventions around the city. But it needs to get scaled up, and I would scale it up by looking at all those other things around the city and seeing if anyone else has placed at that rate, and if not, why not? And why are we funding it?
I also know that as we get more people into shelters, the cost of doing sweeps will go down, even if we kept the same policy. I don’t support the policy of sweeping. But even if we did keep the same policy, it would be cheaper because there would be fewer people that are affected. So that’s a savings too. Again, prevention is always cheaper than reaction.
Those two things alone, I think, would more than sufficiently fund what we’re talking about doing here, and also, again, would prevent doing harm to folks and be more preventative in the context of camp clearances and things like that by getting folks into shelter and connecting them to services. That’s one of the key things about these particular types of shelters: service providers come to them.
They can help you get a driver’s license if you don’t have one or any ID, and they can help you get connected to the Oregon Health Plan, which is insurance for folks who don’t have it through an employer and for low-income folks as well. So, how do we connect you to the services necessary for you to get that stability and then eventually get you into something more permanent in terms of shelter and housing?
Jacobsen: What has been the overuse of emergency ordinances?
Kanal: Yeah, so emergency ordinances — an ordinance is a change to the law. Normally, at the city council, a member proposes it. They have a first reading of it and take public comment. The following week, they have a second reading on it, take public comment, and then vote. An emergency clause can be added to an ordinance. It’s an actual text within the document that says we recognize an emergency exists. We have to pass it now. They don’t have to have that second reading. So, it reduces the amount of time that people have; the agenda is usually published the Friday before the meetings, which are usually on Wednesdays. So you get five days’ notice of the first one plus the additional seven days till the second meeting. So normally, there are 12 days at minimum from the full text of a document being presented.
And it can be shrunk even further by amendments if the other members of the Council want to change it. But there’s usually 12 days. If you have an emergency clause, it becomes five days. And there are times where emergencies exist, like extreme weather events, not necessarily predictable. But we use emergency clauses often on the budget. That’s a thing we do every year. It is the least unpredictable thing that a city government can be counted on to do.
You can always count on the city government to pass a budget. And to have an emergency clause on that, when usually it’s just we didn’t get it done in time to do the second reading before the end of the fiscal year and the budget’s implementation at the beginning of the next fiscal year is problematic. And it also reduces government transparency, which is a core value. It reduces our communication or makes it less effective, which is another core value.
Depending on the content of that budget, it doesn’t help with fiscal responsibility, which is a third value. And also itprevents people who may have jobs that they can’t get out of as easily from having two opportunities to take time off and testify, which affects equity, which is a fourth of our six core values. The others are collaboration and anti-racism. They’re also more indirectly affected as well. So how do we make it possible for people to take part in these things? Overuse of emergency ordinances and emergency clauses to make a regular ordinance into an emergency ordinance is problematic because they make it less possible for you to engage with your government before it makes a big decision.
Jacobsen: Last little bit here. In terms of getting in contact, donating, or providing expertise, volunteer time, where do you recommend people get involved? I can type a link.
Kanal: Yeah, thank you. I’m on both Instagram and Facebook. My website ishttps://www.kanalforportland.com/. We are in the city’s small donor election program, which provides matching funds to candidates based on their agreement not to take more than $350 from any given donor. The way it works is you qualify based on the number of unique people that donate to your campaign. So we’re all trying to get to, first, 250, and then there’s another level at 750, another level at 1,250 unique donors.
So if you like what you hear today, or if you want to learn more, go to the website and look at the priorities page if you want details of the platform, and donate. I would happily take more than $5 from you, but as little as $5 helps. And it’s better if you and your friend, your neighbor, your spouse, your roommate, your enemy, donate $5 as well, because that helps get us more donors. And the way the matching works is the first $20 are matched nine to one. So $20 becomes $200, $5 becomes $50, and it really helps us get the resources we need to compete without having to ask billionaires for money, which is good because I don’t know any.
Jacobsen: Nice to see you again, and thank you for the opportunity, your time, and your service. Appreciate it.
Kanal: Thank you so much, and thanks for the work you do.
Photo by Elena Kuchko on Unsplash
