A more perfect Union

The Portland Tenants struggle to find their place in the city

By Noah Bruce

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead

 

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it. — Charles F. Kettering

In our more idealistic moments, many of us are prone to imagining that we could change the world. It doesn’t seem such a stretch to think that one person, together with a few like minded individuals, could really make a difference.

And maybe we can, but changing the world, or even a community, can be a bitch and it ain’t quick. So if you’re not fully invested in doing some good, you might as well just stay at home. The world, and especially Portland, doesn’t change easily.

Just ask the Portland Tenant’s Union (PTU), a group trying to change Portland’s woeful affordable housing situation. It started back in January with a burning issue to tackle and a full head of steam. In the first few weeks, the group formed an organizing committee and held a brainstorming session at Reiche School attended by 30 people. It looked like Portland would finally have a group of people who would lobby for tenants’ rights, push for rent control, and encourage housing development.

One year and dozens of organizational meetings later, PTU, hampered by personality conflicts, organizational woes, and some bad luck is still in the planning stages. It does not have a president or a board, and has not begun to work on any specific housing issues.

On the promising side, PTU sponsored a panel discussion on housing in October attended by 90 people and is poised to hold its first annual meeting November 14 and perhaps elect officers. But why did it take the group so long to get to this point?

 

To answer this question you have to go back to the beginning — the Portland West Forum where PTU got its start.

It was a cold night, January 9, when 30 people crammed into the Portland West meeting room to discuss the state of housing in Portland. There was much to talk about. The vacancy rate, as reported by the Maine State Housing Authority, hovered around two percent. People complained about

rapidly rising rents, homelessness, and sub-standard apartment conditions.

The meeting’s participants agreed that a tenant’s union, like those that exist in Boston and New York, was needed. But in a harbinger of things to come, that was nearly everything on which they agreed.

The first point of disagreement concerned whom the new group would serve. Most of the people at the meeting were from the West End, and some felt that in order to ease the process of getting the new organization off the ground, the tenants union should be limited in the beginning to representing this neighborhood. Others, reasoning that the tenants union would be stronger with more members, argued that it should encompass renters from across Portland.

Another bone of contention at this first meeting was whether the new group should include landlords in its ranks. Some felt this was an inherent conflict of interest, while others believed the inclusion of landlords would help achieve results.

There was a tense moment when one young man, eager to begin recruiting for the group, was told by others not to put the cart before the horse.

As the hour and a half allotted for the meeting drew to a close, many questions remained unanswered. The group decided to form an organizing committee to create a structure for the fledging organization. Anyone who was interested was welcome to join. It was decided that the committee would meet several times and then present their progress to the general public in one month.

The meeting concluded on an upbeat note when Portland West’s director, Ethan Strimling said “I just want to say that I find this very exciting. I’ve been with Portland West for four years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

According to Pat Ordway, who has been on the organizing committee from the beginning, the original meetings drew around 25 people, an impressive number of devoted, active members to comprise PTU’s inner circle.

Unfortunately, Ordway characterizes the meetings as “utter chaos.”

“This group was green in advocacy,” she says. “I went home exhausted. They really didn’t know how to get into organizing.”

Despite the lack of organization, PTU pulled off a successful first public meeting at the Reiche School on February 20. Thirty people attended, proving interest was still high. “I attended the meeting in February,” says Ed Democracy who later joined the organizing committee, “and I was impressed by the number of people and very encouraged by what seemed like a group off to a good start.”

At the Reiche meeting, the group cut the umbilical ties to Portland West. “At that point,” says Steven Scharf, PTU’s unofficial leader, “Ethan said ‘You are no longer a committee of Portland West, but you are welcome to use Portland West’s facilities.’ ” Strimling also presented a $100 check from Portland West to PTU. Scharf’s still holding onto that check — he says the group has never got it together to open up a bank account.

But back in February PTU was looking strong. It had autonomy, an interested public, and a devoted core group of members. The organizing committee continued to meet every week and set a target date in April to hold a meeting to elect a president and board.

That April meeting never happened. Instead, according to Ordway, progress (which was slow before the Reiche meeting) ground almost to a halt. The heart of the problem seemed to be leadership.

According to Scharf, he took the reins of the organizing committee almost by accident. “At the first meeting, I kept minutes just because someone said ‘we need someone to keep minutes.’ Then, I had a discussion with Sarah Freeman. She was the chair of Portland West neighborhood issues committee. After the meeting she said ‘Can you take the lead in this?’ So I became the de facto facilitator for the group.”

But Scharf’s tenure as leader of the group has been marked by disharmony. Ordway says that many people in the group wanted a “piece of the pie,” or control over the group, “but Steven wanted it the most.”

Keita Whitten is no longer associated with PTU, but she was part of the organizing committee in the beginning. She describes Scharf as “very good with the details of putting together an organization, but one of his weaknesses was building cohesiveness.”

Within a few weeks, the group “decided I was too heavy handed,” says Scharf, and decided to alternate the facilitator role. However, according to several members, Scharf has remained the leader of the group even when he was not facilitating meetings.

According to John Graback, who joined the committee in June, Scharf’s leadership makes sense, as he is the person who has invested the most time and money in the organization. Yet, by all accounts, PTU remained fractured. “Steve [Scharf] was pushing by-laws and consensus on the group,” says Ordway, “and they just looked at each other and stared . . . Meeting after meeting we accomplished nothing.”

The most contentious issue facing PTU is a divide among members along class lines. This split first became apparent during what would seem to be a routine decision — how much to charge for membership. “We had a lot of arguments as to how much we should charge for membership,” says Scharf “We probably spent six hours talking about this.”

It was finally decided that membership would cost $20, with reductions for children. Yet some felt these dues were too high. As Whitten says, “It might seem trivial,” but it could be a barrier to low-income people.

However, Whitten feels “membership dues are a façade. It is not the issue. The deeper issue is that here is an organization that’s supposed to be advocating for all the people in the community and there is a hidden agenda.”

Whitten says the bottom line is that she felt low-income people were not being represented. The group “looked more for the needs of developers and the people with money, not the backbone of the community, the people working two or three jobs,” she says.

The agenda, she feels, was set more and more by one person whom she does not name, but who is obviously Scharf. “I found it a dogmatic group and approach,” she says. “True leadership would get all the opinions on the table and see how we get everyone involved.”

In June, the rift in the group grew wider when Ed Democracy joined the organizing committee. Remembering the well-attended meeting at the Reiche, Democracy was surprised when he found five people in attendance at his first committee meeting. “Morale seemed low, low energy,” he says. “It didn’t seem like a whole lot had been done.”

According to Ordway, Democracy sympathized with Whitten’s perspective on PTU and opposed Scharf. “It’s a power struggle between Ed Democracy and Steve,” she says, “It’s sad because they’re both good activists.”

This power struggle came to a head at a meeting on August 21 involving several members from a new grassroots organization, Portland Organization for Economic Rights (POWER). POWER is a group that advocates on behalf on the city’s low-income people, and though housing is not the group’s only issue, it is one of its primary concerns. Therefore, there has been some overlap with PTU.

A low point for both groups came when an unidentified person posted an email on the PTU listserve, accusing a member of POWER as being a homophobe. A bitter, 15 email back-and-forth between the unknown emailer and a leading member of POWER ensued, causing general embarrassment and confusion.

On August 19, Democracy brought four leading members of POWER to a PTU organizing committee meeting to add weight to his agenda of advocating for low-income people. From Scharf’s point of view, the meeting had been seized by people who had never showed interest in PTU before.

“I remember we were going around the room talking about promoting the group. . . We were in the middle of this when [a member of POWER interrupted] because she felt we were not discussing the issues of low-income people. These other people jumped on it and we were called racists because we were not addressing the needs of low-income people . . . These people hadn’t been part of these discussions.”

The POWER member brought up motions to eliminate the membership fee and to create a by-law requiring PTU to include two low-income people on the board. Though she never attended another meeting, her motions had an effect — the bylaw passed and the membership fee was dropped to $5, with a provision that prospective members who claimed they could not afford the five-spot would still be allowed in PTU.

Despite the rumblings between different factions, the group managed to plan its first public event since the Reiche meeting in the winter, a panel discussion moderated by city councilor Peter O’Donnell on the merits of rent control versus increasing the housing stock. Finally, it seemed PTU was going to do something. Unfortunately the date they picked for the event was September 11.

The discussion was rescheduled for October 23 at King Middle School. Ninety people attended, including 25 or so from POWER, and the meeting was considered an all-round success.

Building on the strength of the panel discussion, PTU is finally ready to hold an open meeting where it elects a president and a board. Then the contentious organizing committee can be put to rest, and the group can emerge from its long and painful planning stage and start to work on behalf of Portland’s tenants. Seems like that should be easy enough.

Not surprisingly, however, planning for the big meeting, which is scheduled for November 14 at King Middle, has been mired in controversy. In early October, PTU set November 13 as the date for the meeting. However, two weeks before the meeting, King Middle informed the group that the school was no longer available on that date.

So Scharf, after a conversation with another member of the organizing committee, decided to push the meeting back one day, and sent out an email on the Portland Tenant’s listserve. Democracy, who objected on the grounds that the amount of notice would “send a message that we have no clue about organizing” countered with an emotionally charged email calling for an emergency meeting to discuss the date change. “The tenants of Portland have suffered enough!” read the email, “No more! Failure is not an option.”

When Scharf realized Democracy was trying to postpone the meeting, he acted quickly to cement November 14 as the date. “I sent out the press releases, and I sent out postcards informing people of the date. I put a nail in the coffin with the press release.”

Yet Democracy still held his emergency meeting on November 6. The results of this two and a half hour meeting are unclear. The minutes say that the group agreed that the 14th did not allow adequate time to publicize the meeting, and therefore the election of board members should be postponed. Some members felt that the agenda for the meeting should remain flexible and if there was a large turnout, the group should go ahead and elect a board. However, a motion to that effect was vetoed.

Yet John Graback, who proposed the flexible agenda, told the Phoenix, “If there is not a good turnout, the alternate agenda makes sense. If we do have a good turnout, say 50 people or more, we should elect people. We need to end this process, and elect officers and get started.”

Scharf, who did not attend the emergency meeting, agrees with Graback’s thoughts, which do not coincide with the meeting’s conclusions. So it remains unclear whether or not PTU will emerge from its meeting with a board and some direction.

The flap about the date change, and perhaps the PTU’s modus operandi in general, was best summarized in an email on the PTU listserve from Rebecca Weinstein, a relatively inactive member of the group:

“As basically an outsider, I don’t understand what drives the divisive internal politics. But, whatever it is, it feels pretty destructive to me. The idea of joining a group that projects this much hostility is not terribly attractive. If the meeting got screwed up, set another. Things happen, people make mistakes — life is difficult and unpredictable. What is your mission, people? Self-destruction or social change?”

Hopefully the meeting on November 14 will proceed smoothly and PTU will soon elect a board and begin to work for change. However, if its leaders continue to bicker (and send contradictory messages over the listserve) this will most likely not happen. And that would be a shame. Because everyone agrees Portland is in a housing crisis. We need a citizen group that will advocate for the city’s 35,000 renters. Will the Portland Tenants Union be that group?

Noah Bruce can be reached at nbruce@phx.com.