In 2019, an elected Portland City Councilor took it upon herself to get rid of the “Neighborhood System” in Portland. She was on record as saying “neighborhoods” are unimportant – she apparently didn’t even know or care what neighborhood she herself lived in – and she felt that only the city itself mattered. Further, she seemed to have the idea of neighborhoods were somehow “elitist”, even though the neighborhoods we live in are simply villages within the city, and every resident of every kind has a voice in their neighborhood association – and every single block in the city is within one of these neighborhood associations.
In fact, Portland’s Neighborhood System is probably the single greatest factor in keeping this major-league metropolitan area feeling to its residents like being in a livable small town. Your editor has in the past walked across this city for miles, winding through many neighborhoods, and found all of them that he encountered had its own charm and identity – each, a village within the big city.
This particular City Councilor evaded public notice, furtively replacing personnel in the Portland “Office of Neighborhood Involvement” (ONI) – the city’s office to facilitate the interaction of the city’s recognized 95 neighborhoods with the city itself – and ultimately announcing that the office had now officially been renamed the “Office of Community and Civic Life”. No more use of the word “neighborhood”!…