Season 1 Episode 03 Podcast Transcript
Interview with Karen Kubey, Cleo Davis, and Kayin Talton Davis
Host: Priyanka Bista
Audio Engineer and Editor: Mary Anne Funk
Cue Music
Welcome to Design for Spatial Justice Podcast Series launched by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Environment. This podcast brings you insights into the work of Visiting Faculty Fellows in Design for Spatial Justice Initiative. They are designers, researchers, and activists from around the world working on spatial justice issues at the intersection of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and income inequality. For the first four episodes, I’ll be your host, Priyanka Bista, a design for spatial justice fellow. My own work, which we’ll talk about in the final episode, is focused on biodiversity conservation and participatory design in Nepal.
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Priyanka
Last week we talked with Zannah Matson on understanding how unequal power structures and racial hierarchies tend to manifest itself through the built environment starting with the lot lines. And this week, we’ll talk about spatial justice and injustices that have happened to the black diaspora closer to home—in Portland Oregon.
To speak on this critical issue, I have with me three guests—Karen Kubey, a Design for Spatial Justice Fellow, along with Cleo Davis, and Kayin Talton Davis, who are activists and artists. The three of them are collaboratively teaching a Masters level Architectural Design Studio called Rebuilding Cornerstones: Towards Spatial Justice for Portland’s Black Diaspora.
Karen Kubey is an urbanist specializing in housing and health primarily based out of New York. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity. She served as the first executive director for the Institute for Public Architecture, and she co-founded the New York chapter of Architecture for Humanity. She holds degrees in architecture from UC Berkeley and Columbia University.
Our second guest today, Cleo Davis is an artist whose work takes a critical view of the social, political and cultural issues. His background is in industrial design and architecture. He is the person behind the Historic Black Williams project and has previously started the Screw Loose Studio, the Mayo house project, and most recently the ARTchives in collaboration with Kayin.
Kayin started off in the artistic direction at a young age but later learned her love for math and science. She then pursued a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineer at Portland State University. Her interest is in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all– but especially children from underrepresented communities.
Wow! I’m really honored to have all three of you join me in this podcast today!
Welcome, Cleo, Kayin, and Karen! Thank you so much for joining us today!
All guest speakers
Thank you, thank you.
Priyanka
So I think talking about spatial injustice, when I look at Portland on the surface not being from this city I, I see it as a very livable and really progressive city, in fact, and but yet, much like any other North American city, it actually has a history of deep discrimination that has been inflicted on the black diaspora. Albina in particular is a community where you can see this, you know, when you study the history of this community and the 60 year discriminatory practices that has been inflicted, you know, through mortgage lending policies, housing disinvestment processes, neglect of public services, and schools that continually restricted the black community to own homes leading to abandonment of homes in the 60s and 70s. And so perhaps it would be good to start from from grounding us into this region. Because Cleo, and Kayin, this history is not an abstract theoretical history. It’s your own history and history or for your family.
Kayin
As you mentioned there are a series of injustices that have been committed against the black community here in Portland as definitely elsewhere. But there’s some things that are somewhat specific to Portland, especially organizationally. There were times at which large organizations were able to buy up large areas of property for very cheap, and people were evicted from homes that they just bought or had saved up and were not able to get fair market value. There were times where people were renting or buying homes and realized that the contracts never really made the home theirs. so in Portland scene, you know, one of the things as you mentioned, Portland is a very livable city. And Portland is great and it’s well known for having, you know, being a walking city where the commute is easy. It’s really easy to get from point A to point B. And so often the communities that were destroyed, were exactly that. very livable, very walkable, you could get where you needed to go in just a few minutes, and now with the destruction of the community through redevelopment, you have businesses that were destroyed. But then you have people that have a connection in one area, but they live in a completely separate area. For instance, one of the big questions for black folks and African Americans that are coming into Portland, number one, where is the black community but then also, where can I go to a barber shop or a hair salon. Majority of the barber shops and hair salons are still in the historically black neighborhood. But quite often newer arrivals are living out in East County, or all the way out in Beaverton. And so it’s a half an hour commute just to get connected to somebody who does proper services.
Karen
a lot of people they think Portland and I think, super livable, excellent services. But the real story isn’t necessarily that way. And, and and not for everyone. And so I think what’s really important, you know, this studio we’re talking about spatial injustices and you’re talking about large scale injustices felt by the black and brown communities here.
And the studio I think it’s really amazing because it looks at, you know, your own story is a microcosm of that and your own story is, is about righting the wrongs that have happened to your family. So maybe we can talk a little bit more you can tell the audience about what’s going on with the Mao house. What’s the story? What happened? How are you? How are you working to turn that around?
Cleo
So it originally had a seven unit apartment building on it that my grandmother and father purchased in 1982 for $19,000 and it had a small house in the back. And from my understanding the history of that was that small house was a servant and corders to that apartment building. That’s the family history behind that, that I’ve learned. But at that time in the 1980s, the black community was just dealing with the onslaught of redlining and through the red lining that’s what really disenfranchising the community the neighborhood. Without loans and insurance, the properties around the community began to deteriorate.
I remember at the time a lot of boarded windows. folks in the black community had to save their money in order to do repairs. Within the white communities, you were working with equity and you bought multiple properties. And those properties were investment properties. And that’s what the seven unit apartment building was for our family. After redlining is when the city and PDC under Ira Keller brought in blight in the nuisance ordinance to cut down ghettoization that’s, that’s what the goal was.
So now you have these dilapidated buildings. And as a census, I mean, we knew that we weren’t able to get loans. But we didn’t know it was an actual conspiracy that bankers and insurance companies would lose their license if they did
Kayin
Real estate agents,
Cleo
real estate agents
Kayin
to sell it to sell things
Cleo
The real estate agents, insurance companies, as well as the banks, all three of those, they would be penalized by the federal government if they allow any type of investment in these communities. So come the 80s pretty much everything is boarded up, you have no money to move. You have no money coming in, you know, you’re you’re working off at your jobs or your businesses. But you’re not getting help like the rest of the American citizens. So now comes the blight in nuisance ordinances. And now if you have boarded up windows, dilapidated stairs, even if you had a clawfoot tub, you know how much clawfoot food is worth today…
Karen
Seriously?
Cleo
Seriously? Yeah, I could show you some.
Kayin
So if you had a clawfoot tub it was considered blight, because of the age and so on that a lot of them were also
Cleo
creaking stairs
Kayin
some of it went through energy usage. So if you were trying to keep your power bill down, then if you were using less than a certain amount, it would kind of get tagged for blight as well.
Cleo
So, we’re in the midst of this but we don’t know, people in the community they’re doing their work, they’re not privy to all of these policies and things. Once these blight nuisance ordinances pass, that’s when we get what’s called, we call it red tagging, which means that they put a red tag on your home or structure. You have so much time allocated from the city to bring it up to code. And if you don’t bring it up to code, you forfeit on that property and it goes back to the city. Well, it was real. It was real tough to, to bring your stuff up to go by design. But on this particular property, my grandmother and father well this was done as a family endeavor. And every single one of my grandmother’s children had a special skill, you know, all the way from engineering, one of my uncle’s was an engineer to master electricians to stone and brick masons to carpenters. So I come from a family that builds, so architects, engineers, and trades people. My uncle, who’s a civil engineer, wrote up the plans. We got denied any permits. And the reason for the denial was either, let the city hold a $50,000 bond, which means your $50,000 is just held no interest gained on it. Nothing! Or hire a contractor. And a contractor was going to be more than $50,000. And in 1980. In 1982, it was it was going to be way more than $50,000, who has $50,000 to let someone hold and the family had calculated to be another 15,000 to bring to fix these apartments, we have photos and everything with the apartments they were they were nice. Matter of fact, the little house in the back was in worse condition than other than those apartment buildings.
So we were denied that and my grandmother and father took it to city council. And my grandmother stated at the Council hearing, that the property is no good to her. She has to demolish both of those structures. So city council said, we’ll let you keep the little house in the back but the apartment building has to go. So, that was the beginning. I remember when that apartment building was, was torn down. So back then Black folks would disassemble a building and use all the lumber in building something else. So city council say yeah, you can salvage it. And when we got the first one, we got the second story down, the city came and put in a halt work order Stop, Stop the deconstruction and then they came, the next couple days with a dozer and dosed it and charged us for it. We have all the documentation on all these, all these things that happened.
So Kayin and I doing an artist residence, the City of Portland archives and with this project, we were able to go in and do a whole lot of research on the black community in Portland, and you know, be compensated for it. So it was, it was beautiful. It was fun. And we weren’t exactly sure what the outcome was going to with the artistic product was going to be at the end. But we knew we wanted to make an impact and we knew that we had these real life issues, and particular also with our own family on that property. So, amongst other things, we began looking at the nuisance ordinances. So we went in and start studying ordinances, forfeiture laws, would happen with the Emmanual, Black Panther Party, all these things were all going on. All going on at one time. And when you get the broad scope, you can see how they all played a part. They’re not really separate. What was exciting was, we pulled the information, the data of that particular property, what happened with my grandmother and father, from the archives and to see it on an administrative policy level, versus having it happen to you was amazing. And then to put it in the context of these ways of atrocities, of exploitation to the community and to know the politics behind it now was a whole nother story.
Karen
So to step back a little bit, our studio brings together the three of us as teachers, me coming in from New York, for a year, Cleo and Kayin bringing their amazing project into the studio. It’s a graduate level studio with a few undergrads. And their, their main project is for the site that Cleo and Kayin have been talking about, on northeast Sacramento, where the Mayo House has been moved and will become an archive of black histories and in Portland. So the students are all designing projects that incorporate the Mayo House as the archive and incorporate residential and incorporate some retail or commercial. And I think what’s amazing from my experience, if there’s going to be a community engagement piece that you imagine the grad students, undergrads, you know, going out, you know, leaving the studio, this has been the opposite of this, where Cleo and Kayin have brought in kids is, I mean, like, amazed these amazing kids, you know, some are in high school, or, and some are really young. And it’s been amazing to watch and then I also is being from outside I said oh, so these are kids from Albina. And I had to, it had to be explained to me that no, you know, there’s been so much displacement. These are, these are kids whose parents and grandparents are from Albina, but they don’t live there anymore, most of them. So to see Kayin and also, you know, she’s like a master, it’s so phenomenal see her run that classroom. And And somehow, you know, it’s it seems so simple but I know it’s not to to structure these exercises that work for all ages, that’s really hard. So it’s been phenomenal to watch. And, and I’d love to hear you talk more about it.
Kayin
So in creating and setting up this studio, one thing we wanted to make sure we did was to have community engagement, but very specifically working with youth. Having so often we kind of get caught up in what is the academic thing to do and what are the points that we need to hit? Without wondering the why. And I think working with you really kind of brings back some of that, why do we do this? Why do we need to think about somebody other than your standard 20 to 40 year old who is fully mobile able to reach everything between five, six and six feet tall. Well, what about the people that don’t quite fit any of that? How do they think how do they use these different things? How do they interact with this design process? And really, what is the feedback that you can get from them? So we did have a couple older adult community members, as well with their feedback. But I think working with the youth, one of the things that the students were saying was just that the level of creativity that the kids had was just really amazing. And it made them rethink how they were approaching some of their designs. So we did. For instance, one day we did a design exercise where they were designing a park. And so everybody were in groups, everybody designed a park and they had these very nice structures and it was, it was they were Okay, we gave them like 15 minutes and then we told them You know, now pick somebody else’s idea and see what you can think, you know, try to improve upon it. And when we got down to the very end, it became this thing where now you have to design for a, somebody six and under six years of age and under. And then now you need to make sure that it’s accessible to everyone. And so all the things that people had thought about these great big things for adults and climbing and things at certain heights. Now they had to really kind of develop well, is this even interesting to anybody else? What do the kids think? And the kids were able to the youth were able to really kind of focus and bring in their own personalities and their likes, and get some experience with designing from architectural perspective building models, and really what the design process can look like. And they loved it. They absolutely loved it. I think everybody really enjoyed it. What we were doing in the class?
Priyanka
so i would love to hear about the outcomes of the studio and what were you surprised by?
Kayin
We have two projects during the studio that are we’re running concurrently. So there was a small plaza that we were designing as part of the Historic Black Williams art project. And then there was the site design and development of the Mayo House on Sacramento. The youth primarily worked on the plaza and the design there. But then their influences also appeared in some of the more playful designs in the Mayo Artchive redevelopment, definitely some of the students who, some of the grad students who are working more closely with the kids that were really inspired, have started pulling in some of the kids ideas in some ways and seeing where they can incorporate them. One popular portion, one popular idea that a lot of the kids had was to have a sushi restaurant, unfortunately, that is not, I don’t believe in any of them. But it is, it is.
All guest speakers
laughter and single word statements
Kayin
But really just kind of looking at different ways that businesses could be incorporated. What a community actually looks like. For instance, one of the exercises we did with the youth was design your future home. And so within doing that, they were able to kind of start looking at what floor plans look like, elevations. We didn’t really use that terminology with them. But we made sure that they got those different views there. So what does it look like on the outside, what does it look like on the inside? Where all, where do all these different things go and how are they related?
Kayin and Cleo
In your location? Yeah, what’s your location? What city state?
Kayin
Yeah, so there was I mean, there was a sushi building that had a sushi sushi restaurant and it but it also had housing. So it was interesting..
Kayin and Priyanka
to kind of, I support that, Yes, I think everybody does
Kayin
And so there was another one where there was like a camera that had a photography studio, some very literal things, but also a completely different way of thinking about how we represent buildings, and how they can relate directly to their purpose. In some of the Mayo and Artchive redevelopment plans, there are a couple that are very community based. And in creating that community feel, being able to work with the kids, it really kind of helped them to see and ask those questions: What kind of things would you want around you? What kind of things would you want in that neighborhood if you were looking at a building and so on? And so I think that really kind of influenced them that way as well.
Cleo
I just think that Kayin and Karen did an excellent job of making this class work.
Karen
10 weeks is really short.
Generally we meet three times a week. And every Wednesday we’ve had these kids come in, so it hasn’t been like a one off. It’s been, I don’t know, eight sessions, like a lot of sessions where the grad students are meeting the kids. The kids are also they’ve been at the reviews. And so that means as a student, you might, you know, we were invited architects who will, you know, talk to you about your interstitial wall condition or whatever architects talk about, and then you’ll have you know, an eight year old saying, you know, your, your roof looks like a bridge. So pretty, pretty amazing stuff. And then we’ve had we’ve had a couple of sessions, we took the students, Cleo arranged a visit to the city archives, so that students could get a sense of the research behind this and make connections we also had a really phenomenal session, we called it a master class with James Buckley and Skylar Levitt from historic preservation, where they dove in and they talked about, you know, larger work they’ve been doing around Albina and you know, workshoped, a handful of the student’s projects to see where do historic preservation techniques, where can I help and where do they not make sense? Because, you know, of course, this studio is happening, while historic preservation as a field is questioning what they’re doing, what are they preserving, and whether they’re preserving buildings or, or cultures when those things are in conflict. And I think, you know, talking about what’s been surprising, you know, where we are, we have our final tomorrow. So we’re just we’re and we’re still we’re really in the middle of this so I really want to you know, I’d love to talk to some of these kids 10 years from now and see, did anyone become an architect? What’s going on? How are you know, what are the impacts? We don’t know. We’re not going to know now we don’t know for a while, what the impacts are and in people’s lives. So when we were talking in the beginning of the quarter, what are your goals for this? You know, Cleo said, I want I hope the studio changes people’s lives.
Cleo
I just want to touch on that piece about changing lives, you know? Looking at this the spatial injustices right, there’s it’s multiple problem. So we ask ourselves, how do we, it’s best to try to attack those all at once. If you can work on a project that attacks all of those. So the thing with the university’s I look back at my education, and I feel like design school, just American universities, if you’re in you’re not white is just a different experience for you know, in the way that we’re educated. And a lot of times we’re educated to go out there like, like Karen was mentioning, to be a part of a system that is already in play, what do we need to do to get those requirements to get a job? And so it kind of freaks me out to look at this reality. And I’m one to say reality can be changed. I’ll give you a quick analogy. Like, if you really think about it. Think about the transatlantic slave trade, right? Think about before it occurred. So there’s forms of slavery and in almost every culture, I won’t say every culture, but almost every culture had forms of some type of indentured servitude, but not chattel slavery.
But think about before your mind is set to chattel slavery, and the concept someone brings a concept to you, like, we can have folks just do work and we can take them all around the world and have them. Well, how do you do that? So that’s not a reality at some point. I would suspect that you do it on a smaller scale. So you have an example of someone in chains go fetch a pail of water or something, you get what I mean and then you magnify that. So we’ve changed the minds of people on the ability to do injustices until 400 years past where it’s common. So if we can do things like that, we can do things that benefit humanity. So with that said, that one act is supported or created so many other industries, do you get what I mean? Slave catching, slave education, how do you educate a people when this is necessary? And so these things are still interwoven into the American fabric and in different fabrics all across the planet, right. So being here in America and looking at Portland specifically, I look at the education that I got, I look at my experiences at work and you look at all these things about property ownership and getting jobs and then affirmative action comes in. And then all these, so I said, well, how do you begin to tap in and change some of these things.
It’s not just so much about property rights, We make what’s right and wrong, what’s just and unjust and we create the rights that in the property rights and all of these policies. So if we could get more black students, so because we were talking, we’re talking to Justin about creating a pipeline also, if we can get more black students in to get an education in spatial justice, design policy, I’m sure that we’re black real estate agents, during redlining and black bankers doing red lineings, but those were the policies that even they were held to, so I’m saying, I just remember when I was in school, not everything was conducive.
This big term colonial perspective, or more of a dominance perspective on these particular methods, they don’t work for every community. Now we have to have repurpose education to have it work for all. And that doesn’t mean just black folks coming in and being able to develop their ways, but those who are not black need to learn other methods alongside that, because that’s what the hopes of this class is and I’m proud of the students in this class. They’ve put in a lot of work and it’s shown and many of the students, if not all of them, showed that they cared about the project and were interested and engaged. If you’re the community that has been ostracized and oppressed is thriving, I believe that all communities are that thrive and as long as those communities around it are not living off of their insecurities operating off of their insecurities, that’s what I want to say towards you changing the changing of lives. Thank you for bringing that up.
Priyanka
I think it’s so important to understand what community engagement is on a real level and I think it’s incredible opportunity and something I never had in school, so I think the students are very lucky to have all three of you as instructors. It’s been a real honor, so thank you very much.
All guest speakers
Thank you Priyanka
Cue Music
Thank you for joining us on our third episode with Karen Kubey, Cleo Davis and Kayin Talton Davis from the Design for Spatial Justice podcast series.
This is Priyanka Bista, your host, signing off, along with Mary Anne Funk, our editor, from Portland, Oregon, with music by Chicoco Radio – all the way from the waterfront settlements of Port Harcourt Nigeria.
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Transcribed by Mary Anne Funk