Portland State Magazine Fall 2021

FALL 2021 // 25 For now, the program is limited to Portland’s Lents neighborhood and surrounding areas with plans to scale up citywide in 2022. Restoring people’s confidence that it is safe to return to downtown will take time, and presents a knotty dilemma, points out Kris Henning, crim- inology and criminal justice faculty. On the one hand, feelings of safety will be enhanced when more people visit or go back to work or school; but “that requires that people feel safe,” he says. The reopening of PSU should be beneficial, because it means roughly 20,000 more people “will be downtown for legitimate, positive purposes.The more of that we have, the closer we will get to the point where people feel safe.” Clifford Allen, dean of The School of Business, agrees. “When people see each other, that tends to make people feel more comfortable,” he says. Allen serves on the mayor’s Business Success & Job Creation Action Table and worked with other members on a creative strategy to engage students as they return to downtown and help local busi- nesses at the same time. The group used a Portland-based payment app called Kuto to put $30,000 of federal relief funds into the pockets of 600 students specifically so they could spend the money at downtown businesses. The partnership has even grown to include a program where 30 students will get paid internships helping businesses that have suffered pandemic losses. As Allen notes, downtown still has a lot to overcome, but if knowledge truly can save the city, Portland State is leading the way to make its comeback a success. Preparing for next time The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us all a lot—how to be flexible, how to work remotely, how to situate a webcam just right so the kids playing in the other room are out of view. But perhaps the most important lesson we’ve learned from these unprecedented times is that as a country, we were unprepared for this kind of large-scale disaster. Portland State researchers are investigating how to do better next time. With funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, Kelly Clifton is looking at how people in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington have dealt with provisioning during COVID-19, research triggered by the dramatic shifts in shopping seen at the beginning of the pandemic. “There was the initial crisis that was really about supply chain shortages,” says Clifton, civil and environmental engineering faculty and interim associate vice president for Research and Graduate Studies. “Grocery stores were running out of hand sanitizer and toilet paper, dried beans, all of those things, because people were hoarding.” Since April 2020, she and her team have surveyed people about their shopping habits—including whether they shop online or if others help them—to examine how new technologies have affected provisioning and to identify the most common barriers faced by vulnerable groups like the elderly. Since each of the included states approached pandemic restrictions in different ways, the researcher have also had an interesting view of how provisioning differs depend- ing on the level of lockdown. John MacArthur, Sustainable Transportation Program manager, is working on a National Science Foundation rapid grant to see how COVID-19 has impacted people’s travel behavior in Portland and Nashville, Tennessee, especially their use of public transit and micro-mobility vehicles like bike and scooter shares.The goal is to create models that help predict how city transit systems recover from future public health crises. Most people who had the option switched from public transit to private transportation. (According to Portland’s Trimet, weekly average rides on public transit this August were less than half the average of February 2020.) It’s not clear whether they’ll return. For instance, over the years, PSU’s Transportation and Parking Services strived to shift people from driving to using public transportation. “Will they go back to using the bus?”MacAr- thur wonders. “Will they start using a car? Or, will they pick up a bike and start biking?” One finding both Clifton and MacArthur have noticed is that the pandemic highlighted class and income disparities. Some people simply don’t have the means to avoid disease exposures by shopping online or traveling by car. “In planning for the next pandemic,”MacArthur says, “it’s always this group we need to be focused on the most.” —JENNIFER LADWIG MS ’21 Members of the unarmed Portland Street Response team respond to an emergency call at an encampment in the Lents neighborhood. PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative contributed to the development of this new public safety pilot program. CITY OF PORTLAND