Director’s Desk | Street Roots aims to replace all first floor windows with commercial-grade glass. The price tag? $80,000.

I saw the shattered glass, the jagged edges of the remaining window as well as mounds of tiny shards in the bright morning light.

Then I saw their faces framed by the sparkling glass and lit by the morning sun. That’s what stands out for me now.

Robert Allison and Ken Lebal were confronted with a broken window when they arrived for their flight crew shift at Street Roots’ new West Burnside Street building early Monday, June 10. Taking stock of the damage done in the early morning, they first appeared to me crestfallen, shaken by the setback to their months of work fixing up the interior under the leadership of Cole Reed, designer, and DeVon Pouncey, Street Roots community media director.

Allison, Lebal and other Street Roots flight crew members work as Street Roots vendors, earning income by selling you this newspaper. Additionally, Street Roots is paying them to prepare the building to open for operations. The Street Roots grand opening will be Sept. 5, pushed back from the earlier planned Aug. 1 date.

Cole Reed leads with the idea that we make something stronger and more interesting from what is broken. She is inspired by the Japanese design principle of kintsugi
(金継ぎ, "golden repair") of repairing broken pottery with bits of gold. The practice highlights the breaks in an object with beauty rather than hides them.

I am, of course, always concerned about financial stability. When we reported a broken window in 2020, our general liability insurance dropped Street Roots. We’ve struggled to secure reliably affordable insurance ever since. These are the hidden costs of doing work for whom there is no profit.

Within hours, Alpine Glass Service boarded up the window, and the flight crew was busy revamping furniture.

Meanwhile, dealing with this window comes with several strange pressures. This was one of seven “picture windows” along West Burnside Street and the corner of Third Avenue. Light spreads through these windows from the south and west. We estimated the necessary work of upgrading the glass would cost about $80,000.

Grants for such things come in dribs and drabs, so we needed to find a bigger drib, a bigger drab, of such money. And that has to happen in order to begin operations. Nonprofits must hustle for each dollar, and we fill in spaces abdicated by other entities, including insurance companies passing on high rates to us.

But the greater pressure comes from the story we choose to be a part of. A broken window is a singular action, but too often, it is part of a law-and-order story that shifts priorities of community safety and health.

Then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously subscribed to “broken windows policing” in the 1990s, focusing on low-level crimes, including the criminalization of homelessness itself. The now-disproven theory posited small acts of “disorder” — like the titular “broken window” — add up to create a society in which “disorderly people” feel more comfortable breaking the law. Putting the theory into practice for policing was politically popular and societally corrosive, disproportionately impacting people of color.

The Giuliani broken windows policing rhetoric of the 1990s resurfaced in Portland since the start of the pandemic and overtook much of the language during the Multnomah County District Attorney race this past spring.

Although many people know how damaging a focus on low-level crimes is to people in poverty who lose housing and employment due to legal entanglements, our community seems stuck in short-term thinking regarding public safety.

This is why at Street Roots, we look at this broken window with a clear purpose: We need to replace all of the first-floor windows with stronger glass and keep going. The Street Roots Burnside Building represents this commitment.

We believe in Old Town. We believe in Portland. We believe the stories must always be richer than individual incidents; it’s much more interesting to build what’s broken into something more beautiful.

Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.