A change of heart
Sheila Mason opposed Kenton Women’s Village, then became one of its biggest supporters
By Amanda Waldroupe | July 31, 2017
Sheila Mason started out as one of Kenton Women’s Villages biggest skeptics.
Mason, who has lived in the Kenton neighborhood for 10 years, arrived at a neighborhood meeting in January with a list of tough questions for members of a village-planning subcommittee. An engineer at Intel, Mason describes herself as left-brained and analytical, naturally drawn to understanding the world through data, statistics and facts. She wanted to know how the village would deal with trash, what safety precautions were being taken for the women, and how criminal activity would be dealt with.
But listening to herself as she spoke, she realized she was judging Kenton Women’s Village despite knowing little about the project.
“Listening to my own voice asking my questions…I actually could hear my bias coming through,” she said.
The election of Donald Trump rattled Mason; she cites national politics as a major reason for getting involved with Kenton Women’s Village. She remembers feeling helpless after the inauguration, wanting to “root down and work on something that I can control.”
“Something I can control is what kind of neighbor I am to my fellow neighbors,” she says.
That made her think: what does it mean to be a good neighbor?
Living in a house doesn’t necessarily make a person a good neighbor, she realized: housed people may leave trash in the street, hoard car parts in their yards, or deal drugs from their homes. Living in a house doesn’t make a person immune to problems, such as addiction and mental illness, that many homeless people face.
So, maybe the lack of a house didn’t mean trouble.
Mason made a conscious effort to think about the Kenton Women’s Village proposal from a different perspective. She still wanted to know the facts and data about homeless villages. How does a village’s self-governance model work, she wondered, without becoming “a big, dramatic mess?”
She attended one of Hazelnut Grove’s General Assembly Meetings, held in the village’s dining area. Village residents are required to attend the weekly meeting, when chores and other duties such as kitchen and security detail are decided upon.
“They have a humongous investment in where they live,” Mason said. “They have it all worked out. Everybody has to pull an equal load.”
She also became more confident of the proposed village’s likelihood of success when she learned that Catholic Charities, which acts as a property manager for hundreds of units across Portland, would manage Kenton Women’s Village.
Property managers know how to deal with trash, sanitation and other issues, Mason said. “That’s huge.”
Then there’s the statistic that Mason says leveled her.
Earlier this year, Home Forward, the Portland metropolitan area’s federal housing authority, opened its waiting list for Section 8 housing, federally subsidized housing that caps a person’s rent contribution at 30 percent of their income.
Over five days, 16,000 households applied before Home Forward closed the list again.
“I thought, wow,” Mason said. “This is how serious this is. That started changing my mind. I didn’t fully understand the scope of how homelessness (was increasing) due to rent rising.”
Mason encouraged her neighbors to approve Kenton Women’s Village at a neighborhood-wide vote held in March, making the point that many of the women selected to live in the village were “already here.”
“They are our neighbors,” Mason said.
This story is part of Giving Ground, an investigative series produced by the Open: Housing Journalism Collaborative, a joint project of Open: Housing, Pamplin Media Group and KGW. Look for other stories in this and related series at OpenHousing.net.
