Portland’s Most Dangerous Neighborhoods

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

GoLocalPDX News Team

Portland’s most dangerous neighborhoods*, ranked by crime, fire emergencies and the presence of dangerous intersections, are disproportionately clustered in east Portland, according to a GoLocalPDX data analysis.

Taking five years of police and fire data from the city, and combining it with the Oregon Department of Transportation’s ranking on the city’s 60 most dangerous intersections, GoLocalPDX crunched the numbers to see where the dangers lay.

Slideshow Below: Portland’s 35 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods

Taken together, five east Portland neighborhoods - Hazelwood, Lents, Powellhurst-Gilbert, Centennial and Montavilla - topped the ranks of most dangerous neighborhoods due to their nexus of high crime, fires and the fact that they are home to some of the city’s deadliest intersections.

GoLocalPDX Method for Ranking Most Dangerous Neighborhoods: Here

Neighborhood leaders in these communities take understandable pride in their areas. Many point to the fact that east Portland has seen massive growth in recent years as poor residents flee from the rapidly gentrifying inner city while City Hall all but neglected the area’s infrastructure. That said, most were optimistic that their advocacy for change and a shifting attitude at City Hall was paying off in improvements in the community.,

Full list of neighborhood rankings: Download

Crime: Downtown, North Portland and east Portland

Crime in downtown Portland gets a lot of media attention. Just this Tuesday, police arrested two suspects in connection with a 43-year-old man who was fatally stabbed downtown the week before.

But over the last five years, east Portland’s Hazelwood neighborhood there were almost 1,000 more calls for police, due to serious and violent crime, than were made downtown. The city classifies crime in clusters, the most serious, are part-one crimes, and includes, murder, rape but also larceny and burglary*.

“We are a big neighborhood,” said Hazelwood neighborhood activist Linda Robinson. She used to be data analyst and research assistant for Portland State University. “We have 23,000 people who live in the neighborhoods.”

Robinson cautioned against reading too much into rankings like GoLocalPDX’s that compare raw data, such as total number of crimes. But the raw numbers generally parallel per capita crime rates.

Hazelwood, with over 23,462 residents covering 2,625 acres, is one of the largest neighborhoods in Portland. The neighborhood has about 2.31 of part-one crimes per person.

Compare that to tiny Eliot Neighborhood in North Portland, (number 15 on the list) with its 3,611 people in 560 acres, which has a part-one rate of 1.86 crimes per person. While Old Town/Chinatown (number 18), with 3,922 people in just 198 acres, has a rate of 1.20 crimes per person.

North Portland had three neighborhoods in the top ranks - Kenton, Portsmouth and St. Johns.

Crime trends in the metro area have been moving east for a decade.

“Certainly we’ve seen a shift in Portland over the years,” said Sgt. Pete Simpson of the Portland police. “Gang activity has shifted from Northeast Portland to east Portland.”

Of the top 35 most dangerous neighborhoods, there are 13 located in east Portland, and nine with over 2,000 calls for police service on serious and violent crime, way above the average for a Portland city neighborhood.

Healy Height’s in Portland’s West Hills, by comparison, was the safest neighborhood in Portland with only 12 calls to police over part-one crimes in five years.

The Mayor’s Office was not immediately available for in-depth comment, but staff stressed that while rates may be higher in one spot of the city or another, overall the violent crime is on a long term decline, both in Portland and around the nation.

“We are at a 50-year low for part one (violent) crimes,” said Dana Haynes, of the Mayor’s Office. “The city is the safest it’s been since the 1960s.”

Dangerous Traffic

GoLocalPDX’s ranking used ODOT’s list of the city’s 60 most dangerous intersections to access neighborhood traffic safety. The list is made up of data from 2008 to 2011 and includes crash rates, injuries, fatalities and property damage. Both ODOT and the city use the list to prioritize spending on safety and improvement projects.

Of the three factors that threaten residents in the areas east of 82nd Tim Curran wants traffic addressed most.

Curran is the publisher of the Mid-county Memo, a community newspaper and website site that covers much of east Portland. Curran grew up in the Alameda Neighborhood and has been an east Portland resident since 2003. He said since Portland annexed the area in the 1980s there have been few road improvements.

“For the last 27 years it’s been ‘You’re on own,’” Curran said of City Hall’s traditional attitude.

The top five most dangerous neighborhoods (all in east Portland) contain a whopping 31 of the city’s 60 most dangerous intersections.

Richard Bixby, director of the city's East Portland Neighborhood Office agrees.

“It’s an old road system meant for fast speeds,” Bixby said. “On Halsey the speed limit is 40 miles an hour. People drive fast and then get into a congested area and you get hit.”

Improvement Slowly Happening

Over the last three years, east Portland has seen improvements to its long list of projects.

Efforts like the East Portland Action Plan and East Portland in Motion have prioritized projects and advocated for things to get done.

Repaving has happened on 122nd Avenue, improvements have been made to outer Southeast Powell Boulevard and new sidewalks have been installed on Northeast Glisan Street.

Curran recently wrote about 18 newly installed crosswalk beacons.

The parks bureau unveiled a plan for the area in 2011, pledged to build 20 acres of new park space and recently refurbished 12 existing ones.

The city has unveiled a raft of new road improvement projects from a Foster Streetscape Plan to transit improvements plans for Southeast Powell Boulevard.

Even new middle-class homebuyers are starting to trickle into neighborhoods like Lents, Gateway and Parkrose.

Robinson, a retiree, has been involved with her neighborhood for almost 20 years. She said progress is slow, but building momentum and that’s what keeps her going as an activist.

“You make small improvements and then people see that they can make a difference.”

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*Part one crime is a category of crime that includes, assault, arson, burglary, homicide, larceny, rape, robbery, theft from vehicle, and vehicle theft.

Related Slideshow: Portland’s 35 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods

* Rankings have been adjusted since their original posting to better reflect all neighborhood boundaries that make contact with the city's most dangerous intersections.

Portland’s Most Dangerous Neighborhoods

Slideshow Below: Portland’s 35 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods

Crime: Downtown, North Portland and east Portland

Dangerous Traffic

Improvement Slowly Happening

Related Slideshow: Portland’s 35 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods

#35

Buckman-East

#34

Overlook

#33

King

#32

Buckman-West

#31

Kerns

#30

Hosford-Abernethy

#29

Parkrose Heights

#28

Creston-Kenilworth

#27

Hayden Island

#26

Wilkes

#25

Pleasant Valley

#24

Lloyd

#23

Madison South

#22

Richmond

#21

Arbor Lodge

#20

Parkrose

#19

Northwest

#18

Mt. Scott-Arleta

#17

Brentwood-Darlington

#16

Sellwood-Moreland

#15

Eliot

#14

St. Johns

#13

Portsmouth

#12

Pearl

#11

Kenton

#10

China/Old Town

#9

Downtown

#8

Cully

#7

Foster-Powell

#6

Mill Park

#5

Montavilla

#4

Centennial

#3

Powelhurst-Gilbert

#2

Lents

#1

Hazelwood

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