How Portland fought gun violence with better street design

When Nadine Salama moved into a new apartment building across the street from her daughter's favorite park in the Mount Scott-Arleta neighborhood in Portland, Ore., she was thrilled.

For years, Salama and her 9-year-old shared a home with Salama's business, Green Tulip Peace & Nature School, a preschool and child-care facility. They were excited to have their own space when they moved in January 2020. The apartment was only three minutes from Salama's work.

Then, six months after they moved, there was a shooting across the street from their home.

Salama, who has lived and worked in the area for 12 years, found herself reassuring her neighbors that this kind of thing wasn't common in the neighborhood.

But the shootings were becoming more and more common. By summer, Salama says the neighborhood saw five or six shootings each month. "It was something that we were dealing with every day," she says. What's more, shootings that had previously taken place at 1 a.m. or midnight now began as early as 6 p.m.

The shootings were, and are, part of a broader increase in gun violence across the U.S. Last year, Portland experienced its highest number of homicides in three decades. Nationwide, gun violence increased by more than 30% during the pandemic.

Salama noticed her neighborhood's physical layout made it conducive to drive-by shootings. Mount Scott Park is next to 72nd Avenue, a major thoroughfare that allows shooters to drive away quickly. Across the street from the park, a church parking lot with five entrances also made for quick escapes.

What Salama did next helped reduce gun violence in the neighborhood by 60%, NPR reported.

As an involved neighbor and preschool owner, Salama started local. She reached out to parents, youth organizations she'd worked with before, and the Mt. Scott-Arleta Neighborhood Association.

Everyone was willing. They decided to work first on reducing access to the church parking lot.

"We didn't want to lose our community," Salama says. "We figured the best way to address this would be to start to create obstacles and make it harder for the perpetrators of these acts to get away with them and be able to escape."

Joel Sommer, pastor with Access Covenant Church, had been renting a small space from the church. Sommer put Salama in contact with the church's leaders. "When they heard what Nadine was asking for, they immediately sealed off two of the exits" using simple chain barriers, he says.

Since 72nd Avenue is commonly used by ambulances and other emergency response vehicles, speed bumps weren't possible. Hardesty put Salama in touch with Jonathan Jay, a Boston University professor who studies how traffic patterns and tree coverage affect gun violence, and he came to town to meet with Hardesty. Jay met with Salama and Andre Miller, a community justice organizer for the city. Salama showed them around the park and pointed out where bullet casings were being found in the neighborhood.

The trio came up with a plan to convert a nearby slip lane — which allowed cars to turn left without entering the intersection, giving shooters a quick escape route — into a community space. (Residents are voting on proposed uses for the space.)

But Salama was looking for more immediate action. She recalls hearing gunshots while cooking dinner in her apartment in September 2021. After the shooting, a car crashed into a fire hydrant as the driver tried to flee the scene.

"My daughter was in her room playing, and we heard, distinctly, gunfire at the end of the road, like towards the park," she says. "I didn't feel safe for my daughter to walk down the stairs to our car by herself because there might be a stray bullet."

Salama gathered videos of the incident from her neighbors, and pushed Hardesty's office to take action. The city installed orange traffic barrels printed with "Local access only" on residential streets within a six-block radius of the park, forcing cars to slow down. Within a week, the message had sunk in and they were able to take down the barrels.

The next step was reclaiming Mount Scott Park and the nearby church property as community spaces. Salama worked with neighbors and organizers to plan events in the park. The idea was to have people gather, play music and bring their children to instill a sense of neighborhood pride.

"We had just had a lot of members of the community come out and just occupied the park in a positive way. Fill it with music and joy and happiness," she says. She soon organized another event in the church parking lot.

After these changes, the neighborhood went 57 days without a shooting. More impressive, gun violence decreased by 60% — and stayed that way, even as other neighborhoods in Portland have seen an uptick in shootings.