Erik Sten
President
Further Development, llc
Former City Commissioner,
Portland, Oregon (1996-2008)
Former Living Cities Distinguished Urban Fellow (2008-2009)

If politics is indeed the art of the possible, Living Cities is the rare innovation that makes it possible to achieve more. Our cities are filled with committed elected officials flanked by talented staff. Yet, one election cycle after another finds new faces arguing about the same old issues. The complexity and persistence of urban problems has proven overwhelming to many cities and devastating to families and individuals affected by them.

As a four-term City Commissioner in Portland, Oregon, I took part as Living Cities helped us to break through that cycle. Living Cities brought me and our city an unusual and effective mix of inspiration, access to resources, concrete ideas and peer learning that made a wider range of achievements possible. While Portland is well-known for progress on many urban issues, it’s less well-known that Living Cities played a major role in making that progress possible. With a quiet touch, an insistence on clarity as to what works and a willingness to bring resources early, Living Cities provided the support that allowed us and other committed, but formerly stagnant cities to succeed.

My focus was housing, and as our financing, service and other related strategies evolved, Living Cities connected us to government, philanthropic and intellectual resources. The approach is one of experimentation rather than dogma, thoughtful trial and error rather than prescriptive formulas and mandates. It is a partnership guided by optimism and grounded in a detailed knowledge of what has not worked to date. As we looked for new ideas or tried to evaluate existing strategies, Living Cites was always there with an introduction to the right resource, opportunity or innovation.

After leaving the City Council, I jumped at the chance to become a Distinguished Urban Fellow with Living Cities. My assignment was one that any former elected official would love: to advise the Board and staff on strategy and issues while spending a year producing a major paper. While I spent many hours thinking about what had worked and not worked in my topic area, chronic homelessness in Portland, I had a chance to see and understand how Living Cities operates. Never in one place had I seen a combination of so many high level leaders from the philanthropic world staffed by the best and brightest thinkers in the country. As I attended the Board meetings and Living Cities’ events, I saw the CEOs, presidents and top officials from many of the country’s most innovative and important foundations and corporations spending hours and hours trying to find answers. They were willing to challenge themselves, to make change when it was needed, but also to stick with long-term investments they believed would work, as well as partnerships for which they received little glory. They interacted well with the political world, while bringing a longer perspective than the political cycle often allows.

Living Cities truly created a forum in which the sum could be greater than the parts and in which some of the country’s best minds could take the time needed to construct and implement new strategies in partnership with practitioners in urban areas that matter. Our cities deserve no less, and the fact that Living Cities is still energetic and determined 20 years later makes me very optimistic.

Living Cities is a good idea that has turned into a great organization. Portland and the rest of the nation’s cities are better for it.