In 2010, Willie Levenson founded the Human Access Project, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming Portland, Oregon’s complex relationship with the Willamette, a river whose public image lags behind the considerable ecological improvements made in the last decade.
Despite the city’s reputation for progressive planning and environmental policies, Portland has not kept pace with Seattle or Vancouver, British Columbia, in developing waterfront access for public recreation.
This is due, in large part, to lack of demand from citizens, many of whom regard the Willamette as polluted with sewage and industrial waste.
“When I moved to Portland, I was told two things. First, it rains a lot, and, second, you never dip a toe in the Willamette,” Levenson told me, raising his voice to be heard over the boisterous teenagers diving off a nearby dock. “It seemed crazy to me: people would drive miles out of the city to go swimming, neglecting the river that flows right through downtown.”
State officials confirm the river is now safe for swimming. (There are still pollutants, but they’re at low levels or in the sediment on the river bottom, so don’t pose a threat to swimmers’ health.) The Oregon Health Authority reports that levels of contamination are too low to be considered harmful, even for young children. And the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, an agency that monitors water quality on the river on a monthly basis, has declared that recreation is safe when no [combined sewer] overflows occur, which is now the vast majority of the time.
But according to Levenson, the work hasn’t been finished yet. “It’s like the city only did half its job,” he contends. “We’ve funded a project that cost more than a billion dollars to make the river safe for human recreation, but we’ve not effectively informed the public or provided attractive access points to coax people into the water.”