On day 5 of a different America, Portland feels safer than most places I could be.

Oregon Democrats won most of the races, flipped a U.S. House seat, retained all three statewide offices on the ballot, and captured a state senate supermajority. But the reason I feel safer is the new mayor, who in his acceptance speech encapsulated the opposite of Donald Trump’s ethic. Keith Wilson told a gathering at the community center where he had played as a child:

My life and career evolved alongside our city. We are rich in our diversity and are shaped by the many paths we took to get here today. From those who have been here since time immemorial, to those who came here seeking a better life, to our ship builders in Vanport, to shop keepers in Albina, and to those immigrants and refugees who have only just arrived: Every neighborhood matters, every community matters, every person matters.

That Wilson named two neighborhoods, Vanport and Albina, is an acknowledgment of the racism in the DNA of our city and state, which under its territorial constitution slavery was banned and so were Negroes. We don’t ban books.

Vanport was the community of 10,000 homes Henry Kaiser built on a flood plain north of city limits during the Second World War for ship builders and their families. (Its health care center was the seed for Kaiser Permanente.) When Portland was racist to the core, Kaiser’s 40,000 recruits included 10,000 Blacks (six times the city’s pre-war population) and the schools he built were integrated. Vanport’s population after the war fell by half, and about a third of those remaining were Black. In the spring melt of 1948, a dyke on the Columbia burst and destroyed the community, displacing 5,300 families. Portland officials were aware of the threat but reassured residents they were safe.

After the erasure of Vanport, the heart of Black Portland shifted to Albina, where I live. Nearly half its residents were Black. As in other Northern cities, Portland’s fathers created a ghetto, compressed by redlining, restrictive covenants, and municipal disinvestment. But its residents nevertheless developed a thriving community where Duke Ellington played and Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Then starting in the 1950s, neighborhoods in Albina were razed to make way for a coliseum, highways and expansion of a hospital, displacing more than a thousand families. When federal money for the hospital ran out in the early ’70s, several acres that had been the commercial core remained cleared. To this day.

Wilson pointed to that history.

The second-generation head of a 70-employee trucking company with a “green” fleet, Wilson, 60, ran a bootstrapped campaign against two well-funded and well known challengers. The early favorite, Rene Gonzalez, ran on law and order and was endorsed by downtown business and the police union. In two years on the city commission, Gonzalez showed us a knack for not playing well with others. His most notable policy decision was to stop agencies from distributing tents to people living on the street. He finished third in a field of 19.

By contrast, Wilson founded a nonprofit, Shelter Portland, to address homelessness in a way our poorly coordinated city and county did not. He aims to end homelessness—which he defines as a person without a roof over her head on any given night—within a year.

Portland has had a housing shortage dating to the early 20^th century, when our boomtown had more homeless people per capita than any other city and ranked fourth in absolute numbers behind Chicago, San Francisco and New York. Since Covid, homelessness has consistently polled as our worst problem. Whether we can improve remains to be seen.

Here’s the other element in Portlandia’s approach that gives me hope. Two years ago voters adopted a new charter, developed by a citizens committee. It recommended trashing the century-old commission system, under which five commissioners, including the mayor, were elected city-wide and served as the policy-making board and as heads of departments. That is, a commissioner was a legislator and an executive of one or more bureaus. We finally abandoned this Progressive Era “reform” a century after most other cities recognized its flaws.

Under the charter we’ve just implemented, we used rank-choice voting to elect 12 policy-making councilors from four districts, ending the domination of downtown business interests and enabling modestly financed candidates to mount smaller campaigns. I thought it was crazy to have the top three winners in each district elected, but now that we’ve been through the exercise, I am encouraged by the emerging diversity of voices and the results.

The mayor’s role is no longer setting policy but overseeing city management and setting a tone. That’s a challenge, considering nine agencies are charged with trash collection and public works are siloed into narrow, uncoordinated bureaus. I would have preferred a strong-mayor structure typical of big cities (Portland has 620,000 residents). But we did reform, a step inconceivable under the U.S. Constitution.

I moved here six years ago, drawn to the creative, entrepreneurial vibe. It is a world away from the power-obsessed nation’s capital that had been home since John F. Kennedy was president. We cannot escape Trump, who in 2020 sent masked agents to our city absent any request. But my town remains dedicated to the freedom to be who we are, where our focus on Saturdays is meeting up at the farmers market and embracing the spirits of all who call it home.