(Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the correct age of Nate McCoy, executive director of the National Association of Minority Contractors’ Oregon chapter)

A group of African-American design and architecture professionals shared their personal experiences in the industry Wednesday during a special panel discussion directed by local students.

Organized through Hacker and The CENTER, a Northeast Portland coalition-led hub for child and youth education, creativity and engagement, Vital Voices in the Built Environment brought together industry professionals, high school students and community members for a conversation on how to drive Portland development in a direction that encompasses all of the communities in the city.

“I’m an Oregon native for all 36 of my years,” said panel member Nate McCoy, executive director and operations manager of the National Association of Minority Contractors‘ Oregon chapter. “And for the last 30 years I’ve seen our city change and grow and modify and expand in so many ways, and it’s been perplexing.”

Joining McCoy on the panel were architect William Hart, a founding partner in Carleton Hart Architecture; Joy Alise Davis, CEO and founder of Design + Culture Lab; and Anyeley Hallova, a partner at development firm project^. Together, the quartet provided their takes on not only working in their respective industries, but the struggles involved in preservation of existing communities and cultures in the face of ongoing gentrification.

For McCoy, who grew up in Parkrose, in Northeast Portland, it meant carving out his own path into his desired field. He engineered a transfer to Benson High School, with its technical programs, and eventually realized he could go to college and achieve his goals. This was a revelation for a teenager who was constantly told that certain paths were closed to African-American students.

“For folks of color who sometimes feel voiceless, sometimes you have to take that faith if there is not that opportunity then you have to create it,” McCoy told the audience.

He earned a scholarship to the University of Oregon and eventually became senior construction coordinator for the Portland Housing Bureau. He helped oversee developments of the type he once depended upon, including North Portland’s New Columbia.

In Portland, gentrification of traditionally black districts has led to substantial cultural losses along Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard and other thoroughfares.

One of the biggest challenges panelists are working to address is how to preserve and even re-grow that culture. Work with longtime property owners in the Albina area and others has been made more difficult by the distrust engendered by the burgeoning wealth and demographic changes that have happened there.

“Today, I’m still dealing with some of these community folks desperately trying to understand with all this zoning, where can we go to get developers and banks to come in and look at these areas,” Hart said.

Engaging these people in the discussions around future development, he added, is key to ensuring that local communities remain coherent.

“I think it starts with making sure early and often for folks who don’t have a chance to get to meetings, giving them a chance to weigh in,” he said. “We have to be grassroots with this work and really make sure folks know what resources are out there.

“They’ve got the land, but they don’t have the resources to do anything with it.”

Hallova agreed, and said the widespread gentrification in Portland has left some property owners wary of trusting banks and developers.

“The trust issues, like you said, at this particular moment, if you want to get a property developed, you have to have a development partner,” she said. “We work with land owners all the time and that’s what they do. But in the African-American community, with all the broken trust that’s come before, I completely get why they don’t trust.”

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Designing buildings that will change a community for decades to come is never an easy endeavor. Doing so when without speaking many residents’ languages or knowing their cultures can be exponentially tougher.

“Fundamentally, in any community, if you ask them a set of questions, there is a commonality that can be brought out,” said Suenn Ho, principal and urban designer at RESOLVE Architecture + Planning. “What makes the difference is the cultural diversity of the neighborhood. There are some subtle nuances that are often missed.”

Ho has worked on a variety of projects in ethnically diverse communities. Creating designs that appreciate those nuances can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition. Typically, project teams hold town hall events and meet with neighborhood associations to gain residents’ input. But in communities with a variety of ethnicities, that might not be enough.

“If they make time to go to open house, sometimes the minorities don’t speak up in a public forum,” Ho said. “Then (developers) say no one spoke up in the events, so everything is good. Then their building is not reflecting what the community wants.”

Language can present a big chasm to cross. In 2016, the city of Tigard decided to turn Metzger Elementary School athletic fields into a public park. While working on the project, RESOLVE Architecture + Planning had to get input from community members who came from different parts of the world and spoke various languages.

“That school has very diverse demographics,” Ho said. “There were large numbers of Somalians, African-Americans and Muslims that we needed to reach. We had outreach in five different languages. It was very eye-opening.”

For that project, the team held three open house events. But designers also took the extra step of sending community members surveys in languages such as Marshallese, Arabic, Chuukese and Spanish. Ho worked with the MultiCultural Collaborative to bring in as many different views as possible.

That effort required time and money and is one that many architecture firms struggle to plan for, according to Ankrom Moisan Architects principal Scott Thayer.

“Our firms typically shortchange that whole topic,” he said. “When it comes to the identity of a cultural group or entity, that is where it becomes obvious that some special attention is needed.”

Outreach to communities can lead to subtle project changes that have significant meaning to residents, Thayer said. For instance, for a housing project in a largely African-American area, he said, designers found that porches and stoops were preferred so that residents had places to congregate and socialize. In other parts of the city, porches were largely seen as merely decorative additions.

“It’s important to be able to understand what the lesser understood values are,” he said.

Other subtle changes can be something as simple as a sidewalk upgrade. While working on a series of projects in the area of Division Street between Southeast 117th and 151st avenues, Ho found that residents were unhappy with the states of area sidewalks.

“They felt there were not enough sidewalk lights (and) they weren’t wide enough,” she said. “The area had always been treated like the suburbs. What do you do in suburbs? You drive everywhere.”

What hadn’t been taken into account was the area’s significant Laotian and Burmese populations. Even when traveling by car is an option, many people within those communities would choose to walk.

“They walk around as families,” Ho said. “They are walking because that is what they do. Yet to people and planners who are working in downtown Portland, it is not seen as downtown Portland, so why do they need large sidewalks? You can’t understand how they navigate.”

Ho has found that who designers talk to is as important as the number of people they find. During efforts to redesign the streetscape on Northwest Third and Fourth avenues in Portland’s Chinatown, Ho and her team reached out to the Asian community.

“We did extensive press coverage in the local Chinese Times,” she said. “We also went out and went to meetings with property owners.”

Oftentimes, the small restaurant owner or shopkeeper was the best resource for finding out what a particular community wanted to see in a new development, Ho said.

“Some of these ideas are brushed off by so-called experts,” she said. “These ideas are coming from people not in the mainstream circle. Because no one knows who they are, we are not really paying attention to these voices. As a design team we tried to encapsulate these ideas into the project.”

Portland’s extensive network of neighborhood associations can make the job of gaining public input somewhat easier than in other places.

“People, in general, like to be heard,” said Cameron Hyde, president of Soderstrom Architects. “Sometimes, they aren’t as skilled in describing what they want. It takes more effort to hear them.”

When residents aren’t familiar with dealing with the built environment, and a language or cultural barrier is present, learning what they want can be a challenge, Hyde said.

“You have to sort of interpret what people are saying,” he said.

Sometimes architects find it helpful to hire an interpreter. Design+Culture Lab, for instance, has worked with Ankrom Moisan on outreach in ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

“We will design outreach to allow architects to build relationships,” Design+Culture Lab CEO Joy Davis said. “People want to be involved in shaping their community.”

However, to be effective, outreach must be sincere.

“You have to have quality outreach,” she said. “Designers can’t go in thinking (they) can check a box. People know if it’s thrown in as a token gesture.”

Davis said that the biggest aspect a company like hers brings is trust from minority and disadvantaged communities. Often that effort means walking the streets and involving nonprofits that are active in the community. Davis’ company tries to make sure that the outreach becomes a conversation and not simply a one-note explanation of what a project is going to look like.

“It takes more than a one-size-fits-all approach,” Davis said. “Architects need to spend more time researching beyond their specific area. Get to know the community beyond just the built environment.”

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Designing environments that promote equity and diversity is a big concern of landscape architects, so they’re holding an event on just that topic.

The American Society of Landscape Architects‘ Oregon chapter on April 9 will host a symposium at the University of Oregon’s White Stag Building, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Oregon ASLA spokeswoman Rebecca Wahlstrom said the keynote speaker, landscape architect Diane Jones Allen, is a leader in designing for diversity and equality.

Allen was featured in the November issue of Landscape Architecture magazine for her work to convert empty lots into green community spaces in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. She has also performed pro bono work on plans for restoring Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, once a tree-lined boulevard that separated minority communities when it was replaced decades ago with an elevated freeway.

Allen is a principal of DesignJones LLC, a landscape architecture and urban planning firm based in New Orleans and Baltimore. Her talk is titled “Bridging Community, Practice and Academy to Create Equitable and Resilient Environments.”

Other speakers include Gabriel Diaz Montemayor of the University Texas at Austin, Nolan Lienhart of ZGF Architects, Joy Alise Davis of Design+Culture Lab and Tony DeFalco of Living Cully.

Wahlstrom said the symposium will also include a panel discussion. Attendance costs $165 for ASLA members, $200 for nonmembers and $30 for students. The symposium is co-sponsored by the John Yeon Center for Architecture and the Landscape at the University of Oregon.

The symposium will offer continuing education credits for landscape architects and also provide valuable information for people outside the profession, Wahlstrom said.

“They would be able to hear really diverse speakers and people who will touch on this topic of environmental justice and equity,” she said. “It’s something that we as landscape architects and as a culture don’t touch on enough.”

To learn more and register for the symposium, visit .

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