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A proposal to hold business owners responsible for sexual trafficking on their properties, particularly along 82nd Avenue, was met with a mixed reception on the Portland City Council last week. The body’s left flank voiced concerns that it would penalize small business owners and drive exploitation further into the shadows, making it harder to identify and help victims.
The proposal, if passed by the City Council in the coming weeks, would take a novel approach to cracking down on sexual exploitation. The policy amends the city’s existing chronic nuisance property code to include activities like loitering to solicit prostitution, operation of a massage business in violation of state law, possession of a loaded firearm, and prostitution procurement. If a property receives at least two nuisance complaints—either documented through a police report or a declaration by law enforcement that it has probable cause to believe that such activity has occurred—within a 90-day time frame, then the city administrator would have the authority to require that the property owner take steps to abate the nuisance.
Councilor Steve Novick brought forth the proposal, he said, to make it harder for sex purchasers to exploit young people and to ensure that students at McDaniel High School aren’t walking through a “gauntlet” of prostitution while en route to school.
He said the city’s current policy is too weak.
“To what extent do we think property owners have an obligation to make sure that their properties aren’t being used as a base for certain sorts of illegal activity, such as human trafficking or drug dealing?” Novick said. “What we’ve heard from law enforcement is that [our current code] is too restrictive.”
Portland officials have long sought to restrict the sale of sex on streets like North Interstate Avenue and Southeast 82nd Avenue. What complicates the matter is that the sex industry consists both of people engaged in a consensual trade and other people being trafficked against their will or without the ability to exercise choice. Observers often disagree which of these conditions is more common in Portland—and also debate whether a punitive approach helps victims or hurts them.
Survivors of sex trafficking who testified to the council had different takes on the policy. Some said it would hold accountable business owners who knew trafficking was taking place on their properties but did nothing. Others said the increased enforcement would simply make the abuse more clandestine.
Chelsey Passon, a former victim of sex trafficking, urged the council to support the policy.
“Overwhelmingly, our stories are ones of violence and oppression, not of empowerment,” Passon said. “At this very moment, there is someone, or likely many someones, stuck in a hotel on 82nd Avenue who is unable to leave or eat or even sleep until they meet their quota making as much money as they can through the exchange of commercial sex acts. I hope no one else in this room ever has to experienced the feeling that comes from the commodification of one’s body for another person’s pleasure.”
Robin Miller urged the same, telling the council that she’d been trafficked along the very street that Novick had mentioned as his inspiration for the policy. “I was moved up and down 82nd through motels, places where everyone knew what was happening, and where no one intervened,” Miller said, growing emotional. “They’re hubs of exploitation and places where my life was at risk.”
Yet Emi Koyama, also a survivor of sex trafficking, said the policy could hurt more than help because it didn’t address “underlying social and economic conditions that lead to vulnerabilities and abuse.”
“It pushes certain people and activities further underground, displacing, isolating and endangering people who are already vulnerable to exploitation and abuse,” Koyama said.
A key voice in support of the policy was state Rep. Thuy Tran (D-Portland), who co-sponsored a state bill last year that increased civil penalties for illicit massage parlors. That’s an industry that’s exploded in East Portland since the pandemic, and Tran and sex trafficking experts have said the businesses are often staffed by women who have been trafficked and are forced into commercial sex acts.
“I come to stand with the [anti-]human trafficking advocates from across the city who are demanding that we finally stop looking the other way,” Tran said.
But some members of the council’s progressive caucus took issue with the policy.
When Multnomah County senior deputy district attorney JR Ujifusa noted that such a policy could be an important tool in the fight against human trafficking, Councilor Candace Avalos challenged that premise, worrying that it would just move the sex trafficking elsewhere. She also questioned Novick on what success metrics would look like.
Novick replied: “I think that if there’s fewer places where exploitation to occur, then less exploitation will occur.”
Ujifusa said, similarly, that “if I can prevent two young people in Portland from being trafficked and their trafficker to be held accountable so that they don’t recruit other young people, I think that metric is well worth creating and amending this city code to protect those youth.”
Avalos bristled, saying she would “appreciate having a little bit of deference for the fact that I’m coming from my own lived experience, and there are people in my community who are experiencing the result of exploitation by further pushing this into the shadows.”
When Novick asked if Passon, one of the survivors, could respond to Avalos’ concern, Avalos declined.
“I’ve asked my question, and if I have more, I will ask them,” Avalos replied. “Thank you for your perspective, but I think I’m done with my questioning and I’m not asking for further.”
Councilor Sameer Kanal said that the only “predictable outcome” of the policy would be “running [motels and hotels] out of business.”
“One of the most dangerous things a person with decision-making authority can do is to recognize a real problem and say, just, ‘We have to do something,’” Kanal said. “What has been done here is taking an accurate assessment of the problem and going and finding a scapegoat: business owners along 82nd Avenue.”
Kanal moved to send the policy back to the Community and Public Safety Safety Committee for more reworking, especially in light of a handful of proposed alterations. His motion died.
Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney cast the attempt to send it back to committee as a delay tactic. “I’m not sure why we’re sending this back to committee,” Pirtle-Guiney said, “other than to delay.”
Nearing the end of the meeting, Novick appeared frustrated by Kanal’s motion, which was supported by Avalos and Councilors Mitch Green and Angelita Morillo.
“These amendments are pretty straightforward. They’re not hard to understand,” Novick said. “I do think that my colleagues do simply want to delay...they don’t like the underlying law, they don’t like the proposal, that’s not going to change.”
