Fred Stewart

Fred Stewart wants to talk—positively, for a change—about gentrification in North and Northeast Portland.

Stewart, a longtime real estate agent in an area that's seen intense demographic shifts in recent decades, acknowledged this week he's planning a run at Commissioner Steve Novick's city council seat in May. It's no secret Stewart has long coveted public office. He ran for a council seat in 2008, shortly after Commissioner Erik Sten quit the job mid-term, but came in third in a race that launched Commissioner Nick Fish onto the council. He ran for state senate the following year.

Ask Stewart why he's running again, and he'll point to the obvious knock on Novick: repeated, failed attempts (along with Mayor Charlie Hales) to push through a new "street fee" without a public vote. "When I walk into the room, if I detect a bully, I’m gonna stand right next to the bully," says Stewart, who nevertheless claims a lot of respect for Novick. "In this case Steve Novick’s a bully."

Plan to hear a lot about that if Stewart follows through—as he promises to—on plans to run. He's also pitching himself as a business-friendly Democrat, though he hasn't worked out the specifics of his campaign.

More interesting, though, could be Stewart's take on the titanic shifts that have taken hold of North and Northeast Portland. A litany of terrible public policy decisions first made those areas the only place African American Portlanders could reasonably live, then set about letting them languish or pushing them out (read this entire PDF if you never have). Those shifts have spawned new ire at a time when Portland's thinking harder than ever about oncoming gentrification and displacement (see: the Trader Joe's controversy of last year).

Stewart, who figures he's sold more homes in inner Northeast Portland than anyone, doesn't agree with the concerns.

"That's another reason why I’m running," he tells the Mercury. "I’m very happy with the direction inner Northeast and North Portland have gone. I’ve got people jogging at two in the morning. When I was growing up, you didn’t jog at two in the afternoon."

Stewart says discussions of displacement in the neighborhood is a "hot topic from a group of people who refused to buy in Northeast."

"That’s one of the reason why I love to talk to people who want to talk about changes here," he says. "I remember how hard it was to sell houses here. I remember when people said 'hell no I won’t.'"

He insists no one's been pushed from the neighborhood, either. "About a third of my listings were owned by black people," he says. "You know what they wanted? They wanted to buy in other markets in the city and state. And they did."

The counter-argument, of course, is that those people sold only after years of abandonment and disinvestment had left the neighborhoods run down and riddled with crime.

This isn't the first time Stewart's ran with housing in mind. In the 2008 council race, he ran partly on a rent stabilization platform, and that's something he's still clearly concerned about. He says the "street fee" proposed by Novick and Hales (in its many iterations) would have resulted in higher rents. He's got a similar gripe with a $482 million schools bond voters passed in 2012.

"That school bond measure kicked more people out of inner Northeast Portland than any home sale has ever done," Stewart says.

Stewart, who's already commissioned polling he expects to see results for shortly, is the strongest bet right now to run against Novick. Past council candidate Nick Caleb announced earlier this month he's changed his mind about running for personal reasons.