Last July, an unusual letter arrived at Kathryn Kundmuller’s mobile home in central Oregon. It invited her to participate in a drawing to select 30 Deschutes County residents to spend five days talking about youth homelessness. This is a visibly controversial issue in the region, where population and living costs have skyrocketed in recent years. Those selected will be paid for their time (nearly $500) and asked to develop specific policy recommendations.
Kundmüller had been invited to participate in a so-called citizens’ assembly. These gatherings do what most democracies only pretend to do: leave decision-making on difficult policy issues to ordinary people. Many civic assemblies follow a basic template. They attack a random but representative group of people, provide them with quality information on a topic, and ask them to collaborate in reaching a decision. In Europe, these groups helped push through Ireland’s constitutional reform to legalize abortion, guided an Austrian pharmaceutical heir on how to transfer his wealth, and are regulars in governments in Paris and Belgium. Although still rare in the United States, this model reflects the surprising idea that fundamental problems in politics, such as polarization, apathy, and manipulation by special interests, can be transformed through radical direct democracy.
Kundmüller, who is usually dissatisfied with politics, was intrigued by the letter. She liked the prospect of being able to help shape local policy, and the topic of housing insecurity particularly resonated with her. As a teenager, after a falling out with her father, she spent months bouncing between friends’ couches in Vermont. When she moved across the country to San Jose after college, she lived in her car for a while while looking for steady work. She worked in the financial industry but became disillusioned. Now in her early 40s, she ran a small house cleaning business. She was still considering living in a van and renting a mobile home to save money.
About 120 people responded to an initial mailing to 12,700 households in Deschutes County. Congressional organizers, a group of nonprofit organizations with the support of local elected officials and philanthropic funding, target selected delegates along a variety of axes, including age, gender, housing status, ethnicity, political affiliation, and education. and wanted to reflect the demographics of the county. The Portland-based organization Healthy Democracy has implemented a software program that uses survey results from respondents to create a large representative mix that reflects the region in microcosm. When one of those groups was randomly selected by a lottery-style system, Kundmuller was among them.
The rally lasted five full days, spread over two weekends several weeks apart. Members of the group range in age from teenagers to people in their 80s and include a retired pipe fitter, an IT professional, a restaurant manager, an employee of a local ammunition manufacturing company, and several small business owners. was. Some participants were struggling to pay rent in small apartments. Others owned spacious houses with many spare rooms. About 50% were politically independent, and the remaining half were evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
They met in the airy wood-paneled atrium of a new building on Oregon State University’s Cascade Campus in the county seat of Bend, engaging in icebreakers and small group discussions while learning about youth homelessness and each other. Spent the first weekend there. , presentations by experts. “There was an awkward atmosphere in the room. It felt like an elite university, in a really good way,” a local government council member who toured the first weekend told me.
The awkward but civil conversation was an improvement over recent political debates about homelessness in Deschutes County. One Bend City Council member recalled a public meeting where someone compared the homeless to raccoons and said if they were fed they would stay in the area and increase the number of raccoons. Advocates for homeless people can also be extreme. Another local councilor said he had been likened to the Nazis for suggesting the need to regulate encampments.
During the first weekend, lawmakers developed questions they wanted answered in the second session. Organizers then convened a committee of nonprofit service providers, government officials and community activists to address the delegates. Some of the questions were very broad, such as “How can we break the intergenerational cycle of poverty?” There was also a very targeted comment: “How much money is being spent cleaning up homeless camps?” “Are there more funds and resources to build smaller homes?”
In an era of increasingly polarized and dysfunctional politics, a diverse group of citizens calmly studying and debating sensitive issues presents a surprisingly functional image of politics. “It was like Congress without the hype,” Elizabeth Marino, an OSU-Cascades associate professor of anthropology who studies divisive conversations, said of the first weekend. Marino, along with a group of researchers at MIT, were interested in observing gatherings to understand how people navigate tense conversations. Marino’s research team found that changing the moral framework used to discuss polarizing topics allows for greater agreement. In one study, researchers found that when climate change was framed in terms of patriotism, personal responsibility, and the purity of America’s environment, conservatives were more likely to found that people were more likely to say it was caused by humans. Values such as justice and fairness are typically more appealing to liberals. The researchers found similar results when suicide prevention messages addressed to firearm owners invoked tradition and responsibility. These were controlled studies. Whether something similar would occur spontaneously in Bend was an open question.
On a cool Friday morning in October, participants sipped coffee and fruit in the light-filled atrium, chatting and waiting for the final three days of the competition to begin. The room aesthetic was divided between an elk hunting cabin and a trendy coffee shop. Some wore jeans, work boots, and cowboy hats, while others wore leggings, puffy jackets, and hoodies. Bend reflects a similar situation. This city of about 100,000 people was once a logging town and is now home to craft breweries, upscale boutiques, and technology companies.
The participants took their seats at large U-shaped tables and chatted peacefully. After the first weekend, they learned who would play Scrabble, who would raise the alpacas, and who would do the interior decorating. The atmosphere was more like a neighborhood association potluck than a city council meeting.
Clouds of yellow sticky notes were placed on the window banks, where participants wrote down points they wanted the whole group to consider. They range from facts (“There are 500 homeless children in central Oregon”) to policy pitches (“Direct cash transfers represent life-changing changes for youth in the homeless system”). , and a quote by conservative economist Thomas Sowell (“There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”)
During the morning session, a bearded delegate named Benjamin, wearing a blue and white plaid shirt, tapped a microphone on the table in front of his seat and began speaking. He said that based on the information presented, it seemed safe to assume that it would be impossible to increase housing supply fast enough to drive down prices. Instead, he wondered if there was a way to reduce demand from “out-of-area buyers” who had “disproportionate purchasing power.”
The three panelists, all housing policy experts and city or county government officials, offered no concrete ways to accomplish this. “It’s probably going to be a bigger philosophical discussion,” said Deschutes County Deputy County Administrator Eric Kropp. “I don’t see how it’s limiting buyers in terms of where it’s coming from.” A second panelist mentioned Portland’s policy to use property tax revenue to fund affordable housing. “Here’s a list,” Benjamin said while reading on his laptop, listing various places that tax out-of-area buyers. . Kundmüller, who was a few seats away, nodded as he spoke and wrote something down on his notepad. “Do you think that is politically feasible?” Benjamin asked panel members. they didn’t know. Some suggested this was a question for elected officials, not staff.
Benjamin’s idea can be considered a wealth tax, but this was not the way he presented it. Instead, it implicitly appealed to people within the region to protect them from outsiders who would jack up prices. “It was shocking,” Marino said later. “It felt like a new path forward, which you don’t get a lot of when you’re listening to arguments on the floor, right?”
During a snack break, I approached Benjamin. Benjamin was making a point about the unreliability of the media to a small representative group. He claimed the rumor that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets was based in truth — he was from there, so he should know. He was happy to talk to me about his life and political views, which he described as “somewhat akin to anarchism, agorism, and libertarianism.” However, he felt these labels were misleading. “Which liberals have you heard proposing tax increases?”
