Updated: Sep 5, 2019
by Rae Richen
Rock art is hard work, but has staying power.
Advertise your shop with art you can walk on? Are you thinking sidewalk chalk art? Thinking paint your intersection of the street? Great ideas, but they have a drawback. You have to renew them every week or every year.
I'm thinking a little more permanence to your art underfoot. I'm thinking rock art.
Look under your feet for an art that is whimsical, yet good advertising. Rock art is hard work, but has staying power.
The photos here are from the town of Freiburg, Germany. We are in the older part of town near the cathedral, where shop spaces are small and close together in buildings from previous centuries. The streets have been closed to auto traffic. The sidewalks are partly brick. The old curbs are concrete or sometimes a conglomerate rock. Next to these materials are patterns made of rock from the River Dreisam and other nearby rivers.
The oblong ovals of rock are from three to four inches long and mostly about two to two and a half inches wide.
As you can see, the sidewalk rock is many-colored: rose, pink, tan, light and dark gray.
The creation of the patterns here means that somewhere along the rock-collecting work path, the sizes and the colors have been sorted. That stripe of pink between two bands of gray represent an eye and a purpose.
The designs represent many knee and back hours with a cartoon and artistic intention. some of the patterns you'll see below represent a clever use of ancient pattern, others represent the type of shop they advertise.
When you are in any new city, notice the art in many places -- even underfoot. Chances are, even your home town has some forms of art you have forgotten to enjoy.
Updated: Feb 1, 2019
By Rae Richen
Many Oregonians work hard to solve the homeless problem. We look at the solutions of others and find that we’re not alone. By studying what is happening in the countries we visit, we see what has worked, and what isn’t working. Just maybe, we can avoid big mistakes.
Or we can find ideas to adopt.
Last month, we looked at the Tiny House possibilities. And that is part of the solution we found in Germany on our recent visit. But in Germany, they’re employing other big pieces to the puzzle. Germany hasn’t solved homelessness, but here is what they are doing.
Homeless In Germany
“Where are the tent-dwelling homeless?” We asked ourselves as we noticed the huge difference in the towns we visited in Switzerland and Germany. Our interest in this subject is the result of our work with the thirteen congregations of the Interfaith Alliance on Poverty in Portland, Oregon.
Portland, Oregon’s lack of low income housing is all too abundantly clear. The alliance has been working with several non-profit partners and with the city to advocate for solutions to this lack of housing and the need to address renters’ rights in a reasonable way.
The Interfaith Alliance has also been working to create deeper understanding of the reasons so many people live in poverty, and has been helping people remain in homes, and become stable in homes despite inadequate pay and rising costs.
In our sixteen days of travel through Switzerland and Germany, there was only one place where we thought there may have been tents in the recent past, and that was in Freiburg near its Dreisam River. There, we saw that the wilderness pathway near the river on the eastern shore had been cut off with a new fence. We thought the fence, hastily erected, may have been an attempt to discourage tenting or some kind of trespass. The west side of the river still contained an open path between the river and the highway. Still, even in this area we saw no beaten down grass or signs of garbage that might have indicated an encampment. It was the only place where we saw a hint of that possibility.
And as we explored that path, we remembered the tents along the Interstate 5 corridor and along the Springwater Corridor.
During our Freiburgian sojourn, somewhat puzzled about the apparent absence of homeless tenting, I began searching for local solutions to homelessness in each town we visited.
True, we were in each town for only a few days, and our radius of search was narrowed by our ability to walk or use the bus system. It is possible that there were whole tent villages on the outskirts of the larger towns such as Freiburg, but in the smaller towns, we were able to visit most of the area of the village and still saw no tents.
As our train crossed a bridge going into Frankfurt, I thought I saw a tiny house village with gardens. But that made little sense because the riverside location is high value property. Then, I remembered that in Estonia and other northern European towns we had visited, our hosts often owned a small acreage for vegetable and fruit growing. Each such lot often had a tool shed and green house.
Sure enough, asking around, that is what the tiny houses turned out to be. People with means had room to grow their own food. No such thing as tiny-house villages, yet.
And then I saw an article in INSP, the International Network of Street Papers. The INSP wrote about Sven Lüdecke who built portable tiny sleeping pods for those who had been sleeping on the streets. They were shelter on wheels, lockable storage, movable when the local powers decided to rid the area of the homeless.
“Just a few months ago, nobody, not even Sven Lüdecke himself, would have thought that this crazy idea would even get off the ground.
However, there was a very similar story from New York, where the interior architect Gregory Kloehn made waves with his Homeless Houses made of bulky refuse, initially only meant as art installations.”
Lüdecke learned that Kloehn had created how-to tutorials on the internet for anyone who wanted to build these houses. “I remember thinking: ‘I want to do that too.’ And so I got myself a few pallets and the necessary tools,” says Lüdecke.
A search of newspapers and opinion pages didn’t turn up mention of a homeless problem, or a camping homeless problem until an article found by a friend toward the very end of the trip. Friends who spoke German fluently also searched in the papers they picked up.
The sleeping pod builder in Germany is creating safety for individuals. But in Portland, Eugene, and Cottage Grove, our several tiny houses are built as communities of people who support each other and create community expectations for caring and living within stability.
Early in the trip to Germany, an internet search in Freiburg indicated that there were three major apartment complexes especially designed for people who may have otherwise been without enough money to rent an apartment. We walked past two of those (the third was in another part of the city. They were clean, good looking buildings with a clear way for only residents to code themselves into the building.
The article about Freiburg that clued us into what these two buildings were, also indicated that Germany supported those with too small an income so that they could rent an apartment. The government had come to the conclusion, based on research, that they could spend less on each person by giving them secure shelter than by allowing their health and mental health to deteriorate because they had no shelter. It will be interesting to follow this over time.
However, while we were in Frankfurt, I read the following in Deutsche Welle or DW, an English language newspaper: “In Frankfurt, the wealthy epicenter of Germany’s finance sector, homeless people will now have to pay fines for sleeping on downtown streets.”
Recently, there had been a backlash against this suggested fine that would be
imposed by the city council – marches against the ordinance at council locations and in the streets of the city. We were not there long enough to know the outcome, but the criminalization of sleeping was very familiar to all of us from Oregon.
I believe this ‘solution’ to homelessness has been put forward in many cities. It is the wish to solve a problem by sweeping it under the rug, by blaming the homeless instead of recognizing our lack of policies that make affordable and low-income housing even possible.
In my previous story about Switzerland, I referred to the evidence that many people who worked in the resort town of Adelboden did not live within the town, but traveled each day by bus down to the towns in the lower valley. This long commute from the affordable to the rich community is true in many parts of the United States. When I visited the area of Ojai California, I learned that the people who worked in the Ojai resort could not afford any home closer than an hour and a half bus ride away – a three-hour part of their work day not covered by their low pay.
The German government intends to provide apartments for low income residents. However, it appears from the articles I read in DW or Deutsche Welle (English language news about Germany), that there are not enough government apartments set aside for the low-income families or individuals within the cities where they work. One article by Elizabeth Schumacher , December 18, 2017, reported that the financial center of Germany, Frankfurt, had proposed to fine those found living on the street. DW also observed that the government of large German cities, such as Berlin had been selling public property that might have been used for housing, while not planning for the influx of moderate to low income workers.
Does any of this sound familiar? Are these ‘solutions’ to homelessness that we have tried in many of our cities?
Who are the homeless in Germany? Some Germans may like to believe most of the homeless are the refugees that have recently come, but that is only a part of the populations. According to Andrea Bistrich, author of an article in the online newspaper, SHARE, “It is easier for families to get temporary accommodation than for single people. This means 35,000 single people face life on the streets.”
An independent organization that offers social services is ironically (or perhaps purposefully) called BAG (BundesArbeitGemeinshaftWohnungsloseHilfe or Organization to Help the Homeless). BAG has demanded official government statistics of homelessness within Germany, but to no avail. It is their hope that real statistics would help determine the need for housing. Bistrich writes that “Estimates indicate that there are approximately 591,000 homeless people in Germany; if you add the homeless immigrants the total adds up to approximately 860,000 people. By way of comparison, that [total number] is the size of Cologne, Germany’s fourth largest city.”
According to SHARE, about almost third of the homeless are women, and almost third are children and 39 percent are men. Recent news in Oregon, indicates that we also have a growing population of children in poverty and in homeless situations.
Building the Wrong Type of Housing
According to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research, only 32 percent of needed new apartments were built in Germany’s major cities between 2011 and 2015, particularly in Berlin. The institute estimates that Germany needs 385,000 new apartments every for the next three years. Most surprising was that there was such a shortage of small apartments.
Institute author Michael Voigtländer, “Investors do want to build, but there’s a lack of building land, and …then of course they build what gets them the biggest margins and that’s the biggest and most expensive apartments.”
According to the deputy director of Berlin’s tenants’ association, Wibke Werner, “Another problem is that most new apartments are for owning, not renting. Given that more than half of Berliners have a relatively low income, the demand is nowhere near covered for now.”
Werner concluded that “Some kind of subsidy that is more attractive than what (Developers) can get on the market is needed. This could be tied to regulations on how many two or three-room apartments should be included in any new buildings.
All of these observations sound very familiar to those of us working to eliminate homelessness in Portland, Oregon, and, I’m certain in all of Oregon. Our recent news shows that while we sought information about housing solutions in Germany, the Portland Housing Bureau planned to buy a nearly-finished apartment complex in East Portland to operate as public housing for low-income renters. The city would pay $14.3 million for the 51-unit building at 10506 E. Burnside St. from the $258 million affordable housing bond voters approved in 2015.
The Portland City Council said that leasing would begin in July. The Portland Housing Bureau plans to buy a nearly-finished apartment complex in East Portland to operate as public housing for low-income renters.
For more information about the Interfaith Alliance on Poverty, (see www.InterfaithAllianceOnPoverty.org ).
For more information about Sven Lüdecke in Cologne and his new project in Berlin, go to https://insp.ngo/tiny-houses-homeless-cologne/
For 2016 statistics on homelessness in Germany: http://share-international.org/archives/homelessness/hl-abGermany.htm
Start following the Portland Housing Bureau work for the homeless at: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/06/portland_to_buy_new_apartment.html
And the Metro proposed housing bond: https://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2018/06/metro_poised_to_refer_6528_mil.html
See you next time with a review of a good book, and then later, some fun we found underfoot.
Rae Richen
Updated: Jan 8, 2019
by Rae Richen
We get it. From our last blog, you were wondering when the cows take over Main Street. You will soon find out.
In our correct train car from Freiburg to Switzerland, we get into a discussion with a Schweizer gentleman from Basel. He loves music, and since he is newly retired, he makes a pastime of seeking out rarely heard operas. He returns this day from Erfurt where he saw an opera by Gaspar Spontini, which he enjoyed and recommended. He also recently heard the modern (1987) opera, Nixon in China (opera by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman). “Very interesting. You should see it.”
I understand his focused hope to hear the lost and the undiscovered. With the same intensity, many of us seek rare animals, high peaks or, in my case, the rare Japanese Maple.
During this discussion, we become aware of the soft sound of swift motion. The rails in Germany and Switzerland are now the same gauge. In war times, change of gauge slowed or halted troop transport from invading countries. In these more peaceful times, movement between countries is smooth, unless you are a refugee.
And if you are a refugee, you must know who was most recently elected to office in each country, and what their attitude is toward your people. It appears need for asylum and immigration is the issue that may tear apart the union of European countries. In the same way, U.S. immigration inhumanity and mistreatment are outcomes of fear sold by politicians who ignore human values.
Presently, in peace-time, the trains in Europe share a gauge and a smoothness that is unbelievable to those from the U.S. The rails are welded together, not linked by couplers. It is those hiccupping couplers that give United States’ trains a rhythmic clackety-clack.
After an hour or so, we say good-bye to our friendly Swiss gentleman as he leaves the train in his home town, Basel. Basel is just across the border from Germany and very near the border with France. We ride on into the countryside around Lake Thun, or Thunersee, and up into the mountainous areas above the lake.
Our goal here is to see the home towns of Woody’s grandparents, Caroline Jungen and Peter Reichen. Yes, our name was Reichen when the family arrived in the United States in the 1880s. Grandma Caroline once told me the name was changed during World War One. “People didn’t like Germans,” she said. “They didn’t know Swiss Germans were not the other type, those who start wars.”
To approach Frutigen, our train runs over low passes and through the mountains (I counted five tunnels of substance) The train emerges from a wood, allowing us our first glimpse of long Lake Thun, a blue and calm water dotted with sails. The main lake lies east to west in a substantial valley. Nearby, a very steep funicular, or tram car, rises on slender tracks into the hills near Lake Thun.
I remember seeing a historic photo of just such a tram which once rose into the west hills of our own town of Portland, Oregon. By the nineteen fifties, that Portland tram had been replaced by a road. Our modern OHSU hospital tram is suspended above ground. Portland's old tram ran on tracks on wooden framing, much like the one we see near Lake Thun.
The church, built first in 1433, overlooks Frutigen, Switzerland. The graveyard uphill from the church has many headstones for people who share a last name with Woody's grandmother and grandfather.
Grandma's Jungen family had lived in the town of Frutigen, near the confluence of the Enstlige River with the Kandar River. the Kandar empties into Lake Thun. The lower portion of the Enstlige and Kandar valleys, are referred to as Frutigland. The Enstlige, Kandar and their tributaries are glacier-fed by the many mountains that we know surround the town. However, as we enter the area, we cannot see those mountains, only impressively huge hills.
Frothy clouds hover between us and the nearby hills. The hills are steep and dark-green with pines and spruce. Our hotel host bemoans the fact that “our mountains hide from you today.”
She invites us to dinner in our Landhaus Adler (Eagle) Hotel and gives us keys to our room on the first floor. As I haul my suitcase up thirty stairs, I remember that in Europe the main floor is street level,also called the rez-de-chausée, the floor for wearing shoes, or as they call it in Switzerland, the Ētage. The first floor is up a goodly height, allowing the main floor Étage to be expansively tall. We go into our room and gratefully take off our shoes.
Looking around at the pine walls, the very small desk, and the minuscule space between furniture pieces, we realize Landhaus Adler in Frutigen expects to serve skiers and hikers who will not be in their room very much. We will not be in the room either, except to recover from jet lag. Woody is out and down along the Enstlige River almost right away. I take a nap.
When I get up, we both go for another walk, along the river, which has been controlled by a concrete channel which may save the town from floods. We wander past tree stumps which have been carved into animals, and through meadows of wild flowers to the upper town where we find the church and the church yard with many Jungen and Reichen tombstones.
Headstone for Marie Schmid Reichen Der Lieben Mutter.
As evening falls, we wonder about the lives of the family members back in 1880. What did they do here? What forced them to leave this beautiful place and face the long journey to America? Woody's grandma once told me, "We didn't have enough to eat. We had to find a new place."
We also find this headstone for an Ernst Werthmuller-Jungen, so we know that Reichens and Jungens remained behind when our family emigrated to the United States. Between 1880, when the grandparents left and 1990 when Margrit Schmid-Reichen died, Switzerland was buffeted by two world wars and the flight of refugees from those wars to this neutral land. They have lived during the formation of the European Union and are now watching to see if that union will hold. We think about what experiences they and we share, and the differences in our lives.
Wandering back to our hotel, we meet a black-faced brown-wool sheep who wonders why we are messing about in his territory. At the moment, the sheep looks big and fence looks flimsy.
Atop a faraway hill in the mist sits a tower. Below is an armature over the railroad tracks that emerge from one of two long tunnels under the hill and the mountains behind.
One morning, we hike out of town to the south heading for a hill we have seen with a tower on top of it. We pass along a busy road and onto a less busy way until we come to a path with an arrow pointing up to Tellenburg. Any reference to William Tell? Maybe, but no one knows for certain.
It is known that the freedom of Switzerland rested on the fires lit atop high hills to warn others in the confederation of the arrival of a Hapsburg representative and his retinue who might try to regain control of the cantons. Was this one of the communication towers? It certainly can be seen for a long distance.
Another possible explanation for this tower is that a burg is a fortified town. There are references in signs to Tellenburg castle, so this may have been part of a castle or one tower in part of a fortified town. Not easy to tease out the meanings of old things. In this part of the world, there are layers on layers of old things.
Tellenburg Tower is fragile, but has reconstructed safer steps to the top.
While Woody climbs the Tellenburg Tower, I take pictures from the lower reaches and realize this tower is built on a basalt intrusion. The edges of the columnar basalt have been squared off with blocks of stone to form the foundation of the tower. This once defensive tower has long been a hikers’ goal. A nearby barn next to the trail has public toilets added to its side for hikers. At the foot of the tower, is a picnic table and a ring for a fireplace. I wonder how many hot dogs and ‘S’mores have been cooked over that fire.
The valley below includes the rail tracks, an old arched bridge and a newer iron bridge, side by side. One track for incoming, another for outgoing to the nearby town of Kandarsteg. In addition, in another direction below us are tracks from a tunnel that has been carved under the mountain.
As we hike home, we pass the tunnel and a display in German telling about the engine that carved the tunnel. In fact, it carved out one long tunnel, as well as another shorter one on a track that heads off into a different valley. The photos of the tunneling machine are very familiar. It is very like the machine which dug our Light Rail tunnel under our Portland west hills and out toward the towns of Beaverton and Hillsboro.
One morning, we take a bus up fifteen miles to Adelboden. Our bus drives along a winding mountain road where the rider is very glad to have wonderful views – mountains of unbelievable rugged beauty surround the area. But the rider is not so glad to look down into the possible fall off the narrow way. Our bus must wait at certain corners to allow another bus or large truck to make the turn first. Both will not fit around a tight corner.
Enstlige Falls seen from a terrace in Adelboden, Switzerland.
Grandpa Peter Reichen’s family had lived up this mountain-side in the high-pasture town of Adelboden. He was here until a teenager, and then his whole family came to America’s west, to the Swiss settlement of Helvetia, near Portland, Oregon. What did Peter and his family do in Adelboden? What did Caroline’s family do in Frutigen? We know too little. And what they might have done is now covered by the present ways of living in this town. Both Frutigen and Adelboden now seem to rely on winter and summer sports to bring tourists.
Many chalets have been built and are being built in this area. Some are homes. Some are homes with rentable rooms. Some are hotels. They all sport the carved rail, the dark outside wood and the scallop-curved fascia board under the wide steep roof that we all picture in our dreams of a ski vacation in the alps. Hard to find your chalet among the clones. Pay close attention to the small variations in banister posts, the carved railings and the color of the flowers in your chalet's window boxes.
Owning or managing a hotel and restaurant is not that new to the inhabitants to Adelboden. The first hotel up here was opened in 1902. And there may have been hostels or boarding houses before that. Indeed, after arriving in Helvetia, Oregon in the 1880s, and then moving to Portland, many in Peter Reichen’s American family were owners and managers of hotels and of restaurants. Peter himself owned that famous hotel in Alaska mentioned in a previous blog. He also, for a time, owned or partially owned the Hoyt Hotel in Portland near the railroad station, and for a time, he owned the Lotus Café and Card Room near the Swiss Cleaners on Third Avenue downtown Portland. So hostelry as a way of earning a living also may have been important in Adelboden before the 1880s.
(Regarding the Lotus Cafe: For old times sake, we have celebrated some Richen/Reichen family birthdays in the Lotus Cafe in Portland, but just this summer, it is closing. Its famous cherry-wood bar is sold to McMenamins and much of the city block will be torn down to make way for new buildings.)
The Swiss family shield indicates that Reichens were carpenters – a compass, a right-angle rule and an axe form a triangle within the shield. Cousin David Richen once explained to us that the Swiss had guild shields and not family coats of arms. David was pleased with the shield. He was an architect. In his visit, many years ago, he found a home somewhat uphill from town that had writing carved in old German script. The carving announced that the building had been constructed by A. Reichen. During our visit, we don’t find that building, but we do see others that have lettering carved on them. Most carvings are painted gold or red to stand out from the dark chalet wood. Most include a philosophical quote of the “Home is where the heart is” sort, in German, of course.
The day is sunny. We lunch on the terrace of another Adler Hotel and restaurant. The Adler or Eagle is an important emblem in these areas. Adel -boden literally means Adel -- nobility, and boden – territory. Some say this name may refer to that noble bird and may mean the eagle’s nest. Who knows? We all tell ourselves the stories our parents have told us, trying to explain the meanings of the past.
We’ve seen so many eagles in various styles in these two towns, that we’re bemused at the frou-frou over certain Kosovo-born Swiss soccer players who in their excitement over making a goal for Switzerland used the double-eagle sign to express their elation. So what if the double-eagle sign is from their country of origin? Allow them their emotions. The Swiss seem to have hung on to the Hapsburgian Eagle as a symbol of their love of country, even though it was from the Hapsburg regime that William Tell and others fought to gain independence. The frou-frou seems to be anti-immigrant slop put out by politicians who play on the fears of others by pretending that only certain strains of people can be seen as real citizens. True here in Switzerland, for a few, as it is way too true in the U.S. right now.
While we sip coffee on the terrace of the Adelboden Adler, we stare up at the circle of snow-covered mountains and suddenly two para-sails appear, coming up over the pass between two peaks. We watch them float about and down toward the forest. It takes them over an hour to arrive at a pasture far below us. Surprise for the cows? Or a normal arrival in their days near this recreation area?
We learn that parasail companies can be certified for safety. The advertising says that children as young as four can be safely transported by parasail. I happen to know that six year olds can be sailing like this, but that is a story for another time, when I calm down from the memory.
Later in the day in Adelboden, we get small glimpses of what life must have been in more rural times. We are visiting the church yard near the main street. The church was built in the 1400s and has a mural on its outer wall, beneath a porch roof, depicting heaven and hell with Jesus in between. The mural was first painted in 1477 and has been restored a few times in the life of the church. This congregation once was Catholic and is now Reformed Evangelical. During the Reformation which seems mostly to have taken place without war, we are told that the Catholic priest escaped over the pass to the south. That’s all that is known. Which pass? What was coming his way that made escape seem necessary? No one knows.
Across the street from the church, the statue of a cow stands on the roof of the cheese market. She is pretty much the same cow statue one finds in many towns except Grants Pass, Oregon where they have bear statues. Adelboden's cow is painted white and brown – a Guernsey. Suddenly, that cow begins to moo.
As she moos, pedestrians and cars leave the main street. Soon, we can hear bells approaching. Large deep bells and high pinging bells accompanied the moo of live cows. Herdsmen approach, followed by small, reddish brown and white (are they Jersey cows?). Each cow has a bell hung around her neck. The lead cow begins to stray up the side street next to the church yard, but the lead herdsman touches her flank and brings her back to the main street.
Woody follows the herd for several blocks and sees that within the herd are a few Guernseys.
When he returns, he says, “I’ve been running with the cows.”
While Woody is gone, I visit the cheese market and ask about the mooing cow statue. Yes, they have a button on the wall and Yes, they use it to clear the street before a herd comes through. The herd of about twenty cows and three herdsmen are headed for higher pasture and newer grass. In the afternoon, we take the four o’clock bus back to Frutigen. I realize that many on that bus are women we have seen working around the town, in the hotels and restaurants of Adelboden. I see that they live where they don’t work, which is true in many resort areas of the United States. Those who work cannot afford convenient housing near their job. I once visited Ojai, California and learned that the workers in that area couldn’t afford any home closer than an hour and a half drive from work. In the moment when we disembark with the hotel workers in Frutigen, I remember a comment made by the gentleman from Basel. “Frutigen is known to have five very conservative churches with views like your Tea Party and pandered to by your president. A few of our politicians pander to people who fear immigration in that same manner. But these groups are small, and we are not worried.” I think about people who may find solace in keeping out immigrants: people who feel threatened by those not like us, people who feel that if an immigrant gets a job, we are robbed of something, people who are threatened by those who have new and different traditions and may displace us in our precarious world.
I believe that we need to make life become less precarious for those who fear. We need to make all citizens safe from the edge of financial disaster. We need fair housing policies, access to a living wage and good schools to help all people feel safe. Secure people are less fearful and more able to accept others. Unlike the gentleman from Basel, we should worry. We should worry enough to make certain all our citizens have shelter and a living wage. Let’s worry when the problem is as small as Frutigen. Let’s move to solve income fragility before fear again elects politicians who pander. When we have waited too long, it is much more difficult to change course, but our course must change to include rising prospects for those who feel left behind.
The next early afternoon, we say goodbye to Frutigen and we take the train to Frankfurt for an entirely different kind of travel. Another story about the present and the past, for another day. Gute Reise! Good journey to you.
Rae Richen
