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Reprinted from The Antiplanner

 

Let’s Talk about Gentrification

Jun 2

2008

The New York Times has a love affair with Portland, but a recent article points to a dark side of Portland that the Antiplanner has commented on before: it is (as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser once put it) a “boutique city catering only to a small, highly educated elite.”

That means there isn’t much room in Portland for chronically low-income blacks. The black “ghetto,” as we called parts of Northeast Portland when I was growing up there, has been gentrified by yuppies who can’t afford homes elsewhere in the region’s urban-growth boundary. This has pushed blacks from rental housing in those neighborhoods, leaving just a scattering of blacks who owned their homes.

What is left “is not drug infested, but then you say, ‘Well, what happened to all the black people that were in this area?’ ” Margaret Solomon, a long-time black resident told the Times. “You don’t see any.” As California writer Joseph Perkins put it, “smart growth is the new Jim Crow.”

Portland’s solution? A “Restorative Listening Project” where white newcomers could listen to the complaints of blacks who have been pushed out and those who are left behind. The whites love it because they get to feel like they are part of some New Age reconciliation process.

Some of the blacks are not so sure. “Where’s this meeting going?” one asked the Timesarchives on the Wayback Machine (a useful source of documents no longer available on their original web sites).

Portland is not unusual. As documented by Joel Kotkin, the same thing is happening, with much greater vengeance, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is probably also happening in Seattle. It may soon happen in Denver.

What bugs the Antiplanner is that the people in these cities, as the Times notes in its headline, call themselves “progressives,” as if this means they care about democracy and the rights of low-income families, minorities, and others to try to attain the American dream. In fact, Progressives have always been some of the most intolerant, authoritarian folks around. But more on that tomorrow.

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