Educator and writer Michael Copperman has discovered that Portland’s hip scene has come at a price: young people moving to Portland from other parts of the country have gentrified North Portland, traditionally a heavily black neighborhood, and displaced blacks to the suburbs. “The number of people living in poverty in Portland’s suburbs shot up almost 100 percent between 2000 and 2011,” observes Copperman.
While such income and racial integration might be welcome, it has its costs as well. While the whites gentrifying North Portland neighborhoods enjoy food carts, boutique restaurants, and ethnic grocery stores, displaced blacks are not better off in the suburbs and in many cases are worse off, replacing the single-family homes they rented with cramped apartments.
“Suburban Portland, home to the most notorious white West Coast gangs, has in some hotspots become a turf war apartment complex by apartment complex, the traditional Crips and Bloods of urban Portland overlapping areas dominated by the European Kindred and affiliates, all battling to control lucrative sex trafficking operations off the I-5 Corridor,” says Copperman, a transition that is pretty much invisible to recently arrived Millennials.
“If the North’s poor black residents are driven to the same poverty in less desirable areas, then the Portland Boheme for middle-class whites has been purchased at a price of cultural disruption and displacement, even violence.” Copperman adds, “people flocking Portland-ward rarely wish to accept their own culpability or complicity in this story—there is a desire on behalf of most newcomers to think of themselves as socially progressive and so properly enlightened, as if being anti-racist or super-considerate and well-meaning, responsible even, somehow makes this process of ‘urban renewal’ consequence-less and clean. It is not.”
This is said so because levitra without prescription certain components of the pill. Erectile dysfunction drugs such as view this link now the best sildenafile used by a wide number of men who need help with that is a top-notch penis health cr me (health professionals recommend Man 1 Man Oil, which is clinically tried and intended to effectiveness. Each senior, junior and young ones needs their personal home care treatment from their very cheap viagra nearest one. The reason commander viagra find over here now behind doing so was that the business was initiated more from the side of erectile dysfunction rather than for increasing size of penis.
In the classes he teaches, Copperman meets both “at-risk” minorities and middle-class whites trying to be bohemians. While the whites may live a life of voluntary poverty, riding bicycles instead of owning cars, they have a safety net: they can rely on their parent’s (or their own trust funds) if anything goes wrong. The minorities they displace have no such safety nets.
“Portland is a modern microcosm of the nation,” concludes Copperman, “in all the glory and strangeness of the beard and the bike, the contradictions inherent in the white hipster’s celebration of hip-hop, the music of black poverty, as he moves into a neighborhood that was once black and poor and will be no more.”
Copperman’s observations are hardly new. Though his data compare 2000 with 2011, the trends were visible long before 2011. A 1999 paper on displacement by the Coalition for a Livable Future showed that poverty rates in Portland suburbs grew rapidly between 1990 and 1996.
What neither Copperman nor the now-defunct Coalition for a Livable Future recognize is that the physical and cultural displacement caused by gentrification is a direct result of Portland’s urban-growth boundary (which the coalition, at least, strongly supported). As the Antiplanner noted in The Vanishing Automobile, without the growth boundary, Portland housing prices would not have grown high enough to lead Portland’s growing hip population to displace blacks in North Portland]. Creating an artificial land shortage may have benefitted some property owners, but it harmed newcomers looking for an affordable place to live as well as many existing residents who remain nearly invisible to the middle-class Millennials pretending to be socially responsible.
“, traditionally a heavily black neighborhood, and displaced blacks to the suburbs. ”
A large part of the racism is the USA is down to language like this. People are not ‘black’ and ‘white’, they are people with a wide variety in how light or dark their skin is. If the most that you can say about someone is how light or dark their skin is, you can’t know much about them.
“While the whites may live a life of voluntary poverty, riding bicycles instead of owning cars, …”
Not unlike Amsterdam, a very wealthy European city. Or Copenhagen. Or…
An interesting take. I wonder how Mr. O’Toole explains the gentrification pressures felt in places like Kansas City, Houston, and other antiplanner havens. The fact is many traditional black, Latino and/or low income neighborhoods are close to city centers. Over time people realize that the barriers separating those neighborhoods from the real estate hot spots in a the city are artificial. Land is bought up. Investment pours in. New fancy units are built. Often density and intensity increase. Property values increase. And there you have it, gentrification.
The only thing that is literally driving people out of their neighborhood is property tax. People can afford to continue to live in their homes except the fact that they can’t afford the increase in tax. I’ve pondered a solution that would levy the tax increase upon the sale of the home opposed to increasing the tax paid every year. Could that help families remain in their existing neighborhoods? Just a thought.
“I wonder how Mr. O’Toole explains the gentrification pressures felt in places like Kansas City”
The KC one is easy. It’s because of the World Champion Kansas City Royals! The team has reinvigorated the city. Expats living in expensive cities like Denver, SF, Seattle are returning and enjoying very affordable housing AND great baseball.
Wait for it… wait for it…
“gentrification is a direct result of Portland’s urban-growth boundary”
I’ve pondered a solution that would levy the tax increase upon the sale of the home opposed to increasing the tax paid every year. Could that help families remain in their existing neighborhoods? Just a thought.
No. Most of the low-income residents who are displaced by gentrification are renters. Instituting a tax that is applicable upon the sale of the property will only result in that expected (future) tax getting capitalized back into current rental prices. The net result is the same.
A large part of the racism is the USA is down to language like this. People are not ‘black’ and ‘white’, they are people with a wide variety in how light or dark their skin is. If the most that you can say about someone is how light or dark their skin is, you can’t know much about them.
There are two possible explanations for the continuing use of descriptors like “black” to refer to ethnic groups. One is a matter of sheer simplicity of measurement. The U.S. Census still uses terms like “black” and “white” to refer to groups. The former is a catch-all term to describe both native-born African-Americans as well immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. The latter is a similar term used to describe virtually anyone of at least partial European descent. In more causal use, “black” and “African-American” are interchangeable, and separate terms are usually used for African immigrants.
The second reason for the use of “white” and “black” is that people whose livelihood relies on them portraying stark racial divides seems to require them to use these terms in order to sow the kind of division that paves the way for special pleading. The contemporary case-in-point is the Black Lives Matter movement in many cities, which is essentially doing the same thing that people like Al Sharpton have been doing for over a generation, but adding a hashtag to it in order to widen its appeal among a shallow social media audience.
An interesting take. I wonder how Mr. O’Toole explains the gentrification pressures felt in places like Kansas City, Houston, and other antiplanner havens.
I haven’t looked into Houston in any detail, but a quick perusal reveals that Kansas City’s population has become increasingly less white over the past two decades. Kansas City, Missouri is becoming increasingly Latino, white Kansas City, Kansas is becoming more black and Latino.