Please tell me someone recorded audio or video of some sort.

i'm all for going back to 1900. my house would only be 10 yrs old and would probably be lookin' pretty good. Also, the tradesman of that time were pretty cheap, so my second bathroom would have been less expensive. I would have had a hand made sink instead of the one I have from Turkey (via IKEA.)

Joking aside, a great night. Great discussion. I truly wish someone would have defined Red Lining for the crowd. Also, the discussion should look at the larger issues. Yeah, North Portland used to be working class. It isn't much anymore because there aren't that many working class jobs left in Portland let alone the nation. We've become beholden to the service industry.

Diesel, your Ikea sink is why Portland has become gentrified. It's all your Ikea sink's fault. All of it.

Now: "Redlining," according to this past Mercury piece by Katia Dunn, is defined as follows:

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=26633&category=22107

"In Portland's past," explained an anonymous email claiming responsibility, "'redlining' practices created exclusionary zones for 'Negroes and Orientals,' by real estate, banking, and insurance companies. Now, urban gentrification displaces low-income families, as the remaining affordable housing stock in this area disappears."

Oregon is also the only state to have written a "black exclusion law" into its constitution:

http://www.drbilllong.com/LegalEssays/OregonBlacks.html

More on Met'blogs here:

http://portland.metblogs.com/archives/2007/08/debate_club_gen.phtml

You ought to look into the history of Vanport...before that humongous housing project...the largest in America...came along during WW2, Portland had a black population of 1,931, out of 305,394. In other words, slightly more than one half of one percent of the entire city was black, at the time of the 1940 Census.

N and NE Portland were built, and inhabited, almost entirely by whites before the war.

Supposedly, this place even had segregated restrooms and drinking fountains, just like the South, and extremely active KKK groups, from which a large amount of the local police force was recruited.

The rumor is, the entire State of Oregon was founded in large part by the KKK, and was intended to be a whites-only state. From what I've seen around here, I believe it.

Amazing tidbit Cabbie. All of the housing N/NE was indeed built explicitly for the post-WW2 soliders to return and work at our ports and manufacturing centers.

As for the racial divide, yep. Portland was about the last place, outside of the Southern US, to be dealing with a serious Skinhead problem. Terrible stuff. Then again, we should be hopeful about Portland (Oregon in general) becoming more diverse. If Atlanta, GA and other southern cities can have a large, thriving diversity - we can too!

the wikipedia entry on redlining is pretty good. i've been searching online for a historical redline map of portland, even asked a title company if they had one.. but i've failed so far.

there are some streets in portland that i am pretty sure still bear the mark of being a redline border. 15th ave for example, with sabin on one side and alameda on the other.

while 14th and 16th are roughly similar in housing stock, 16th has older, more established landscaping. the houses are in better shape, there are fewer new homes or major renovations on 16th as well (cause the houses kept in good shape).

opb's actually going to have a short documentary on the history of vanport on their Oregon Lens show next tuesday for those who are interested in some of that history:
http://www.opb.org/programs/oregonlens/

dieselboi, as for your comment about working class, maybe we need to change our definition of what that means in these times-- what with the lack of unions in a lot more jobs these days, less access to health care, etc. I'm considered a white-collar worker, but i'd say that I make more of a working-class living if you look at my income level, and that's part of why i moved to n. portland, because it was what i could afford. it's not like I'm sitting around lighting my cigars with dollar bills, and I'd certainly be in bad shape if either my wife or myself had a sudden loss of income.

though there really IS no substitute for the flavor of a cigar lit by a burning $20 bill.

and i'm with a commenter over on the Metblogs
http://portland.metblogs.com/archives/2007/08/gentrification.phtml#comments
who wrote:

I'm all for affordable housing for all, but i really don't see what the argument is about people taking pride in their neighborhood, investing time and resources to clean it up and making it more liveable. This is a bad thing?

If you want to argue against the infiltration of chain stores and strip malls, that's one thing. But people finding an area desirable, purchasing a home there, then improving the neighborhood? I just don't see the detriment in that.

judging by that photo, in true portland fashion, a whole lotta white people were discussing gentrification and "racial displacement". did anyone actually affected by these issues come to the debate?

Hey Jason, I'm affected by double-digit rental cost inflation. How about that half of all Portland homes now cost more than $300,000?

Michelle Reeves made a great point at the beginning about defining terms and getting specific about what we mean by "gentrification."

Too bad no one listened to her. Aside for John Charles's epic conflation of racially exclusionary regulation with *all regulation since the turn of the century*, none of the panelists talked about the causes of or proposed solutions to racial displacement or so-called "blighted" communities. And I don't recall hearing any mention of the words "Portland Development Commisssion," by anyone in the debate.

But for the record, I wouldn't mind yellow fever and no indoor plumbing if it meant fewer restrictions on my ability to build a big house for under 100k. Added bonus if I could do it entirely with underpaid Chinese labor.

the man i was sitting next to at the bar and i agreed that the debate was way too short. a lot of the major issues around this topic were not even mentioned because the whole thing lasted for LESS THAN AN HOUR. I think there was plenty of interest to keep the conversation going a little bit longer.

at the bar: "always leave em wanting more..!"

If anybody has more information on redlining or Vanport—thanks for the info Cabbie, by the way—please get in touch at mdavis@portlandmercury.com.

I'm interested, after last night, in doing a more thorough investigation of Portland, and Oregon's, racial history.

Matt,

Sorry I didn't attend. It sounds like it was interesting to say the least, although I too found it sadly ironic that everyone on the panel were a bunch of crackers.

Anyway, I have a ton of stuff on Vanport and Redlining in Portland. Drop me a line and I'll set you up.

I would have liked to see some more pointed criticism of the free-market/trickle down/rising tide arguments I thought were put to rest following the Reagan era. So I'll just say it here: Free markets tend towards islands of wealth and continents of poverty. That's because wealth can buy power to increase wealth and then you have a feedback loop. Secondly, despite the business mantra, change isn't good. Maybe it's good for those islands of wealth, but for most people change is bad. For the University of Chicago economists that have set our national economic policy for more than 25 years, anxiety and dread have not been monetized so they aren't worth considering. If you're not considering these things, the demise of a stable economy doesn't matter if it increases absolute wealth.

There are many other more specific criticisms of the free market position, but these are the two big ones for me.

overall i thought the debate was pretty amusing. i know there were some last minute changes to the panel, but i was wondering how they were chosen, and did you get roughly what you expected? when i think of the gentrification debate in pdx, the things that comes to mind are:

jack bog vs homer williams.
mississippi neighbors vs randy rappaport.
lair hill neighborhood vs the tram/"SoWhat".
etc...

an odd mix of criticism of misuse of public funds, displacement, nimbyism, "they're killing portland" on one side, and public transt, green building, condos/densification, and the pdc/pba on the other.

the thing about that argument is that there is an actual divide within the typical portland progressive outlook, and good arguments for each position. whereas the 1 hardcore libertarian vs two portland progressives (plus the whole audience) felt kind of one sided and obscure. (how many times did john charles refer to the "government created cartel of homeowners"??? i'm not saying that's not a good argument or anything...)

oh yeah, what was up with the people who were booing everyone who was not born in portland... i mean, the greater metro region... but also including the outlying areas... actually, include all of oregon... and some of southwest washington... and that little sliver of california that is part of the state of "jefferson"... oh forget it, anyone who had moved here 1 year before anyone else? so what do you think, was that sarcastic, or sincere?

The non-crackers who were invited all declined. And, as Michelle pointed out, the race issues are separate from (though a part of the discussion about) gentrification, which can affect anyone who doesn't have the funds to stay in their neighborhood, or who's looking to get their own piece of dirt.

i dunno if you can really separate race from gentrification. especially when the current meaning of gentrification seems to be "any change in my neighborhood that i don't like".

Some smart things were said, then it was over. Very conflict-avoidy to keep the rabble silent.

What never came up was the biggest threat overall, and that is the effect of gentrification on the spirit of a place. The creative, vibrant, (sometimes) friendly Seattle I loved became more standoffish, shiny, and dull thanks to its transformation into a bedroom community for the software industry. The same thing is starting to happen here.

I've been rich as hell, and I've been nearly homeless, and I think I can say without prejudice or resentment that rich people (on the whole, not talking about individuals here) are BORING. That is the most profound and general threat, not to individuals, but that the entire population that makes this an interesting and alive place may soon be unable to afford to live here. No solutions were brought up last night. Sten's staffer basically was only defending what government programs are in place from attacks by a free market libertarian who doesn't seem to understand the car/sprawl lifestyle is colossally subsidized by the Federal, and other governments. (Still, he had a good point about class distinctions, I thought: why yes on IKEA but no on Wal-Mart? Why indeed? Why for that matter does the new Trader Joe's in Hollywood have a COLOSSAL parking lot?) This nearly turned into a sprawl debate but that should have been a sidebar.

There's plenty of room for another debate on this, where I'd like to see it get down to the nitty gritty: let some of the folks who are being pushed out speak. Let's hear from some of the people who opened marginal shops on Alberta but acknowledge that they have replaced a community (a drug and crime-ridden one, but a community) with their own new, more affluent one. I think Seattle is an excellent test-case: look at what happened there and learn from it. I find it interesting that the sit-lie ordinance (one of the shock troop laws that started Seattle's transformation in the mid 90s) when implemented here, provides for benches and restrooms. Are those a sop for opponents that will be taken away later, or is there a real intent to provide options for people who right now are camping out on the sidewalk?

Here's what I think: if you can't handle walking past some poor person lying on the sidewalk you can't face the price of the economy you live in. This is a spiritual debate, about the spirit of this city and the real agenda of this civilization. What ARE you going to DO? Because the change is coming. It may be unavoidable (and in fifty years the pendulum will swing back) but it IS coming. The city you love will disappear, and your only option is to try and mitigate that change any way you can. Nobody went anywhere near that dark reality last night.

Race issues are not separate from gentrification, they are tangled in it.

Besides, not to get all semantic on you, but if race is part of the discussion about gentrification then how can they be separate?

I still think it is amusing that everyone on the panel was white, whether by pragmatics or choice on the part of the Mercury. Just an observation...

Oh, and someone asked for a redlining map?

This is the infamous 1938 "Security" (seriously, that's what they called it) redlining map of Portland. There are others out there, but this is the one I have handy:

http://www.upa.pdx.edu/IMS/currentprojects/TAHv3/Content/Conservation/PDX_Redlining_1938.pdf

oh thanks!

i've always wanted to see that.

note, that the redlines were moved year to year. and that this process of moving the redline was a very important part of the economic impact, as it helped cause white flight and gave a huge economic incentive for white neighborhoods to exclude black residents.

So...um...how many of the people bitching about diversity here are white people who were at the thing? Cuz, you know, that would be some funny shit.

Why would being white and being at Rontom's last night make concern over loss of racial diversity in this city any less legitimate?

Sorry Whitey, I can't take your last question seriously and read the name you're commenting under at the same time. That's not to say it isn't funny, but you're telling me you don't see the irony?

Ugh. Randy Rapaport. AKA "The Gentrifier Who Thought He Was Too Hip To Be a Gentrifier."

Someone tell him stop with the hideous yuppie Habitrails please. Or at least stay the hell out of Southeast.

Matt, it's all ABOUT the irony. The gay couples, the intellectuals, the artists, the chattering classes, the folks not so immersed in the struggle to survive that they can wax philosophical about these issues are the very people who are the vanguard of gentrification. The question for these folks - and those, nearly to a person, were the people at the debate - is how does this population use its own power to stop or mitigate the creep from '"revived" funky, affordable neigborhood' to 'sterile in-city "white" suburbia'? The point of my moniker is to acknowledge these paradoxes.

And you met me last week at a barbecue. We talked about England.

Who's Randy Rapaport? As the title of the play says, 'I'm Not Rapaport'.