• Max Dubler

Last year, the police have handed out exactly zero tickets to skateboarders on the steep Southwest hills, but the Oregonian got the numbers on an uptick in police patrolling the area for traffic violations recently: In the two weeks between July 25 and August 8th, police wrote 33 citations on the route. Ten of those were written for drivers, two for bicyclists and 21 went to skateboarders.

The enforcement is part of a multi-part plan put together by skaters, the police, and city of Portland planners to address unsafe skating in the neighborhood. In addition to handing out citations, the city installed these Skate-Friendly PDX signs and are making online videos that encourage kids to stop at stop signs and be nice to neighbors.

Whether the education and enforcement campaign works will be the question facing city council this fall, when they revisit a plan to ban skateboarding on West Hills' streets.

I'm working this week on a cover story about change on North Williams, particularly noting the recent uproar around the transportation project planned for the street. After a six-month delay to include more public process, the recommendations for how to make the street safer (wider bike lane? Remove a car travel lane? Install more cross walks?) are finally due this March.

When people talk about gentrification, the conversation can get vague and highly emotional. So the story this week focuses on the facts and figures of change. Here are some quick mind-boggling statistics from North Williams:

• Of the 62 retail spaces along North Williams from Broadway to Alberta, 42 have opened just since January 2007. That's means 68 percent of businesses on the street are less than five years old.

• The entire budget of the Williams transportation project—including planning, outreach, and actual construction—is $370,000. To put that in context, the cost of one stoplight is $200,000. Of that $370,000 budget, 25 percent has already been spent on planning and public involvement.

• The racial demographics have almost completely flipped: In 1990, 70 percent of the neighborhood was black and 21 percent was white. Today, the neighborhood is 27 percent black and 54 percent white.

• From 1956 to 1970, three back-to-back urban renewal projects tore down over 1,500 houses in the Albina neighborhood (of which Williams is the heart). Here's what the street looked like in 1962. In 1972, it looked like this:

• city archives

One of the points of tension for long-time residents of the neighborhood is seeing those places where African-American homes and businesses used to flourish turning into vacant lots and then fancy new projects. As Urban League Advocacy Director Midge Purcell told me, “There were music venues, social clubs. All the things that made it a community, those things are no longer here and the things that have replaced them are the exact opposite of what made this community."

Southeast Portland's Buckman neighborhood is facing a big decision: Should the entire neighborhood be declared historic?

A group of neighbors are petitioning the city to become a historic district. Portland has numerous historic districts, including the eastside residential neighborhoods of Ladd's Addition and Irvington, and the designation is a mixed bag. Basically, if a neighborhood is a historic district, people who want to change their houses or build new projects have to go through extra-serious design review that's intended to make all new development have the same "character" as the existing neighborhood.

City planner Tim Heron spelled out the positives for me: Historic districts increase property values and protect historic buildings. "It's all about what you see when you move into a district," says Heron. "Historic districts preserve a certain look that some Buckman residents clearly want to preserve."

The extra design review comes with a steep cost, however, and some neighbors are rallying against the change. To stop the designation, critics need to get 50 percent of property owners in the area (plus one) to sign a notarized letter of dissent.

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One of the more publicized statistics from the 2011 survey is that ratings of downtown (sorry, Pioneer District) have taken a nosedive over the past few years. Maybe it's the constantly climbing parking and bus fees to actually get there, maybe it's all the loogies people feel the need to hock onto the city's sidewalks (YOU'RE ALL DISGUSTING), but rankings of downtown as a "good" or "very good" place to shop, live and work have dropped from 69 percent in 2008 to 58 percent this year. The surveys were filled out in July and August, so that perception can't be blamed on Occupy Portland.

But that perception is contrary to the facts: residents of downtown and Northwest Portland reported the lowest crime rate of any neighborhood in the city. Two percent of downtown dwellers reported home burglaries in the past year and nine percent reported car break-ins. Compare that to the statistically most crime-ridden neighborhood: East Portland. Eight percent of Portlanders who live east of I-205 reported homes burglaries in the past year and 24 percent had their cars broken into. Northwest and downtown residents also feel safer both alone and around police than other neighborhoods.

Despite this, everyone should probably head over across the river come the 2012 Zombie Apocalypse— East Portland respondents were by far the most disaster-prepared of all the districts, with 70 percent of reporting that they'd have enough supplies to last their household a week or longer.

Other interesting factoids below the cut!

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GOOSEWITZ.

• Westmoreland Park, 7:55 am today

• Zervas

Since last year, the city has been paying about $10,000 a month during the summer to close off NE Alberta Street and provide security for the massive, free-form arts fest. That security is meant to reduce tensions in the neighborhood, which gets hit with people urinating on lawns, leaving trash, and generally being whippersnappers after the block party officially shuts down at 10 PM.

That has been the biggest change in the monthly event that has come to define Alberta in some ways: It used to run late into the night, but since the city got involved, a wall of security and volunteers march down NE Alberta promptly at 10PM, pushing all the party-goers back onto the sidewalks and into the bars. The debate over the event is the same: Is it a good use of limited city funds?

On the pro side, it brings thousands of people (and their cash) into the neighborhood every month, contributes to the area's new identity as an "arts district", and, of course, it's a good time. On the con side, some argue that Alberta businesses, not citywide taxpayers, should bear the brunt of the cost.

"It's clearly an equity issue," says Commissioner Amanda Fritz, whose office handles the neighbor-relations aspects of the event. "When we had a meeting back in 2010, we had over 400 people come out, most of whom came to say it's wonderful. But we don't think citywide taxpayers should be paying for it."

Fritz wants to let people know that if they see illegal behavior on Last Thursday, call the police nonemergency line to report it: 503-823-3333. If you have problems the day after (like trash), neighborhood group Friends of Last Thursday want to take your call: 503-888-2934.

Week by week, the Safeway at SE 27th and Hawthorne has emptied out. When products disappear, they're not replaced, creating a bizarre and inconvenient supermarket that no longer stocks random items such as chili powder, peppercorns, or red cabbage. They're also selling off the least popular items one by one at discount rates. Last week, off-brand poison ivy cream and plus-size nude leggings shared discount shelf space at the front of the store with DVDs of Tom Hanks' The Terminal. This week, what seems to be all the Jewish food in the store is tagged half-off for quick sale.

All this because my Safeway, arguably the ugliest and worst-laid-out Safeway in the city, will soon be burned to the ground. From its ashes will rise a new, bolder Safeway! A shiny $20 million Safeway with 20,000 more square feet of shopping space, an underground parking lot, and what seems to be a bland, vaguely Spanish Mission-inspired facade.

The store itself will be closed for a year, leaving me and the rest of the neighborhood to find a new place to buy our discount gefilte fish.

Portland's newest outdoor market will open next week in the Boise-Eliot neighborhood on a plot of land that's been a vacant eyesore for years.

The new Boise-Eliot market is the brainchild of stonemason Spencer Burton who ran for Dan Saltzman's seat for Portland city council in November. Though the bid for city council flopped, Burton and the NE Coalition of Neighborhoods did succeed in a different project: securing a plot of land for a farmer's market in his neck of the woods.

Five weeks ago, the owner of the vacant lot on the corner of North Williams and Fremont offered up his land for a twice-weekly neighborhood market that has about 30 businesses signed up to sell goods so far, including Martini Farms, Canby Asparagus Farm and Portland Organic Garden. Burton hopes to sign up 20 more businesses before the market opens next weekend, July 17.

This isn't one of the official city farmer's markets and it's been a little bumpy organizing a market from scratch, says Burton.

"People can't believe there's nothing there," Burton said about the area's empty lots, many of which are scars from the early 1970s when Emanuel hospital razed 20 businesses in the area to make way for an expansion (which then never materialized).

Opening a market will "help the area as a new commercial hub," Burton says. He hopes people who don't have enough money for a storefront for a business can sell their goods at the lot.

During the summer the market will run twice a week on Tuesdays from 3-7p.m. and Saturdays from 9-1p.m.

Three years from now, Division Street is going to look a lot different.

City council approved a $7 million plan this morning to rebuild Division Street from 10th Ave to 39th Ave as a more pedestrian-friendly, sustainable, generally less crappy thoroughfare. About 15,000 cars travel along the stretch every day and Division needs to be repaved anyway, so the city will take the chance next year while it's being repaved to do what Portland does best: lay down the "green streets."

The city has been working for the last year on the plan (download the pdf here) and came up with a final "Division Streetscape and Street Reconstruction Project" which will make cut most of Division's busiest inner-SE stretch down from two lanes of traffic to one lane in each direction.

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• Look! It is Henry's! Something nefarious could happen here.

Gone fetal worrying about the dearth of condo owning gentrification news in the wake of Matt Davis' vacating Portland? Shaking a fist at the sky and shouting "UNJUST I SAY UNJUST" while popping lorazepams like candy? You are not alone, my friends. I, too, have been in a funk since Matt's departure but I might just have a solution to our depressing predicament.

I have recently moved from San Francisco (yay!) to the suburbs (OMG BOO) and finally downtown to a LEED certified building so smug in its smugness the elevators are powered by EFFING WINDMILLS. The building has 24 floors and I'm on one of the upper tiers. What I am saying is I can actually see your house from here. And I know what you're doing. And stop it because it's really freaking me out.

So, in lieu of leaving the house to do actual reporting (new media is all about aggregation anyway) I've given myself the "gentrification beat." If I can see it from my windows and it's vaguely newsworthy and/or gentrify-y I will know! And I could tell someone about it! Maybe even on Blogtown or the Twitters or at a bar! I am just spit balling here! There are no bad ideas! This is a safe space!

The point is I can see stuff from up here and it might be interesting. Mostly I like looking down on all of Portland. But you knew that already.