Welp, there goes the neighborhood.
It doesn’t look like good news for Portlanders who can afford $17 chilaquiles: Veritable Quandary—the downtown restaurant that bills its patio a “dining oasis”—is probably getting bunch of criminals as neighbors.
The Multnomah County Commission on Thursday listened as the project team looking at two sites for the new county courthouse—the preferred site on vacant county-owned land at SW 1st and Madison and the alternate site next to the KOIN Tower at SW 2nd and Clay—explained the due diligence process of evaluating the sites.
The short of it is there’s no deal breakers for either site, and most of the push back on the preferred site came from people associated with the VQ, according to team testimony.
In December, VQ owners, employees, and people who think the $27 Rain Shadow Farm Chicken is just TO DIE FOR came out in hordes, some even getting teary-eyed, to plead with commissioners not to sully their beautiful patio view with an eyesore of a new courthouse.
Owner Dennis King, who founded the restaurant 45 years ago, and his daughter, Lindsay King, both warned the commission that their restaurant likely wouldn’t survive construction. I mean, who wants to sample a $25 wine flight with sweaty construction workers everywhere? EEEeeew!
Never fear, VQ! The Multnomah County Bar Association will save you!
At Thursday’s public hearing—at which no Sad Sallys from VQ chose to testify—Guy Walden, Executive Director of the Multnomah County Bar Association, pledged he and his fellow attorneys will save the VQ … well, they’ll give it a shot, anyway.
“To the extent that the MBA can assist VQ during construction, we will,” Walden said.
What a guy, Guy! So, see? White people all over Portland step up to help other white people in times of need. Where would attorneys go for business lunches and after work drinks without VQ?
On the other hand, Portland, as the most gentrified city in the country, has stood by for 40 years while our black and brown populations have seen their business owners and residents pushed out of neighborhoods in the name of progress. Huh.
The commissioners are scheduled to make a final vote on the location of the new $150 million courthouse at their April 16 meeting.
How dare the county plan to build a county facility on county-owned land. THE NERVE OF ‘EM!
Who exactly are you mad at here?
Shelby King…. NICE WORK!
I always enjoy a good jab at VQ, so A+ there, but I think the better headline might have been “Don’t Worry, Rich People, Other Rich People Will Save You”. It seems pretty problematic (and honestly, a little lazy, humor-wise) to imply that nice places are white places.
Ugh, facile post problems, amirite?
Shelby, there are professionals of all races and ethnicities working in Portland, and guess what: sometimes they get a nicer lunch than you might feel like paying for.
I don’t give a shit that VQ is inconvenienced by the building of a new courthouse next door, but it’s really shitty to imply (so you can awkwardly shoehorn in a race-based objection where none actually exists) that only white people can afford to eat at a place like VQ, just so you can knock over your straw fops.
if you think it’s just about rich people, then go ahead and name a minority-owned business that is big & successful enough for construction next to it to even be news. we already pushed out Chinatown and barely anybody even noticed because the gate is still there.
Did anyone really “push out” Chinatown, or did Chinese business owners just lose interest in an area of Portland that’s filled with homeless shelters and drug addicts while most Chinese people in Portland live in suburban neighborhoods far from Chinatown?
Also, isn’t the VQ sort of whining about nearby construction basically a completely different issue than gentrification that’s pricing out working class people of all ethnicity from inner Portland?
I know, I know…..ugh, white people…
@eldepeche: You’re asking me to a) determine the ethnicities of all the major business owners in town b) determine which count as “big & successful” c) so I can pose a hypothetical d) where someone tries to build next to a big & successful minority-owned business and e) they object and try to stop it? And then f) we’ll game out how all the other stakeholders might possibly react in racist or other ways? And that will tell us whether race is an issue here in addition to class?
Awesome, I’ll meet you at the Hall of Ethnic Records in 30 minutes!
Damned good stealth attack, King family. Well played.
@Deezus Chinese business owners moved out because the rent doubled or tripled on those locations in Chinatown.
:rolleyes:
I’m asking people to just consider the city’s history of both refusing to do anything to make up for the degradation of minority communities, and actively tearing them up, when deciding how much to make fun of an upscale restaurant complaining about the development of a vacant lot in the urban core.
Racism isn’t people being mean to each other, it’s public policy.
I agree with Ian Karmel about white people “white people”ing white people being lazy.
“I’m asking people to just consider the city’s history of both refusing to do anything to make up for the degradation of minority communities, and actively tearing them up, when deciding how much to make fun of an upscale restaurant complaining about the development of a vacant lot in the urban core.”
And after considering the city’s history of racism (which I don’t dispute), how does that cut on our making fun of VQ? Do we get to make fun of VQ or not?
I took issue with another commenter saying “it’s not about race, it’s about money,” which is pretty much the same thing as saying “racism doesn’t exist anymore, don’t be stupid.”
I say make fun of them, but I’m white, so I don’t even know why anyone is listening to me.
Growth isn’t progress. Maybe hire some deputies or fix some roads instead.
^^^ great comment A+
And where was the Multnomah County Bar Association when they closed Magic Garden!
@ eldepeche: Thanks for putting those silly words in my mouth, after I originally chimed in with a race-based critique of Shelby.
What I’m saying is that the history of racialized land use policy in Portland has precisely nothing useful to say about the situation at hand. Dragging race and gentrification in to an isolated downtown land use spat avoids the work of doing real investigation and analysis in favor of some PSU-freshman-level bomb-throwing.
By zooming so far out, by acquiring so much oh-so-necessary “context,” all useful perspective is sacrificed so the writer can ultimately retreat to a rhetorical vista where she achieves self-satisfaction without actually doing anything.
This paper is supposed to be smarter than that, even when it’s being willfully stupid.
I think Shelby’s point is that those overrepresented by population brown people in that new building will be “isolated” from those folks on the VQ patio, whatever color they are.
yo Colin, you are not the other commenter I was talking about.
I think the context is useful: by pointing out when the white establishment (who have the city’s ear) bands together to save one of its own, we will have something concrete to point to the next time we need to lobby in support of a less well-connected business owner.
And I don’t think there is such a thing as an “isolated” land use argument.
It is easy to blame everything on white people, and it can obscure the point, but it doesn’t make that point go away.
But the other important point of context here is that VQ lost. They “have the City’s ear” only in that they went and whined at a public meeting, and the County Commissioners basically ignored them. It’s newsworthy only in that Ms. King decided to race bait about it. There is no disparate treatment of VQ here.
This would be a totally different story (and one that might have a very real racial component) if the County decided “Based on the popularity of brunch at VQ we are not going to build the courthouse here” but that didn’t happen.
Did I miss something? Dennis (the owner) is in a long term relationship with a black woman. To even say that he has anything to do with racism is ludicrous. SMH, this is about much more than just race. It’s about keeping one of Portland’s oldest and most successful businesses in business. It’s about choosing a site that will not impede traffic while under construction, and about preserving some grassy areas in our beautiful city which is quickly becoming a concrete eye sore. Stop pushing racism on everything.
@BlackedOut
A few places might have left because of higher rents, but the successful Chinese restaurants in Portland like Wong’s King or Ocean City really have no desire to open up down the street from homeless camps and drug corners. SE 82nd has been the new Chinatown in Portland for well over 15 years now. The one downtown is mostly just a shell for tourists and that’s basically the story of most old urban Chinatowns.
I think this article, more than anything else, highlights what a PC asshole Shelby is.
Oh, a restaurant may move? hmm, never ate there.
White girl Shelby defending brown people, labor unions, and criminals in Portland from organic chicken. So noble.
Naw, it’s a good point though. White people only care about gentrification when it starts happening to them. Boo fucking hoo, find a new brunch place.
AND OMG Brandon did you really just do the “He has a black girlfriend so he can’t be racist” shtick? that is so fucking tired. that is some fallacy of fallacy right there. GET SOME NEW MATERIAL!
I’m guessing the clientele at VQ is more diverse than the staff at The Mercury
Who the fuck eats fairy food like roasted wild mushrooms and baby spinach with buttermilk blue cheese and warm pancetta vinaigrette and pays 13 fucking dollars for it? Veritable Quandary ought to be torn down so space can be made for a Popeye’s Chicken or an Arby’s. As for Shelby King, she’s a socialist journalist writing for a socialist newspaper put out for semi-literate socialist assholes in a city that is little more than socialist commune. Maybe if you all ate more read meat and less baby spinach, you get more protein and brain cells. If nothing else, you’d have the energy to do something with your slacker lives rather than mentally masturbating over every God damn thing you read on the Internet!
OnlySanePerson….I would assume that if I also informed you that he employs an almost completely female kitchen staff, which is completely obsolete in the industry, that would also be a fallacy? Fact is the guy employs more females and minorities than nearly any restaurant in town, and no only the newest trainees and waitstaff make minimum wage.
New material….ROFLMAO. Apparently you read the first sentence of my post and completely missed the entire rest which explained why this isn’t JUST about race issues. Shelby used a few choice, easily hashtagable, political hot topics to get people talking about an article that she did little to no research on. That was my whole point. It’s typical, petty, attention grabbing reporting.
You saying that “white people only care about gentrification when it starts happening to them” is in fact….RACIST. Everyone cares about something that is happening to them, and little people care about things that don’t. How up in arms are you about the massive radiation spill in Japan right now? How mad are you that there are in fact just as many white people in our city are living in nearly uninhabitable conditions as there are black people. Fuck off with your racist mentality…… “white people”. If I were to use the term all black people in any sentence, it would instantly get me hung out to dry. The same goes for me with you and anyone else that would lump all of any group of people together. You’re a racist.
I chose to treat all people equally and to pick sides based on legitimacy of the point. Not the color of their skin, or an other non-factor that has nothing to do with this subject.