BISHOP STEVEN HOLT, a pastor with the International Fellowship Family, had the microphone last month, during the first of the Portland Housing Bureau’s community forums on how to spend some $20 million in new affordable housing money in North and Northeast Portland [“A Promise to Keep? Or Break?” Hall Monitor, Sept 24].
Holt, whose church decamped from NE Alberta a few years ago for a larger home on NE 122nd, was talking about the changes in Portland’s traditional African American communities over the past several decades.
It was a relevant speech, in light of all the hope the funding has sparked.
In the 1950s, Interstate 5 burrowed its way through several neighborhoods in Albina, forcing out hundreds. Veterans Memorial Coliseum did the same, helping to create the modern Rose Quarter.
And then, in 1962, a still-pretty-new Portland Development Commission surveyed what was left of Albina and declared the place a sprawl of blight that was beyond saving. In 1969, Legacy Emanuel began snapping up and demolishing a commercial district along N Williams. By the 1980s, thousands of African Americans had been displaced—and that was really only the beginning.
The city tried making some amends. The Albina Community Plan of 1993 promised to “increase housing opportunities for current and future residents,” by building and rehabbing homes by the thousands. And in 2000, the city drew an urban renewal area around the Interstate corridor, also meant to address displacement.
The attention helped the neighborhoods. Just not African Americans.
“If you’ve been walking around Williams or Vancouver or Fremont or Mississippi, you will notice a big absence,” Holt said, ticking through a list of blocks once avoided by many Portlanders, but now seen as destinations. “It’s an absence of color.”
Full-color maps provided at the forum testify to that reality—and give one of the starkest glimpses yet of four decades of displacement, from 1970 to 2010. The Mercury is reprinting those maps here, along with their sobering implications.
Census tracts that were 31 percent African American in 1990, in a city that was 8 percent African American, are now just 15 percent African American. In a city that’s now, overall, just 6 percent African American.
Some might argue this is about economics, not race. But in Albina, those subjects had long been intertwined. And they still are.
Back in the ’60s, integration was touted as the answer to discrimination or racism. Now, integration is being lamented as gentrification. Was Jiminy Carter right when he said?: “I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination.”
Which is racism, segregation or gentrification?
Gentrification is rarely inclusive. It actually discludes people, thats what the complaints are about. Google “displacement” and “gentrification” at the same time homeboy. And nobody ever said the treatment of Eastern Europeans was just or ethical in the 1920s or 1930s. They were displaced plenty too, but that was a fight for the earlier days. We live in 2014.
Dare say old boy, is Oakland gentrified or integrated? Has Portland been ethnically cleansed, or is there more diversity today than in 1975? How can there be integration without any displacement? Everybody is still around somewhere? Are new ghettos growing somewhere else?
I hear that the economy is booming in North Dakota. Maybe all the Afro-Americans are moving over there?
All that Black Gold!
In the Black Hills!
Oh, wait. The Black Hills are in The South Dakota.
According to the article, Portland is becoming less “black”. Is this because people are leaving, or because of the large influx of people Portland has experienced over the last 20 years, diluting those that were already here?
The maps themselves do not establish that there is a problem. They can be interpreted in many ways, but they could suggest that N Portland is becoming more desegregated.