The Burnside Blog

By NE Portland Resident on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 01:46PM PDT

I am exactly the type of person described in this article. I am a young white professional who just moved to Portland a year ago. My girlfriend and I were lured back to the west coast from a three year hiatus on the other coast and to Portland for all the reasons people love it here. Progressive attitude, bike commuting, the whole thing.

We just bought a house a few months ago in NE portland near Alberta street in the epicenter of what this article describes.

I think there is really no way to feel great about this issue except to keep it out in the open and the discussion going. On the one side I feel greatly sympathetic to those people who are being pushed from their longtime homes as prices go up and up. On the other though, my girlfriend and I have worked and saved and made responsible choices for 10 years to be able to afford the house we bought. And this neighborhood was the best place we found to move in terms of location and price. It is not my intention to ruin anyone’s life or push them too far away from the city to be able to find or maintain their work. But it is the consequence of where I’ve chosen to live and it weighs on my mind.

There is no excuse for those who deny help to keep businesses running or loans for homes purely based on race or class. NE is a tremendously diverse neighborhood and I believe that most people who move here think it is a benefit to living here. However, in time the forces of gentrification will take their toll I fear.

However, what else were we supposed to do? Keep throwing away money on rent for 10 more years until we could afford a less ‘diverse’ neighborhood? That notion seems just as absurd.

Feedback please.

By Mike Thelin on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 03:27PM PDT

I empathize with you completely. I purchased my first house in NE Portland in 2003 after moving back to the West Coast from DC. I would have loved to afford a house in Northwest Portland, where I lived at the time, but that wasn’t possible. I can’t say I loved home ownership (mowing, raking, etc.), but I liked my neighborhood. It was mixed in terms of economics, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

One thing to remember is that neighborhoods, like cities, constantly evolve. My great grandparents built a house in North Portland around 1910. It was torn out a half century later to make way for the Interstate. What’s now the South Auditorium District was formerly a Jewish and Italian enclave called South Portland. Old Town once housed thousands of Japanese, that is, until the Japanese internment during WW2. As the article states, Portland’s relationship with race hasn’t always been rosy, but it’s fair to ask if most of the city’s more recent redevelopment patterns (with the exception of Japanese internment of course) have been weighted more by the economics that prevail in urban planning and real estate development than any preconceived plan to displace specific populations. When property and land is cheap, it’s often bought, sold or redeveloped. It’s easy to assail these trends on a macro level when we examine what makes a neighborhood tick, but much more difficult on an individual basis, like when someone fines a cool house in a burgeoning neighborhood at a good price. In that case, all prevailing human wisdom and common sense will prompt him or her to buy it. When that happens a bunch of times, neighborhoods change. Like the article brilliantly states, one person’s frontier is another person’s front porch.

By NJD on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 08:33PM PDT

It’s hard to define gentrification as some like to define it for it seams to be a natural growth pattern of cities everywhere. The part that bothers people is the race issue. When people work really hard to make their neighborhood better and then make it unaffordable for themselves by that hard work is intolerable. Having areas, by their proximity to the city center and their past-era designed (walk/bike-able) infrastructure, makes them desirable again is not anyones fault. Having a city that is very desirable to one demographic, a demographic that moves to that city in droves, is a workforce, community and cultural issue; not one of race. All these things add up to change. Change can sometimes hurt people deeply, especially those who are content with the way things are.

I am white. I am 28. I spent 4 years of my childhood here in East Portland. I moved back here 7 years ago. Half of my family came from Beaverton when it was a 5000 person swamp. I have heard my Dad’s stories a hundred times; the Vanport flood, the early days of the PDC and urban renewal, the KKK marching in Portland’s 1970’s May Day parades, the loggers, and the shipbuilders. It all sounds like cycles to me. My neighborhood was built by streetcars and European ancestors that came for a better life. My neighborhood was its own town 70 years ago, a ghetto 30 years ago, a thriving hippie community 20 years ago, a once-thriving now down area 10 years ago, an up-and-coming spot 5 years ago, and this year it became too popular and priced out 10+ long time businesses in a 6 block stretch. My residential neighbors are all new. I had to move farther away from my business because the area boomed (home prices from $250-350k in 2002 to $500-750k in 2007). But, I am white, and those that are pushing me out are white, so it is not gentrification… or is it? Do those whites off 82nd who are getting displaced by the massive Asian flux call it gentrification? Can someone tell me that gentrification is not just a made up term to be able to point a finger at someone else for natural change between demographics, cultures and time?

Neighborhoods are the people, not the land and buildings that reside. People live and people die, people move and people stay. Too bad when one human finds paradise, other people may find that paradise too.

By Paul on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 11:49PM PDT

Gentrification has nothing to do with race.

By kathleen mazzocco on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 05:36AM PDT

Did anyone notice the article referred throughout to “Albert” Street?

By Mike Thelin on Friday, May 30, 2008 at 08:49AM PDT

I did. It sounded so Canadian.

By Lizzy Caston on Monday, June 02, 2008 at 12:53PM PDT

What I found interesting about the article was the lens that the NYT saw Alberta Street (or Albert street as they called it). I live in that neighborhood, as I have for the past 8+ years, so the article was very much an outsiders perspective to me (which their misnaming only helps confirm). It also seems about 5 years too late – that’s when the real tensions were going on in my experience when the housing market was in a boom and people were snapping up rentals to convert to owner occupied housing and buying homes by people that had owned them for years causing huge shifts in the demographics starting in the mid-1990s. If anything I see a slowdown of gentrification right now, not a sudden increase. I also see huge tensions developing between people that live in the neighborhood and people that come in for last Thursday art walk – with parking, trash, late night rowdiness, etc. and many of these folks that are upset are newbie residents, not just old timers. I am also curious about the Restorative Listening project as that seemed to be the main focus of the article, but I’ve heard barely a peep about it in my own neighborhood which is perplexing.

By Lizzy Caston on Monday, June 02, 2008 at 12:53PM PDT

What I found interesting about the article was the lens that the NYT saw Alberta Street (or Albert street as they called it). I live in that neighborhood, as I have for the past 8+ years, so the article was very much an outsiders perspective to me (which their misnaming only helps confirm). It also seems about 5 years too late – that’s when the real tensions were going on in my experience when the housing market was in a boom and people were snapping up rentals to convert to owner occupied housing and buying homes by people that had owned them for years causing huge shifts in the demographics starting in the mid-1990s. If anything I see a slowdown of gentrification right now, not a sudden increase. I also see huge tensions developing between people that live in the neighborhood and people that come in for last Thursday art walk – with parking, trash, late night rowdiness, etc. and many of these folks that are upset are newbie residents, not just old timers. I am also curious about the Restorative Listening project as that seemed to be the main focus of the article, but I’ve heard barely a peep about it in my own neighborhood which is perplexing.