Gentrifier

So, I've gotten a place in North Portland, a fairly nice place that I'm renting, without a lease, from a friend. It's a pretty good deal. This is the first time in about ten years that I've had a Portland address, and ten years ago I would not have been attracted to North Portland at all. Ten years ago, North Portland was dominated by industrial areas and low income housing, the forgotten "fifth quadrant" of the city. It was the poor area, the "bad part of town," (though never nearly as bad as, say, Detroit or New Orleans or the like). Now, I live here, and all sorts of changes are going on very near my house.

Mississippi Street, a very nice avenue of shops and restaurants, is nearby. Just last night I was at Mississippi Pizza, drinking excellent beer and listening to live hip-hop, and then at Mississippi Studios, a performance space that had just reopened and was letting people in for free. There's also a very nice looking comic book shop that I'll have to stay away from if I want to save money.

A bit north is Alberta, a street that's turned into a Mecca for a certain kind of demographic, i.e., mine. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is also close by, and it's gone from being a wide-open nasty artery to a respectable commercial street. The whole place is developing and improving rather impressively. Back in the nineties, Portland managed to take the downtown Pearl District, then a collection of old warehouses and industrial buildings, and recycle it into an upscale residential and commercial area. A similar change seems to be happening here, though North Portland probably won't be nearly as opulent as the Pearl now is.

This is fantastic. This is really, really wonderful. Whole forgotten and disused parts of the city have had money, life, and culture breathed into them, and I'm not prepared to derisively dismiss this as mere "gentrification."

Gentrification is a real phenomena, and it is indeed a bad thing when longtime residents get forced out of their homes because of rising property values (not that property values are rising in the current recession, but over the long term...). I have little patience, though, for snotty hipsters who make facile "critiques" of supposed gentrification, especially while they themselves are contributing to it. Yes, I find the graffiti above sort of ironically amusing, but in all probability it was probably scrawled by someone like myself, a new arrival to North Portland, a young, educated person such as myself who has a sense of irony and possesses cultural capital if not actual capital.

But really, what's the alternative? Would opponents of development or gentrification really want big swathes of the city to stagnate and fail to develop? That seems even less humane. I would be appalled if North Portland turned into a collection of condos and fancy restaurants, and I do think that there should be corrective measures taken in the way of zoning and rent control. But knee-jerk reaction to economic development (on both an urban and global scale) is ridiculous. It's a stumbling block to success. Yes, there should be housing for low income people. Absolutely. Yes, yes, yes, we should strive for social justice and social cohesion, and try to meet people's economic needs. But demanding that regions stay poor and undeveloped? Preposterous. Development is a good thing. Edward Abbey, as much as I love him, was massively misleading when he said that "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Growth lifts people out of poverty by giving them capital and jobs.

And then there's the whole racial dimension of it, which is too thorny to get into. But, I think that there what's happening now is the opposite of the "white flight" of the 1950s.

Starting after World War II, whole masses of middle class white people moved away from the inner cities and out the the new, shiny, segregated suburbs in what has been called "white flight." The result was that the wealth and tax bases of the inner cities suffered, and the wealth and tax bases of the suburbs did just fine, resulting in a horrible unbalancing of the quality of government services, most notably schools, in the two areas.

Think about it- think about how often in the media the fate of the "inner cities" was decried and moaned about. Well, a big part of that was that the main wealth generators were sitting in the suburbs, not contributing to the economic well being of the urban center that they fled. The biggest reason that inner city schools became so terrible is that they didn't have any money. They didn't have any money because so many of them were funded by property taxes, and when housing values are low all across an area, not enough revenue is generated to adequately fund social services. This problem was so bad that it went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 with San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, wherein the Supremes decided 5 to 4 that funding schools out of local property taxes did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I think that the Court was wrong in this instance, but the whole affair was a great case study about why economic segregation deeply harms communities.

So, "white flight" was a terrible thing, something that harmed the inner cities, harmed poor people, harmed black people, harmed everybody, really. Now we've got the exact opposite happening, and supposedly it's harming the inner cities, harming poor people, harming black people, harming everybody. I'm skeptical of the ills of gentrification and development, and I've wondered if a lot of it is just white liberal guilt getting blown out of proportion.

Do I want North Portland to turn into a series of prohibitively expensive condos? No. But should it have remained how it was? Absolutely not. Again- development is good. I'm happy to be here, happy to be in a part of the city that feels new, and I wonder what kind of development and evolution my hometown will go through next.