Gentrification in NE Portland

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by soleri

It cannot escape your attention that the one argument being deployed by Bell is the same argument that whites used to oppose civil rights and "race mixing".

What argument is that?

Originally Posted by soleri

I'll cut to the chase here: there is no legal basis for using race to codify demographic desires. It's blatantly illegal just as much as deed restrictions and covenants are.

Again, I'm not sure what you're responding to.

I certainly wouldn't have posted this video if I thought it represented some kind of diatribe against civil rights and race mixing. That would be quite inflammatory. I really don't think that's the message Bell intends you to take home, or the message that Oregon Humanities and the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation wanted to reinforce by supporting and helping to publicize Bell's work. The 'argument' that I took away from watching this video is summed up by Avel Gordly:

If you're looking at how a community will grow, will prosper, and in a way that benefits everyone, if you continue on a trajectory or on a path that continues to exclude people based on race, ethnicity, income -- that becomes an Achilles heal. It will cripple and weaken all the other so-called opportunities that people are envisioning.

So I think the video is above all a plea to address the continuing displacement that's happening in Portland and create opportunities for a more diverse and inclusive city. How would I go about doing this? I'd start with housing policy: that $20 million in PDC money you mentioned will help to establish some elements of a rudimentary safety net for people facing pressure to abandon their gentrifying neighborhoods. But it's a drop in the bucket, given the scale of the problem and especially compared to the millions the PDC and other city agencies are spending to subsidize development in the South Waterfront or to build a new, privately-owned convention center hotel. I think gentrification also needs to be addressed at a more systemic level: one idea I'd favor, for example, is a law requiring that any amenities included in new development (courtyards, rooftop gardens, sauna and exercise rooms, swimming pools, etc.) be made public and available to anybody to use. The purpose of these amenities is to inflate the price that developers can charge for the housing they build on a given parcel. Banning the provision of such private amenities would either lower the cost of housing in these developments or help them to contribute more to their neighborhoods and communities.

Note that the solution is not to reintroduce deed restrictions and covenants or to pioneer or codify any new form of racial exclusion. People of color, and minorities generally, don't tend to be the advocates of those kind of policies. And anyway, lots of black families and white families are in the same boat.

All of this being said, I understand that you're very uncomfortable with the claim voiced by some people in the video that a 'black community' needs to exist in a physical location, in a neighborhood such as what used to exist in places like Albina. You're correct that the emotional experiences that people share about feeling culturally excluded from racially homogenous parts of Portland, of growing up 'merely tolerated and continually underestimated' in Bell's words, cannot easily be translated into some kind of normative ideal that would accord seamlessly with 'the values of the Enlightenment'. Then again, the values of the Enlightenment were not articulated at the time in order to get us to a multicultural society. You describe yourself as a liberal who advocates social democracy: well, Americans who have attempted to update and faithfully develop Enlightenment values (beginning with Radical Republicans in the Reconstruction era and continuing through to modern US liberals and socialists) have consistently recognized that the state must take some sort of 'affirmative action' to correct historical injustices and promote diversity and inclusivity in order for us to make tangible progress towards the multicultural society you cite as an ideal.