Portland gentrification/infill (#0477)

This series of pictures are used to provide discussion on gentrification/infill in the neighborhood areas of Portland.

With the building in photo #476 on my left, a taller new housing complex under construction in the distance. Adjacent to it is another vacant lot with some sort of construction and past it are other new complexes on both sides of the street.

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I have mixed feelings about gentrification and infill. The ever-increasing traffic, the environmental destruction, and the racial ghettoization of post-war suburbanization have always been a concern for me from both my environmentalist and social justice perspectives – I’d much rather see people on bikes, walking, or on transit having at least some possibility of interacting with others (even if they have their faces stuck on a phone). Just in my week in Portland I had surprisingly high level of interaction with strangers on the street, on transit, and in shops. AND, the cafes and stores in these new buildings provided access to better food and heath products than in the older stores in the same neighborhoods. But, I have concerns about the negative consequences of housing costs and loss of green space.

Re housing costs, I’ve no data on the costs in this particular neighborhood, but similar development in urban centers around the country is resulting in the replacement of affordable, older housing with significantly more expensive housing in these newer buildings. We thus have the driving out of much of the age/economic/racial diversity (older people, poorer individuals, working families) that makes urban living a model for diversity, replacing that with an unfortunate new age/class/race ghettoization.

Particularly evident in these pictures is the loss of green space. How do kids (and adults) get to just walk out the door into an environment of diverse flowers and trees, of the wild bird, insect, and animal life that is part of that? It’s much less tangible than the affordability issues, but I’m concerned about the increase in time spent in built environments. Maybe Portland is doing better than other cities, but I saw nothing that indicated that dramatic increases in housing density were being met with some sort of proportional increase in public parks.