“First gas, now roads. . . ” _____________________________________ Front St. Shutout Makes Neighbors Roar THOSE i P i o r s RVPPIM' O P LUA Y T O gl>IL.C> L © O S ^ 1 By Penny Allen “ First they take our gasoline! Now they take our roads!!" shouted one angry and alienated man from Multnomah neighborhood as he stood outside Multnomah Elementary School. Despite the school’s topnotch academic standing in Oregon, it has just been closed and many local residents see the closure as a gerrymandered rip-off. No wonder they aren’t too interested in the finer details of “The Plan to Close Front Avenue.” You can’t kick a strong community too many times before it learns to bite. On June 4th, people from every southwest Portland neighborhood gathered to hear Mayor Neil Goldschmidt field questions about his Planning Bureau’s South Portland Circulation Study. The traffic-pattern Study was undertaken originally several years ago to straighten out the mess at the west end of the Ross Island Bridge. Since that time the report has grown to a thorough and futuristic proposal which recommends not only the removal of Front Avenue between the Corbett and Lair Hill neighborhoods but also suggests that the “ found” land be used for housing. The document must ultimately be seen as the Goldschmidt administration’s only gesture towards amending the widespread displacement and gentrification going on in Portland's innercity neighborhoods. But most southwest Portland residents from anywhere further out than Corbett and Lair Hill are having no truck with the Study, and at least a thousand of them have signed petitions protesting the closure of Front Avenue. The whole complex plan has been reduced to a single rallying cry: “They’re closing Front!” Indeed, indignant participants at the June 4th meeting seemed finally to have found an out-let for the general frustration wrought by our eroding gasolinebased system. As a matter of fact, timing of the event just after the school closure, coupled with Goldschmidt’s superficial presentation of the issues (never once mentioning housing) made the whole show look like a deliberate kill. Ernie Munch of the Planning Bureau, who has spent at least five years preparing the South Portland Circulation Study, no longer defends his plan 'well in public. He has also never had the time for small-scale in-depth presentation of his plan in the outlying southwest communities, and of course no idea as radical as removing a highway to build housing could ever make sense without grass-roots support. Goldschmidt distracted the angry crowd by joking about “having already spent enough money on the project to get everybody worried.” The Mayor also agreed with those who suggested that closing Front was one sure way for him to lose an election. Ernie Munch looked like a patsy. Closing Front Avenue certainly would be a hot potato and could indeed inconvenience a great many people. It would also be very expensive. The only trade-off that seems worth all that is housing for Portland’s displaced — sweat-equity housing to be built and owned by those who would live there, a project to be undertaken by a neighborhood-based community development corporation. For anything short of that, closing Front Avenue should be forgotten. On page forty-two of Munch’s South Portland Circulation Study it says, “The new housing should encourage an occupant mix in terms of age, income, family size, owner and renter, and occupation. An emphasis should be placed on the provision of low income housing to assist those low income families and individuals who are currently being forced to leave Corbett/Lair Hill (or you can add Northwest or Albina or inner Southeast) because of rising rents and property values.” Such a good and honorable idea! But many another high-flown intention has somehow slipped out of sight between the neighborhood level and the City Council vote, especially when low-income housing was at stake. “Displacement” may be a fancy word in Mayors’ conferences, but we are unlikely to see Goldschmidt and his people really do anything about it. Blacks Bumped As Rents Rise By Joe Uris Portland’s Black population is facing a forced migration from Portland. As property values rise poor people face an increasingly difficult time finding and keeping affordable housing. While all lower economic levels are effected, the housing squeeze is particularly hard on minority groups. Example: The Irvington neighborhood. By the late ’60’s Irvington was experiencing the fate of many other good inner city areas throughout the nation. Middle class white families faced with an increase in rental properties adjacent to black Albina reacted in terror as black people rented or bought into this once middle class stronghold. Whites sold fine homes for a fraction of today’s worth. Those with the cost of a down payment benefited, but all too few of those were poor people and even fewer were black. Some home owners, unable to sell for a decent price, rented to blacks and others under a program of federal housing for the poor program. The result was some crowding, but also the creation of Portland’s first truly integrated neighborhood. Now all that has changed. Irvington, long popular with the liberal smart set, is now an “in” area. Federal housing money and low cost loans during the Model Cities program, (created to help minorities and the poor in the early ’70s) saved the area from urban decay. The money often ended up being used to stop black movement into a “ good” neighborhood. The white middle class became interested. Many wanted a “ tame” integration experience for themselves and their kids. The fine older homes and convenient location, together with a school whose curriculum is well larded with federal bucks designed to help the poor, has drawn more and more of the new middle class to the area. The result is a boom in the housing market. And the result of the boom, ironically, is the forced disappearance of many black families from Irvington. Blacks who are less than middle class no longer can afford to live in this new middle-class ghetto. The black population of Irvington is down. The white middle class — up. Example: Albina. Once the only neighborhood where black people were allowed to settle, Albina is seeing more and more speculators moving into the area. The reason? The houses are old, well built, often bigger and finer than what is available elsewhere, and the prices are comparatively low. As an immediate result, the amount of available housing for poor people and black workers is diminishing. And this in a city with a less than 5 per cent vacancy rate! Portland has never welcomed the black community. Oregon excluded black folks from the state as part of the compromise which created the state. In the 20’s the Ku Klux Klan was active enough to control much of the state’s politics and to terrorize many minority and Catholic people. The few black people who settled here were mainly laborers, servants and railway workers. The Second World War brought Oregon and Portland it’s first large influx of black people. They came to work in the shipyards. Many brought their families and stayed on after the war. By 1948, most of Portland’s poor arrivals and their war worker white friends were living north of Portland in a federal housing development called Vanport, the state’s secondlargest city. In that same year Vanport was allowed to flood out. The disaster left many homeless. Those that didn’t get the message moved into Albina and the area of what is now the Memorial Coliseum. Since that time Portland’s black population has been forced to move repeatedly. The construction of the coliseum created one such move, the creation of the I-5N freeway another forced move. The expansion of Emmanuel Hospital destroyed 33 blocks of working class black housing as well as a number of popular commercial establishments along Williams Avenue. Similar forced black and white migrations took place on the west side as well. The urban renewal of the South Auditorium area and downtown took their toll. As Lair Hill Park and Corbett became popular with the newly moneyed set, these neighborhoods were upgraded by Portland Development Commission loans and aid. The result? The black population of these areas has virtually disappeared. While it is obviously not just black people who have suffered these displacements, the black community, because of its perilous economic situation, has been hardest hit. The city of Portland through such agencies as the Portland Development Commission, has been following a policy of exclusion toward the lower economic group. This has hit hardest at the most visible and culturally unique of Portland’s poor, its black people. 8
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