Geography 368: Field Seminar
Day 8 | Race, Redlining, & Redevelopment in North Portland
Data Collection
Data collection about land use on N Williams Ave and N Vancouver Ave began around 10 AM. For each building students would document the address, land use, and other significant details like housing or business type. In the beginning of the survey there were older single family homes, brown fields, and empty businesses. On the sidewalks there were signs about historic African American businesses that were there before being displaced. Some places had murals acknowledging previous people of importance throughout the neighborhood. In just a few blocks in everything began to quickly change. Big mixed use apartment buildings lined the streets with businesses on the first floor and housing all above. There was also a place on N Vancouver where two neighboring apartment buildings were being built at the same time. This rapid change lead into a class discussion about gentrification and displacement which was a perfect way to set up our next meeting at PCRI.
Photo by Krista Emery
This building was taken during data collection and is an example of gentrification throughout the neighborhood. These class later started joking about the "gentrification orange" featured on a lot of newer buildings.
PCRI
Photo by Ezra Zeitler
Class with our speaker, Maxine Fitzpatrick, outside of the PCRI office
Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives is a nonprofit that manages over 700 rental properties and homes that support African American tenants and homeowners that were swindled by Oregonian real estate agents. We met with Maxine Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the PCRI. Properties were inherited by the non-profit to convert to affordable and sustainable LEED certified homes. This makes heating and maintaining the homes cost-effective for the tenants and homeowners, but also increases property values through their neighborhoods. By providing funding for these families, they can reduce property costs around the average costs from $365,000 to $725,000 to about $180,000 to $230,000!
Historically, home ownership rates have been low in the black community. In most cases, they must purchase land from a white person. Due to racist redlining practices, only white people could buy redlined homes. The practice is now illegal, but the effects are still rampant in many communities across the nation. Due to the dominance of the white control over the real estate market, these populations were very vulnerable to displacement for the ‘benefit’ of the city.
Bike Counting
After the meeting with PCRI, the class was split into small groups and separated to different intersections on popular bike commuting routes. Data was collected for nearly two hours. Each group did note different data, but most were along the lines of a total bike count, sex, race, and age. This did prove to be difficult because commuters were biking past at a decent speed at rush hour with some groups seeing over 600 cyclists. In general, most cyclists were white men. This counting process gave more insight into how non diverse Portland can be. One group had just over 600 cyclists and only about 30 were not white.
Photo by Krista Emery
An example of bike infrastructure the City of Portland has installed throughout the city.