Portland Oregon as Reverse Detroit: Urban Planning, Diversity, and Sprawl in the American West
Everyone you know has at least one friend who lived in Portland for a year or two after college. The story usually goes like this: Earnest neo-hippy decides that Iowa or Irvine is not cutting it any more and packs up the Subaru mom and dad gave him or her and drives to Portland.
Driven by a desire to be different the story usually ends with the person realizing that they dress like, talk like, and listen to the same music as all the other refugees from suburbia and that in moving to Portland they have made an urban space that feels very suburban.
After they realize the middle class sameness of the place is the reality of the place, they move back to New York, Chicago, LA, Seattle and often move to a suburb or gentrified neighborhood unlike the one they grew up in but shaped by the middle class impulse for authenticity that draws people to PDX.
Then there is everyone else.
I moved to Portland because I landed a job here. I applied for jobs worldwide and had interviews in the Netherlands, the UK, and all over the United States. I had lived in NJ between NYC and Philadelphia and Chicago with stop overs in other cities along the way but had never considered moving west.
Living in Chicago was great. I liked the fact that my train line connected me to downtown, the airport, and that my neighborhood was dense, urban, ethnically and racially diverse, and that stores and shops catered to all the different people who called my neighborhood home. The ownership also reflected this diversity so your taco place was run by a Mexican family, your Polish deli run by a Polish woman, and your hipster vegan wrap place owned by a hipster vegan or the parent’s of one.
So I had done urban and mass transit driven living for a long time and was at home in the city milieu. I liked that “diverse” did not mean merely that there were many consumer choices when it came to lunch but that the diversity of businesses, of neighbors, of race and class makeup was part of the social milieu.
When I got the job in Portland all my yoga enthusiast and pony tailed friends said things like “you are going to the promised land” or as the Germans say Die Heiliges Land. This seemed about right. Everyone loved the place and it even came with a funny TV show that people in Portland love to hate or love or pretend not to care about.
So what is the deal with Portland if you are not a 23 year old dreamer with an Urban Outfitters wardrobe and an electric car?
Portland is a medium sized city.
It is fairly easy to get around in on buses and trains, and by bike as long as you have rain gear.
It is affordable compared to San Francisco but expensive compared to Chicago and prices are going up every year! So for me I found it to be expensive — and the density was mostly smoke and mirrors.
The city has blocks and blocks of Sears catalog homes that are considered historical in the west. You see the same pattern homes in rust belt cities like Detroit, South Bend, and Cleveland.
There is nothing really historic about most of these homes — they were built between 1900–1950 using stock parts. They are also close to the “downtown” and in my view a block on density and diversity and sustainability. They are also not safe seismically speaking.
So, leaving Chicago I expected to find condominiums galore and a dense urban city like those in Europe. Right? Wrong!
What I found was a odd mix of housing for those not interested in a house. There were “luxury” condos downtown, and expensive townhouses, and not a lot other than that. So, as urban planners have documented, Portland is not dense at all. It is in fact one of the least dense urban spaces on the West Coast! Some serious planners are worried that Portland is encouraging sprawl rather than preventing it.
Planned and Unplanned Diversity
This city, whose residents remind you that the city is into planning is wholly unplanned despite great efforts on the part of the city and local planning organizations.
The boom and bust in housing means that the banks are funding new dense construction of $1500–2000 rental units, but not condominium development for those seeking mortgages of between $150–250,000 (middle class).
Density in urban planning requires a mix of homes and opportunities for many different income groups to live “close in” to make investment in rail, bike, and other urbanist projects worthwhile.
And those cute little Sears and Montgomery Ward catalog houses?
These are often $300-400-500-600,000, which is “cheap” according to California transplants, but very expensive to anyone who has to live on a typical median Multnomah County income of roughly $51,000.
Then there is diversity. The county (counties actually) that Portland is mainly in is about 80% white. And Portland is constantly ranked among the whitest cities in America. Just Google it! Also, as Portland Sate University researchers have shown, Portland has a long troubling history of discrimination and was once — in certain areas — more diverse and more dense, even if these areas were often quite poor.
Some are encouraging the idea of “Inclusionary Zoning” to remedy this problem. Clearly, there should be much more multi-family mixed income condominium and subsidized rental construction in “Inner” Portland.
There is a lot to do in Portland, and if you evaluate diversity based on the number of ethnic restaurants there are many here to choose from, but many of the busiest taco places serving “authentic” food seem to focus on the Orientalist “exotic” and are owned by tourists turned restaurateur. This fixation seems to me little more than a way of excluding all Mexican owned businesses from the “authentic” category. Don’t get me wrong. I am all for great food and creative cuisine. These things really make a city great, but let’s be honest about what Portland is celebrating and not celebrating. Even efforts to support ethnic businesses often draw on wealthy investors to make the place suitable for the non-ethnics who will come to dine and drink.
Apparently “real” Mexicans or South Asians don't eat “street food” or prepare it here. That seems just wrong. Let’s be honest: Mango chutney tacos are not “Authentic.” The same goes for “southern BBQ” and other seemingly ethnic or African American food styles presented in deracinated spaces. Trendy ethnic food in Portland’s center is mainly prepared by, served, and consumed by whites. There are many exceptions of course, and many small places owned by ethnics but these are not those followed by the tourist and hipster-set.
The search for ethnic food prepared by ethnic people reveals the dirty little secret about Portland.
Dirty Little Secret
What is Portland’s dirty little secret?
Plain and simple — Portland is a reverse Detroit.
From the city center in about a 3–5 mile radius, Portland is linked by a good bus and rail system (it gets worse if you need to travel from further out), and is home to lots of young, well educated, mobile elites, who ride bikes, eat tofu, drink an amazing array of craft beers, and somehow manage to do yoga daily. These folks can purchase homes in the $500,000 range and up, condos in the $200–400,000 range, and pay rents that often top $1500 for a one bedroom or studio apartment. Even places where there are high density projects under development, they are mainly rental focused, do not appear to have FHA housing requirements for moderate and low income renters, and are not a mix of homes and condominums. Homeoners stay and build neighborhoods — renters often do not. Then there is the fact that most of the new housing is targeted toward a single demographic: Most all of these people are white and middle to upper class.
This is the reverse of Detroit — a city known for being poor, and minority. Detroit is surrounded by some of the richest suburbs in the nation. But, even the suburbs of Detroit are more diverse than much of the city of Portland (at least until you drive out to 82nd Street). But, not to fear, Portlanders are apparently moving to the frontier of modern Detroit! Oh, and let’s not forget — Detroit is a real place.
Everything changes at 82nd Street.
A friend wrote a song about 82nd Street. It started off “You can get anything you need out on 82nd Street/Sometimes a trick/Sometimes a treat/Down on 82nd Street.” 82nd Street is known for prostitution, immigrant shops, and poor white folks.
In the rest of the city people say things like, “don't go too far out past Cesar Chavez” (not named so because this is the center of a Latino neighborhood by the way!). I won't get into all the hidden racial and class scripts in this way of talking about “Outer” Portland that you hear everywhere in the “Inner” areas and from people talking about where to live. Newcomers are told to stay “Close in” which seems little more than code for racial or class-based redlining.
A drive out (yes in a car, but you can take the bus too!) to 82nd street and beyond reveals a racially, ethnically, and income diverse area where tacos are $1 rather than $4 and often served by a Mexican family, you see African Americans who don't live in senior housing, and low income whites who shop at Wal-Mart. A recent visiting Seattle based Latina comic chastised Portland for its lack of real diversity inside the donut hole of the “Inner” city.
The landscape in Outer SE Portland is also different all the way out past the suburb of Gresham.
You see buildings going up to meet the housing demand that the city of Portland is not meeting through planning. The same can be said if you drive South of the city to the suburbs of Tigard or out to Hillsboro which are increasingly diverse places due to the fact that the city is not actually doing that much planning. Or is there a plan here?
Why not Better Planning?
If the median income is about $50,000 then why is Portland building so many apartments that rent for $1500 to $3000 a month and so few that can be purchased and paid for with a $1000 monthly mortgage? Why is it fixated on preserving ticky-tack catalog homes and not remaking the urban landscape to support income and ethnic diversity?
Where one would expect to see rapid urban planning transformation along Powell Boulevard in SE, or Interstate or Martin Luther King in North Portland, you see empty lots and endless meetings and hairbrained “citizen input.” Where there should be mixed income mid-rise condominium development along main blocks planned to resemble Parisian boulevards tied closely to rail, shopping, you have nothing going on other than upscale rental development.
While the single-family homes of Portland are cute they are not historically significant and there is no need to keep most of these stock-part homes along the main boulevards. The city should encourage 4–5 story European style mid-rise condominium and middle/moderate income units from downtown along bus and train routes rather than just an ever increasing pile of reasonably well organized and planned rental apartments.
The single family home and density goals do not go together. The American dream of the single family home is an inefficient waste of space and runs counter to the goal of density and rail/bus centered development.
Mixed and widespread home ownership helps stabilize neighborhoods in ways that apartment complexes — even LEED certified ones — do not! But, with people clinging to the single-family home as a “tradition” in Portland this stability is blocking change and greater racial and economic diversity in a city supposedly dedicated to smart planning.
So, to meet the need for new homes and apartments, capitalism is finding a way to get the job done. Area developers are building apartments and homes all along the margins of the city within the “Urban Growth Boundary” yet, where close-in developments should have 100 units, they often have less than 20, and the “single family home” people — whose home values may have gone up 400% protest needed change. This is a real shame. Portland should be growing in density and diversity, but the city’s snail paced approach is leading to the opposite result.
In a very real way planning Portland-style has had negative impacts on the city by making the inner ring of the city slow to adapt and downright resistant to urban change and the creation of space for mixed income density (which is in fact preserving racial and class privilege), while the outer ring of the growth boundary reacts with capitalist dynamism to meet demand.
Planning in Portland is creating rather than preventing sprawl.
The diverse city is actually being made all around inner Portland — not in it.
But, Portland is not alone in fostering this pattern of urbanism.
Global Urban Change
This is a pattern we see globally, and one might argue it is the way things have always been except for a brief pause between 1945–1990. Paris has inner rings full of rich, non-immigrant peoples surrounded by outer rings that become increasingly diverse and low income as you move out from the center. The racial and ethnic rebellions in Clichy-sous-Bois (a low income outer suburb of Paris), or the Husby rebellion (in suburban Stockholm), or Tottenham rebellion (outer London) are all clear markers of this eventual problems created by a pattern of moving the poor out of the city to the suburban (or near suburban) non place urban realms. No one wants to live in a non place! Sometimes the poor rebel for good reason.
All over the world, the poor live on the periphery of the great cities. As some I know have labeled Portland a very “European” city it only makes sense that this reverse-Detroit model is thriving here.
Winds of Change?
There are some who see this problem and are trying to confront it head on.
Elected officials at the state level who represent “Outer SE” Portland have called for change. Once one gets past 82nd Street, sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks, and even ballot boxes tend to disappear. Also, due to the form of city government Portland has, most representatives have tended to come from the inner-neighborhoods of the city.
Citywide at-large commissioner elections have created a system where elected officials are theoretically responsive to the whole city (or not). This system was meant to weaken the power of “Ward Bosses” but it was also meant to weaken the power of minority and ethnic group politics. In some cases, these at-large systems have been attacked by minorities for their specific racial intent and most major cities have abandoned them in favor of different models.
Many cities in the US South and Southwest had such at-large voting adopted to blunt the election of racial minorities. This so called “progressive” system and the weak mayor model it usually is attached to means that there are few elected officials speaking on behalf of the outer ring of the city or any specific neighborhood in fact. However, with most city elected officials living in the “Close-In” neighborhoods of the city, many feel the rest of the city is being neglected.
Each effort to create a ward-based system where elected officials represent a specific section of the city and advocate for the needs of neighbors and local businesses have been rejected. So the city that plans, continues to do so in a biased way that benefits the well heeled and rich, while neglecting the growing outer portland metropolis (within the city) unless the neglect becomes too obvious to ignore.
Trains and Busses
82nd Street has a MAX rail stop, as does much of the outer ring and suburban ring. The rail planners, unlike housing planners, realized that rail might help create little sub-urban clusters across the rail network. It very well may. It might just take 50 years but good planning might create little hubs of housing and shopping near every MAX stop.
But the MAX and Trimet are also plagued by planning errors. The trains and busses are slow. The subways of Chicago and the BART (as terribly organized and run as it is) are faster — and let’s not talk about the U-bahn, and S-bahn systems of most medium to large German cities! The MAX is often just a bad joke due to its slow pace and surface street system. While it might be cute like the catalog homes, it is amazingly slow. You would expect a planning driven city to establish dedicated express busses like those in Mexico City, or elevated or subway trains downtown and other places where the trains run on busy streets you see transit stuck in gridlock. Portland has a slow system and low ridership numbers. Perhaps this is why everyone is told to live close in? If you want to take the bus or ride the MAX you better live less than 4–5 miles from downtown.
But, it is Better than Lubbock or South Bend!
So, Portland is not the holy land for progressivism that many people feel it is, but it is a place like many others that is struggling to confront an increasingly class and race stratified society. In this way, Portland reflects the larger society. Income stratification of the sort Janet Yellen recently remarked on has had an impact in Portland as IT and sports brand executives flock here for “cheap” homes “close in” and the lucky offspring of the 1% come retire at 28 on the equity taken out of the parental cash box. Some from these privileged communities are at least thinking about what their wealth is doing to the city, and this is a start.
One needs to be careful not to do too much complaining. As a co-worker said: “All of you big city people come here, and within two months have a plan to save Portland from itself!” This seems true. However, I am more interested to see how Portland saves itself from the problems of uneven and short sighted planning than offering a plan. I am not a planner.
I do like Portland. Honest.
I like it a lot more than Lubbock, Texas or South Bend, Indiana.
Sorry Lubbock and South Bend.
Hawthorne Bridge, Portland Oregon 2014
