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Whitest City Gets Whiter

date added: 04.05.2011

Portland should change its motto from “the city that works” to “the city that’s white.” Already the whitest big city in America in 2000, the city has gotten whiter still as poor people have been pushed from the inner city into the suburbs, as shown in this stunning series of maps.

The Antiplanner has covered this issue before, but it is worth repeating, partly because of The Oregonian‘s excellent coverage yesterday and partly because of what The Oregonian didn’t say. As Portland’s only daily paper pointed out, the city did little to help low-income minorities and did many things that hurt.

When planning urban renewal in the heart of the city’s one-time black ghetto, the Portland Development Commission wrote a plan to maintain affordable housing and to help renters become homeowners. In its zeal to promote light rail and transit-oriented development, however, the city jettisoned this plan.

What the article barely mentions is that Portland has neglected its schools. While elite Benson, Lincoln, and Wilson high schools graduate 75 to 80 percent of their students in four years, Jefferson and Roosevelt–which serve the heart of the ghetto area–are 50 percent or less. If Portland weren’t diverting so much of the region’s property taxes to urban renewal, maybe the schools wouldn’t have to be asking voters to approve the largest bond measure in state history that, if approved, would make Portland property taxes 20 percent higher than any other community in the state.

Nor does the pro-smart-growth Oregonian mention that the region’s urban-growth boundary, which made most of the region’s single-family homes expensive, is the real cause of the gentrification that forced the diaspora of low-income minorities. While the resulting integration sounds good, what is going on here is that low-income people have been forced out of neighborhoods they can afford and that provide them a sense of community into more-expensive neighborhoods with few available social services.

The Oregonian views it, of course, through a new-urbanist lens: “Pushed out by gentrification, most settled on the city’s eastern edges, according to the census data, where the sidewalks, grocery stores and parks grow sparse, and access to public transit is limited.” In truth, many have access to public transit, since they moved into the eastside light-rail corridor, but that access is probably far less important to them than access to jobs.

Coincidentally, an urban planning professor just published a lament about the “trivialization” of his profession. How is it that planning, which once had lofty goals for equity and social justice, has lost its way? As the professor tells the tale, planners in the 1950s were seduced by federal dollars into supporting destructive urban-renewal projects. When Jane Jacobs exposed the harm their plans did to cities, the profession fell into disarray.

The professor blames “the Jacobsian revolution and its elimination of a robust physical-planning focus” for the profession’s problems. What he failed to see is that planners are just as focused on physical planning as ever, but instead of using federal urban-renewal funds to destroy Jacobs’ dense, inner-city neighborhoods, they are just as mindlessly using local urban-renewal (TIF) funds to try to recreate those very same neighborhoods everywhere.

The real problem with planning is that its focus on physical planning–the “built environment”–leads it to overstate the benefits of such planning and ignore the real costs. People who really want to improve our cities should join some other profession that can make a real improvement in people’s lives, not one that simply imposes high-cost fantasies on urban residents.

Source: http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=5024

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