Is Portland a Racist City?

In her recent article, "The Racist History of Portland: The Whitest City in America," Alana Semeuls joined the chorus of critics claiming racism blunts Portland’s unique planning model. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-portland/492035/  In the Human City, suburban savant Joel Kotkin also chastises “the nation’s whitest major city” for driving African-Americans out of the urban core via gentrification, which is “partly supported by city funding.” Unfortunately, Semeuls and Kotkin, never mention the investments made to rectify the problem.  


Since a housing emergency was declared last October, the Portland City Council has invested over $100 million for affordable housing, a $258.4 million bond issue for affordable housing was placed on the November ballot, $20 million was appropriated to give housing preference to low and moderate-income residents who have been displaced or who are at risk of being displaced, and the 2035 Comprehensive Plan contains provisions to address displacement due to gentrification.  

These initiatives are a crucial test, and Portland is the proving ground. Integrating market and subsidized housing is anathema to some, but if it done in an environment designed for livability public health is advanced while living costs, greenhouse gas emissions, and dislocations from gentrification are reduced. Instead, Semeuls would have us believe Portland is a narrow minded enclave where "white environmentalists" run rough shod over minorities.

Portland is a white city due in large part to its geography.  Seattle is also a top tier "white city" but Portland, which is not a seaport, was the most isolated city in the Pacific Northwest and last city to be connected by rail in the region. Moreover, Portland was not built on slave labor. 

Houston, which Kotkin holds up as the model of opportunity, is sited on low lying swampy land that was cleared and drained by “negro slaves and Mexicans, as no white man could have worked and endured the insect bites and malaria, snake bites, impure water, and other hardships,” O.F. Allen, an early settler, wrote. “Many of the blacks died before their work was done."  http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/explainer/article/The-trouble-with-living-in-a-swamp-Houston-7954514.php

  

Today Houston is the most flood prone major city in America, and gentrification is rife in the city’s Third Ward, the historic African-American neighborhood.  In the past decade, its African American population has shrunk by more than 10 percent, which matches the displacement rate in Portland.  https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2015/07/07/122196/gentrification-of-houstons-third-ward-a-threat-to-its-african-american-culture/ 

Like other American cities, Portland has a racist history.  African-Americans and Asians suffered the scourge of segregation and intimidation, but they did not face the brutality and malevolent policies that inflicted the South. In Oregon, one African-American and twenty whites were lynched, while in Florida (which was less populated than Oregon during the zenith of this barbaric practice) 25 whites and 331 African-Americans suffered lynching. This scourge remained virulent through the 1920s, a decade when racist policies were ascendant in American cities. 

In 1923, the Oregon Legislature passed laws preventing first generation Japanese Americans from owning or leasing land.  In Florida, racism incited violence and a distorted concept of city planning. In January 1923, a mob burned down the African-American village of Rosewood, murdered six people, and forced the rest of the residents to flee and they never returned.  At the same time, West Palm Beach issued a decree to relocate the city’s 4,000 black residents to three “concentrated zones” between the railroad and the Everglades. “Looking twenty-five years ahead,” the mayor declared, “we are trying to put Negroes in such locations as they will most congenitally be situated to their places of labor and fulfill the needs of the white people.”

John Nolen, the noted planning consultant serving the city, refused to implement the initiative.  His firm adhered to a set of principles, he wrote, “whether it pays financially or not.”  He informed his client that racial zoning was unconstitutional, “It is not possible legally to set aside such districts and restrict them to any one race or color.”  Nolen’s stand reflects the progressiveness of early city planners, and Portland is built on this legacy.http://lalh.org/john-nolen-landscape-architect/

The Portland experiment in city planning that began in the late 1960s is driven by a “moral political culture,” historian Carl Abbott contends, that stresses securing the public good over individual interests.  The public good is predicated on procuring “livability,” the concept upon which the Obama Administration restructured the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  HUD's Six Principles of Livability are straight out of the Portland 2035 Comprehensive Plan, and the agency's investment in pedestrian oriented mixed use neighborhoods with access to transit also carries a measure of social justice. 

When the automobile is an option rather than a requirement for mobility, social equity is enhanced. A recent study by Christopher Leinberger measured walkability and housing affordability (households earning 80 percent of median income) by factoring in the costs of transportation and access to employment, and Portland ranked seventh among the nation’s 30 largest metropolitan areas. Houston, where residents drive 50 percent more than in Portland, ranked 20th and Orlando, which has the nation’s highest pedestrian death rate, came in last.  The Sunbelt cities are also ringed by exclusionary, gated subdivisions, one in which Trayvon Martin lost his life, that are foreign to Portland.

Both President Obama and Pope Francis have championed Portland’s communal approach to planning. Although not perfect, the city's commitment to livability is the best hope for overcoming historic injustice and, maybe even, racism itself.  In 2012, whites supported Barack Obama at a significantly higher rate (nearly two thirds) in Portland than the national average of 39 percent, which begs the question: why did a city with an "alarming legacy of racism” so whole-heartedly support a black politician?

Portland is enacting strategies to blunt the racism's legacy, the very items that can secure the post-racial politics Barack Obama envisioned.  In a nation marred by the sin of slavery, building cites that are resilient, just, and equitable is essential.  This endeavor is a test of our better angels, and  Portland is a prototype for planners trying to secure a better future. 

We are Orlando in Portland, Oregon

Living in Portland, Oregon, the emotional toll of the Orlando tragedy did not hit me until the Pride Parade passed through my neighborhood. 8,000 people marched and over 100,000 onlookers jammed the route.  It was poignant as well as celebratory.  The rhythmic beat of drums, the cheers of the crowd, the bold bright colors, and flashing of countless “We are Orlando” signs immediately brought me to tears.  “Love conquers Hate,” was the message, and I was both saddened and overjoyed to experience the moment—an unadulterated expression of our better angels.

The death of 49 people at the hand of a madman wielding an assault rife is barbarism.  Targeting members of the gay community and attributing their murder to a fanatical religious sect is also the manifestation of evil in a society founded on religious tolerance.  The effort to extend civil rights to the LGBT community is a definitive test of American democracy, a concept under siege in a world where homosexuality is punished by death in ten Muslim countries.

In the past, I viewed Pride Parades as expressions of sexuality rather than citizenship.  I understood the freedom the proverbial “Dikes on Bikes” and marchers in fairy attire and S & M gear celebrated, but virtue—the sacrifices that tempers our liberty—was not the theme.  This year, the pageant had a more sober tone. The cause célèbre was not personal freedom but solidarity, the bonding of citizens to protect rights and advance civilization.  “We are Orlando” is inclusionary: a statement that demands responsibility and it begins with ensuring that religious fanatics do not murder or persecute members of the LBGT community.

A melting pot of ethnicities and sexual persuasions, Orlando is a harbinger of the future.  It is not unlike Atlanta in the early 1960s, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown surpassed Birmingham to become what geographer’s call a “Primate City,” a region’s lead city, because it was “too busy to hate.” Exploiting capital rather than race, Atlanta realized its Olympic ambitions and Orlando seemed destined to do the same.  It is an open welcoming city that has grown too fast to hate.

The tragedy that befell Orlando is a test all free people eventually face.  For democracy can never move forward by forcing one’s beliefs on others, it requires shared personal sacrifice. The future community—the one we need—must be vital and authentic, mixing freedom with what Jefferson called virtue and Christ called love. This will demand more equanimity and compassion, but what community does not?

Houston's Floods Document Joel Kotkin 's Mypoic Urban Vision

The recent deluge that inundated Houston and left it looking like Bangladesh reveals the myopia that distorts Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.  A stalwart defender of drivable suburbanism, Houston is Kotkin’s poster child, “America’s Opportunity City.”  What he never broaches in his 1950s General Motors approach to city planning is the cost of placing 6 million humans in a swamp.

Houston May 2016

To make Houston habitable, a 2,500 mile network of waterways (the length of Route 66) drains the boggy metro region.  Covered with swaths of subdivisions, strip malls, and roads, Kotkin touts this engineered landscape for offering an inexpensive “introduction to the American Dream.” What he fails to mention is the $26 billion price tag to keep the drainage system functioning.

In Houston's auto-addled landscape paving the environment is a priority.  Between 1996 and 2011, the city increased its impervious surface coverage by 25 percent, which translates into an extra $4,000 per square meter in flood damage.  Between 1999 and 2009, Houston suffered $3 billion in flood damage, and as development further burdens the regional infrastructure losses will accelerate.http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/20/houston-flood-damage-chronic-expensive-and-avoidable.html

Ignoring the “social costs” (the cost society bears) of suburban sprawl is endemic to Kotkin’s research.  That so many people chose to live in autocentric subdivisions is the fact he touts for suburban sprawl being a good investment.  In The Human City, he breaches new ground by laying claim to iconic urbanist Lewis Mumford to counter the “Cult of Density,” and the “retro-urbanists” who champion walkable urbanism.  

Mumford, who famously stated, “Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends,” was a towering intellect with a deep understanding of history that The Human City glosses over.  Kotkin, who thrills over the Grand Parkway (the progenitor of the low density, pavement rich sprawl that loops around Houston’s massive 1700 square mile imprint), cannot ingest enough intellectual Viagra to strike a passing affair with Mumford.  He appropriates Mumford's concept of the "small unit" when it is the big idea, the collapse of civilization that earned Mumford national acclaim.  

In his first book, the Story of Utopias (1922), the young sage introduced the concept of regionalism, a template to guide the modern city around the constructs of nature.  Science and technology were remaking the world, and unless these forces were channeled into “human patterns” urban dwellers would be cut off from nature and become as standardized as modern society's growing proliferation of machines.  Mumford proposed building a suburban regimen of pragmatic utopias or "good places" that "spring out the realities of our environment.” The garden city was his prototype, mixed-use communities set to the scale of the pedestrian and streetcar and sited in harmony with the natural environment. 

Mumford also predicted the disasters that now regularly befall Houton were endemic to cities that ignored environmental constraints. In the keynote address at the 1927 National Conference of American City Planning, he recounted the sequence of deterioration that occured when cities exceeded the natural limitations to development,  In past civilizations, periods of excessive urban growth were followed by ecological catastrophe, the implosion of agriculture, and social collapse. The “necropolis,” the dead city, he warned, was that fate of any people that promulgated unrestrained growth.

Houston Flood Refuges April 2016

A decade later, Mumford’s historical insight reached a national audience with the publication of his magnum opus, The Culture of the Cities.  After appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1938, he took a temporary consulting job with the Northwest Regional Council.  Mumford’s Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest was a seminal study that influenced Portland, Oregon’s unique approach to regional planning. “Portland is a better city thanks to the wisdom and foresight of Lewis Mumford,” former mayor and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt stated in 1982.

Portland and Houston are a world apart.  Joel Kotkin would have us believe Portland’s creation of an urban growth boundary to internalize social costs is exacerbating a housing shortage.  Yet Portland, not Houston, is attracting new residents at a higher rate. 

Housing prices are higher in Portland, but the car is option.  Not owning a car dramatically reduces living costs, and C02 emissions are significantly lower per capita in Portland where residents drive 53 percent less (23.6 miles) than in Houston (36.9 miles). http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/onh2p11.htm  Social equity, defined as access to affordable housing for households earning 80 percent of median income, is also higher in Portland when factoring in the cost of transportation and access to employment.  Using this measure, Portland ranks 7th and Houston ranks 20th among the nation's largest metropolitan areas. http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/foot-traffic-ahead-2016 

In the 21st century, walkscores and bikescores measure the Human City.  If we are to have “urbanism for the rest of us,” as Kotkin claims, investing in walkable urbanism must trump building massive infrastructure projects to make flood prone cities like Houston habitable. 

Sims Bayou Flood Control Project

It’s a time-tested idea.  In Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest, Lewis Mumford advocated urbanism that “obviates the need for the grandiose engineering experiments to which we are all by sheer inertia and fashion, too easily committed.” Sadly with nature in retreat and climate change ascendant, inertia and the status quo is what Kotkin celebrates and his concept of a Human City is neither. 

For more on Lewis Mumford in Portland, see "A Vision of Green: Lewis Mumford's Legacy in Portland, Oregon," The Journal of the American Planning Association (Summer 1999).

The D Word in Oz, Density Tests Portland

A recent study placed Metropolitan Portland 10^th in the nation for attracting new residents. What separates it from the other cities is its location, Portland is the only city outside the Sunbelt, and, its housing prices top the list.  This rapid uptick in growth and value has raised concerns that Portland’s vaunted livability is under siege by the influx of newcomers and outside investors.

Portland State University hosted a well-attended event, Has Portland Lost Its Way?  The premise was the planning system is flailing.  The new 2035 comprehensive plan is laden with incentives for developers and lacks heritage protection, urbanism expert Michael Mehaffy contends.  The gleaming Modernist towers punctuating the skyline personify the problem. Looming over parks and historic properties, their standardized mesh of glass and metal impairs the vernacular art good place making demands. "Instead of clear, predictable form-based codes that guide development to blend sensitively with the scale of its neighbors and to mitigate its impacts," Mehaffy finds, "the city imposes a subjective game of 'impress the design panelists' and 'who's the best renderer'—for drawings that are famously unlike the built result."http://www.planetizen.com/node/86508/has-portland-lost-its-way 

Flash Cube Architecture Deadens Urban Vista

He has a point.  The Cosmopolitan, the 28-story glass tower between Fields Park and Tanner Springs Park, functions like a giant roadway reflector on a cloudless summer day.  Its reflective glare deadens the Pearl District’s visual kalidescope while toasting the natural surroundings with shimmering waves of heat.  So much sunlight is reflected that people cast two shadows when walking through Tanner Springs Park.  Michelle Shaprio, chair of Friends of Tanner Springs, thinks a "a study of heat reflection from glass buildings" is in order. "We thought the temperature would be affected, and we were right."

Without sunglasses, viewing the building is to encounter a facsimile of the blinding light that turned Saul of Taursus into Paul the Apostle.  Interestingly, this interstellar brilliance is depicted in  an artistic rendering where high priced units in the building's upper levels are aglow like a Fourth of July sparkler.

Rather than build modernist towers in the downtown, Mehaffy wants development funneled into a “polycentric model.” Orenco Station exemplifies the type of transit-oriented-development that could better integrate with the landscape.   He also proposes investing in “walkable mixed-use nodes” in transit corridors, which allow residents in single family to keep “their ways of life relatively unaffected.” 

The audience, however, did not see the four-story mixed-use buildings rising on Division Street, as having a “relatively unaffected” impact on their lives. A woman with 17 years in the planning field drew applause when she advocated allowing existing structures to add up to two floors, but not permitting teardowns for higher density uses. She was all for building new apartments without parking, but not in her neighborhood.  A “just say no” chorus followed.  Citizens spoke out against “density dogma,” and some wondered if it would not be wise to limit growth rather than plan for it.

Encountering intense Florida style growth (Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tampa ranked higher than Portland in attracting new residents) for the first time, reaction not reason fueled many responses. This is not uncommon. In Winter Park, a toney suburb of Orlando, “No-Density” signs was the response to development pressures. Portland, however, is different from Orlando, which is awash in gated subdivisions and suffers the highest pedestrian death rate in the nation (followed by Tampa, and Jacksonville is almost as deadly).

Portland is eminently walkable and bicycling is common. Moreover, walkable urbanism is in high demand, and it commands top dollar. The question is whether Portlanders can adapt to more road congestion, higher densities, and rising costs and still enjoy the benefits of a quality park system, a range of transportation choices, and thriving neighborhoods where work, play, and culture are close at hand.

When dealing with rapid growth, it is easier to say no than work through the time-consuming process that can procure win-win agreements. Fortunately, Portland’s comprehensive plan is well conceived. The Cosmopolitan’s soulless facade is a reminder that there are flaws, but the 2035 plan has had significant citizen input and it will under go further scrutiny by the City Council. Most important, Portland has already staked out a path to sustainability and equity, and the new plan rests on the foundation that has produced one of the greenest cities in the nation. 

After residing in Orlando for a quarter of a century, I am dumbfounded by the benefits that good planning provides in Portland.  I live a rich life without an automobile in the Pearl District.  I rent my parking space for $200 a month, and rely on my feet, a bicycle, public transit, and an occasional zip car to traverse the city. I recently sold my car in Orlando, and am still giddy with the realization that I will never again have to strike a deal with a car salesman. Trading a ritual corporate shakedown for a vibrant public realm marks a definitive step in the pursuit of happiness, and I expect by 2035 many others will have experienced the same bliss.

The 2035 Plan https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/57352