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City-backed urban revitalization resulted in an influx of affluent white residents and a gradual displacement of poorer, black residents -- near-texbook gentrification -- along Alberta Street and in other hot parts of Northeast Portland. City planners are trying to learn from the mistakes of the past and find ways to turn around neighborhoods without forcing out existing neighbors.

(Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian)

Spike Lee was discussing New York City when he went on an expletive-laced rant about gentrification last week, but he could easily have been talking about Portland.

The Brooklyn-bred filmmaker was talking to a crowd at the Pratt Institute as part of an African American History Month celebration when someone asked about "the other side" of gentrification. The implication was that gentrification can be a good thing.

“Let me just kill you right now,” Lee said, interrupting his questioner. “… Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? … Why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better? Why’s there more police protection now? Why’s the garbage getting picked up more regularly?”

Though the comments quickly spread through the media, they marked just the latest news peg in the ongoing national debate about the return of young, affluent professionals to urban settings and the impact on people who lived in those communities before the boom.

Lee's impromptu rallying cry also echoed – though in a saltier fashion – complaints heard in North and Northeast Portland recently during the debate about whether to build a Trader Joe's at Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard and Alberta Street.

"We have both some bad history and limited history," said State Rep. Lew Frederick, a Democrat who represents some of the Northeast Portland neighborhoods most changed or in the process of changing. "Most of the folks in Portland, the white folks, really do not interact with African Americans at all. When you start talking about this as a problem they go, 'Where?' because they don't see it. They have no clue."

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Gentrification is broadly defined as the mass displacement of a group of people that occurs as a result of revitalization. It can be caused by practical changes – higher rents and property taxes, say – or more subtle cultural changes. Think brewpubs and boutiques replacing corner markets and historically black churches.

The lot at MLK and Alberta is just the latest ground zero for Portland's battle over gentrification.

The transformation of inner Northeast Portland has been a near-textbook example: In the years after World War II, the communities along Alberta Street, Mississippi Avenue and what was once Union Avenue blossomed as vibrant black neighborhoods, in part because red-lining practices by Portland banks barred African Americans from living almost anywhere else. (And, in the process, led to an erosion of the working-class German and Eastern European communities that first settled there.)

The problem that Lee and others complain about isn’t the revitalization, but one result: Urban renewal done without forethought can create economic and racial segregation. For example, planners say there is a direct tie between rising affluence in inner Northeast Portland and rising poverty in the neighborhoods of

Is your neighborhood at risk?

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Starting in the mid-1970s, the lure of comparatively cheap real estate brought affluent young families eager for a bargain close to downtown.

, going in less than a generation from poor, black and under-educated to affluent, white and awash in graduate degrees.

Urban renewal efforts disrupted those communities, however, ripping them apart physically – as with the construction of Interstate 5 – and psychologically.

To a degree, this is not a new phenomenon for Portland. Longtime neighbors around Hawthorne Boulevard grumbled when that district turned upscale. Neighbors along Division are doing the same now that their street has become the center of hip dining.

The first time Portland State University planning professor Carl Abbott can recall hearing complaints about gentrification in town, they were in relation to Northwest Portland – before 23rd Avenue morphed into "Trendy Third."

“Gentrification can happen without a racial dimension. It can be as much about class as about race,” Abbott said. “People may not think of St. Johns or Kenton as gentrifying, because there’s not the same obvious racial dimension. But it’s a similar thing happening.”

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The experts agree that it’s possible to accomplish revitalization without pushing out an entire class of people. But they struggle to come up with concrete examples, at least in the United States.

"If you look at it from a political and economic standpoint, gentrification is sort of a product of our capitalist system," said Gerardo Sandoval, an assistant professor of planning and public policy at the University of Oregon. "We like to leave the market alone to do what it's going to do."

Sandoval wrote a book about successful revitalization efforts in Los Angeles' MacArthur Park, where he grew up.

“It was a rough area in the 1980s, the center of drug activity, a lot of homicides, a lot of drug violence,” he said. “Today, it’s a vibrant urban place, dense, linked to regional transportation, good access to a bus line, very walkable, strong public spaces. They they managed to do it without forcing all the Latino folks out.”

How? Sandoval cites two factors: City leaders used policy tools such as inclusionary zoning, in which developers must include a certain percentage of low-income units in a housing project, to ensure a modicum of economic diversity. Latino politicians and activists, who wield serious influence in Los Angeles, made it clear from the start of clean up efforts that they would oppose programs likely to cause gentrification.

“It was something the activists were worried about from the beginning,” Sandoval said.

Read more from Lew Frederick

The Democratic state representative lives in Northeast Portland and represents some of the areas most transformed by urban renewal and hardest hit by gentrification.

North and Northeast Portland offer a stark contrast: Oregon and Texas are the only states that ban inclusionary zoning, though advocates for affordable housing have pushed state legislators to change that for several years.

And African American activists, due in part to the small percentage of black voters in Portland, carry little day-to-day influence at City Hall.

City planners have recently made preventing gentrification a priority in their conversations about future development. But for a long time, displacement simply wasn't something city leaders worried about -- and in a few cases was something they actively sought.

That history helps explain why the conversation over gentrification in Portland frequently devolves into debates about specific projects, such as the controversy over Trader Joe's or the battle over new bike infrastructure along North Williams Avenue.

“There are so many pieces to the puzzle here, so much history, that it becomes very emotional,” said Frederick, the state legislator. “Families sit around the Thanksgiving table and they say, ‘You remember grandmother or great-grandfather had that house where the Coliseum is? You remember how we used to go to this jazz place or that grocery or to so-and-so’s restaurant?’ They remember that they were moved, once, twice sometimes three times. They remember that the city did that to them, and they get very upset when they see it happening again.”