But there has been pushback on these efforts, too. Many Portlanders say they don’t want more density in their neighborhoods, that they oppose big housing complexes and in-law units in neighbors’ backyards. (There is a similar attitude evident in some San Francisco residents’ responses to that city’s housing crisis.) Some neighborhoods are actually trying to downzone to decrease density.

“There are limits to white urban liberalism,” Justin Buri, the executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, tells me. “When it comes to housing and schools, all of that goes out the window.”

The people who are being pushed out of inner Portland neighborhoods are, by and large, people of color, which would be disturbing anyway but is all the more troubling because Portland—like many other American cities—has a history of displacing African Americans in the name of urban renewal. African Americans lived in a district called Albina until the 1950s and 1960s, until the neighborhood was bulldozed so the city could build a hospital and highways. Then African American residents moved to North and Northeast Portland, until the city added a light rail to those neighborhoods in the 2000s Now those neighborhoods are becoming too expensive.

The city “knew it was going to create displacement, but they didn’t follow through on all the affordable-housing commitments, and things like workforce development and job training, that would sort of stabilize people,” Lisa K. Bates, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, told me.

Between 2000 and 2010, Portland became even whiter, not just because more white people moved to the center city, but also because black people and Latinos moved to the city’s outer edges and suburbs.

Many longtime residents, particularly minorities, are being pushed to east Portland, a neighborhood referred to as “The Numbers” for its high-numbered streets. It can be a 30-minute drive—depending on traffic—and is full of strip malls and poor air quality and fast-food restaurants and other things that seem distinctly un-Portland. Now, people are being pushed out of there, too.

Shanequewa Finney and her family are among those being pushed out of east Portland. Finney, 42, lives with her husband and four of her children in a house near 130th street in Portland, where they paid $1,500 a month for a six-bedroom house (this is already far from the close-in neighborhood they lived in until six years ago). But when the owner turned over management of the apartment to a private company, the Finneys were told they’d have to be out in 30 days. Finney got an extension to 60 days, but the time is ticking down and she can’t find anything else. Everywhere she goes, she’s told there are already three other people ahead of her in putting in applications, and prices are double or triple what she’s paying now. She doesn’t want her children to have to change schools—one of her sons is about to be a high-school senior—but she isn’t sure she has a choice. The family is now looking at two-bedroom apartments.“If I don’t find a place, I’ll put my stuff into storage, and… I don’t know,” she told me. “People can come from a different state and buy property, and they have money. I wish they built affordable buildings for us.”