How East Portland Was Born... and Ignored

FAIRLY OR NOT, many Portlanders consider 82nd Avenue a boundary line. A wall between Portland and something else.

"I have this joke about Portland and East Portland," says Jamaal Green, a Ph.D. student at Portland State University studying urban planning, East Portland in particular. "If you were to make a map of the city, it would look like one of those old Renaissance maps with clouds and dragons. People went [to East Portland] and they never returned! We have no idea what's going on there!"

East Portland, however, is Portland. Depending on how you quantify the area east of 82nd, the region has roughly one-fifth of Portland's land, a quarter of the population with nearly 40 percent of Portland's youth, and the most diverse and rapidly growing sections of the city. And yet, it is all too often casually referred to as a hinterland.

That characterization is implicitly biased about our city's culture and what the demographics are supposed to look like. Since the early 1970s, Portland has made a concerted (and very successful) effort to revitalize the urban core and inner neighborhoods. Downtown, the Pearl District, and Alberta are all former examples of urban blight, the seemingly intractable bugbear of politics and planning for much of the 20th century.

"As we've seen return to the central city," says Erin Goodling, another PSU Ph.D. student who studies the area, "we've seen relative disinvestment and flattening [elsewhere]."

Goodling notes that housing prices, property values, and property taxes have risen considerably in Portland since the urban core has been revived—but not in East Portland. For instance, a side effect of North Mississippi's makeover is that poor and minority populations have migrated to the city's periphery.

Lore Wintergreen is an advocate for the East Portland Action Plan, and she recalls a conversation she had with an African American man who lived in Albina: "He said, 'It's historically appropriate for us to live where you want us to live... I'm moving to outer East Portland, where you want us to live now.' This was in 1999... he needed a larger home, and he knew he would not be able to buy as large a home in North or Northeast."

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