“Make space for us. Don’t treat us as if we’re new. This is our neighborhood, this is where we grew up. Don’t treat us like we are guests and understand that you are a part of this systematic oppression,” says Alisha Kelly, lifelong resident of North Portland.
Kelly witnessed firsthand the changes the historically Black neighborhood has gone through. “If you lived on the north side, you could always find people who looked like you,” she says.
Fast forward to 2022, some displaced North Portlanders are using their friends’ and family’s addresses to enroll their children in schools they grew up attending that were once underfunded and run-down.
Gentrification, as defined by Portland’s 2035 Comprehensive Plan, is an “under-valued neighborhood that becomes desirable, resulting in rising property values and changes to demographic and economic conditions of the neighborhood.”
“Alberta, Mississippi, Williams, and MLK, these people were not coming around there unless they were lost. You damn sure wouldn’t see them opening up a business on Alberta,” says Raina Casey, a Hurricane Katrina survivor who moved to North Portland to be with family. She says that 15 years ago, North Portland was an area where white folks and wealthy people would rarely visit.
Nicole Williams, a North Portlander who left for college and came right back, says, “I had white friends in Southwest Portland whose parents didn’t let them go anywhere near North Portland because it was ‘so horrible,’ and that pissed me off because I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up anywhere else.”
“If you see a New Seasons or a Starbucks in a certain area, that’s how you know it’s been gentrified,” Kelly says. Because of the gentrification of North Portland, Black-owned family businesses and community centers have been replaced by cannabis-friendly yoga studios and overpriced vintage thrift stores.
Kelly’s grandparents always told her family to buy property, so most of her aunts and uncles own their houses. By the time she and her cousins were old enough to start thinking about purchasing property, prices spiked.
Through an affordable housing initiative that aimed to bring back displaced residents of North Portland, Kelly was able to purchase a home there at 22. Unfortunately, after a few years, the house started falling apart, which led to a class-action lawsuit against the company that built the properties.
When she and her husband were looking to purchase a new home in the same area, they had trouble getting approved for a loan that would help them buy what they could afford — and wanted. “Me and my husband make a good amount of money too, whereas the white person who bought our house was a store manager at Domino’s,” she says.
With the North Portland neighborhood becoming more affluent, and in turn, more white, Black residents quickly became strangers in the very place they called home. Medina Gedi, a resident who frequents North Portland for hair products says “whenever I’m in that part of town, I recognize it less and less with each visit.”
“All these new rules started popping up,” Kelly says, “for example, if a kid was going to school in the area and they got caught fighting in the neighborhood more than once, their whole family got evicted so they wouldn’t be in the school district anymore.”
Additionally, schools in the area started to conduct “address checks” to make sure the students who were enrolled actually lived in the district. “They knew that families of color could not afford to live in the area, so they would eliminate students when they found out they were using someone else’s address to attend a better school,” Kelly says.
It is no coincidence that address checks became more common as North Portland got wealthier and less diverse. Williams says “parents are paying taxes for schools to go around and police this shit when all we want is for our kids to have a better education.”
What does a better education look like? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, for instance, has a Mandarin immersion program that was started in 2014. “So, after all these little Black children have been moved to Southeast and East Portland, you’re going to teach all the little white kids how to speak Mandarin?” Casey says.
Higher education also looked different in the neighborhood. Portland Community College’s Cascade campus located in North Portland went through major renovations once the demographics of the neighborhood began to change. Before renovations were made, the Cascade campus was considered to be the worst location out of all four of PCC’s campuses.
“For decades, the city was slow to respond to the needs of residents,” says Tem Habte, who grew up near PCC Cascade, “but once a few white folks started moving in, all of a sudden they can deliver on better housing and schools with a swiftness that we never got.”
Gentrification is often an exploitative practice that consistently helps uplift those with more capital, while leaving the people that have been displaced or feel the impact of gentrification in other ways to fend for themselves.
Kelly knew a mother whose family was able to stay in North Portland despite the demographic changes and financial consequences that took place in the neighborhood. When her child got into his second fight, her family was forced to move.
An immigrant, she did not speak English fluently. She also did not own a car, and depended on the bus. The family had no choice but to make things work despite these barriers that would never get in the way of transplants who benefited from their displacement.
Gedi says “the thing with Portland is that it seems like a super progressive and accepting place, but then these marginalized communities are treated like they’re disposable.”
“I remember going to Mississippi for something one day, and I just straight up cried,” Williams says, “they’ve replaced all the Black people in North Portland with ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs. If Black lives matter, give me my mom’s house back, not an affordable housing condo.”
