Okay, in Portland you’re talking about a historically very racist city that’s segregated low income families and families of colour into certain specific areas–the Laurelhurst arches, for example, are the borders within which no black people could own houses or businesses.
Research the Vanport Flood.
So in the early 2000s an influx of poor white queers started in the poor people of colour areas. We couldn’t afford better, and we wanted to be around other queers. The schools are underfunded, there are still shootings, long term residents couldn’t get home improvement loans or refinance their mortgages, and when white queers made the neighborhoods edgy instead of “the ghetto” white bridge and tunnel tourists wanted a piece of it and slowly began infiltrating. Literally pushing out businesses of colour like the Native American Youth Association couldn’t afford the new raised rent on their building and was forced out for a business called, literally, “hovel” which sold overpriced knickknacks to the new white residents moving into the new apartment buildings.
At first the apartment buildings were built on vacant lots, which isn’t as bad as displacing actual residents, but it drives property taxes up while the banks still refused to refinance or offer home improvement loans to long term residents of colour and low income residents.
The businesses moving in to the neighbourhoods are to a one too expensive for low income residents to access, so when people talk about “urban renewal”, the renewal happening is happening for the specific newcomer population of rich white people. The locals aren’t able to access these new services like yoga studios, expensive hipster bars, expensive urban coops.
And then there’s the school factor: newcomers aren’t invested in local schools and overwhelmingly tend to send their children to charter schools out of the neighbourhood, so a strong advocating force for schools is thus denied to locals.
As the process continues, locals get priced out. They can’t afford their property taxes, rents get deliberately upped (this happened to me twice), people get evicted with no notice so that landlords can remodel or simply sell the lots for money.
In my old neighbourhood an old empty lot that locals had turned into a park was sold to become a giant overpriced apartment building.
The family across the street sold because they couldn’t afford the new taxes.
Three blocks away a landlord kicked out three generations of a family who’d been living in a house divided into three apartments to sell to a developer who made a four story luxury condo building.
The last black owned business in the area was forced out to become a giant leed certified business office.
A family owned ethiopian restaurant was deliberately driven closed because the new developer didn’t think the prospective white residents of his new buildings would “want to smell that kind of food.” But the piss smell of the local microbrewery is so aromatic, amirite?
A local laundromat was driven out of business when a hipster laundromat with wifi, coffee, and wine moved in four blocks away.
What people like Rarebird are doing is facilitating this process without giving back to the community.
Flipping is, definitionally, paying undermarket value for a product to remodel it and sell it for more.
They aren’t paying long term locals what their properties are worth, taking advantage of the high taxes white people have brought while underpaying to buy these places they then profit off of.
This is part of a larger problem where rich people buy multiple condos and apartments and then never live in them, preferring to Airbnb them occasionally for a profit.
There is no corresponding housing being build for the people who are displaced.
None of these buildings accept section 8 and mandatory inclusionary income zoning failed, which means there are no affordable apartments in any of these new buildings.
Rents have risen in Portland six times faster than anywhere else, while we remain largely a poor state, with only Nike, Adidas, and Intel drawing in new workers, and these workers are not the long term residents who’ve been forced out by the greed of the incoming whites for local flavour.
The only geographic locations with prices comparable to the old North and Northeast Portland are incredibly far out, areas without good public transit, and usually without sidewalks.
57% of our school children are on free lunch this summer because their parents CAN’T AFFORD TO FEED THEM.
Over 800 families are on ONE WAITLIST for shelter.
Our dv and homeless shelters for single people are full.
And Rarebird is buying people out, increasing rents, not giving back to the community in any way, and taking their profits and reinvesting them into repeating the process over and over and over again?
And people don’t see a problem with this?
