Snakes and Ladders

Mary Ann and I bought our house in North Portland nearly five years ago. While I was excited about the diversity of folks living in NoPo, and we both dug the proximity to our jobs at the time, truth is it was all about the Benjamins. This was one of the few places two firmly middle-class folks could still afford to buy a home in Portland, and we got our money’s worth.

Five years flies by in the R.E.M. flutter of an eye, and looking around me now, I feel a bit like Marty McFly stepping out of the Delorean in “Back to the Future II” to discover an almost unrecognizable landscape. Bounce up to Willamette, and you can see a vacant block where once there were classic bungalows. Soon I suspect there will be more generic student housing for incoming Pilots. Drive up Lombard toward St. Johns, and you’ll see a New Seasons shooting up out of the pavement like an organic, fair-trade weed, not to mention roughly 10 new restaurants all ostensibly catering to folks such as ourselves.

No judgement on any of these business decisions, but there most definitely is a downside. The Mercury ran a great story this week on Portland’s Renter State of Emergency. If you live in Portland and have yet to be directly impacted by what appears to be a total dereliction of duties by our City Council, to quote the ever-articulate Miley Cyrus, “Congratufuckinglations.”

For me, shit got real a couple weeks back when I found out that one of my best friends in the world (along with all of his fellow tenants) received 60-day notice to vacate his apartment complex, located three short blocks from my house. They weren’t even given the option to stay at a higher rent, because either the new owner assumed they wouldn’t be able to afford it, or they’re not going to build housing in that location. Beside my obvious selfish motivations, such as the ease with which I can stumble back to my own bed after a night spent decimating a bottle of Eagle Rare, there are bigger considerations here.

Shouldn’t a teacher working full time, even as a substitute, be able to afford a place to live? Heaven forbid we all cast our eyes back in time to the post-World War II era, when the government was encouraging an entire generation to grow roots by making home loans ultra-affordable. No, that particular American Dream is long dead at this point. But is it too much to ask that Oregon might finally take a look at its outdated statute banning rent control? Is it unthinkable that rich-ass developers might include a small percentage of price-fixed apartments in the buildings they stand to make millions off? Can we maybe consider putting a stop to this Ebola outbreak of skinny houses being thrust into our neighborhoods where once there were lovely old homes that added character to the community rather than turning the world into a shitty Ikea display one corrupted lot at a time? Even more, perhaps these money-grubbing snakes could pause for one second in their relentless gorging to consider that, while there’s more money to be made off two cookie-cutter condos, there’s a much higher human price to be paid for the elimination of vast swaths of low-income apartment complexes.

Lest you think this only concerns the small matter of human lives, allow me to put it another way. Yesterday I went to pick up my dogs from the groomer, and noticed they were having a moving sale. Beauty for the Beast is being pushed out to somewhere near 30th and Sandy because their landlord just jacked up their rent to $6,000 per month. That is insane. Sure, I believe in a property owner’s right to make money on her or his investment, but when it comes at the expense of having a neighborhood full of a diversity of businesses serving people of all income levels, it’s time to pause for consideration. Small businesses are businesses, too, after all, and Beauty for the Beast is but one of many forced to flee NoPo in recent months.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concepts of White Flight and gentrification, take a break from this and go do some reading. I’ll wait for you.

You’re back? Cool! What they say about the average American attention span is evidently only mostly true. The point is, rich people move out of the city when it suits them, and then move right back in when the whim strikes. Those who don’t actually live here trade our lives and lairs like draft picks in a fantasy football league, and with the same cut-throat mentality. Not a rich person? Tough titties. Suck it up, move out to the now crumbling suburbs and live there until there’s another shift in the housing wind.

I come from a family with money, so I don’t want this to be about class warfare. My parents live in the fancy-pants Eastmoreland neighborhood, and developers are buying up beautiful old mini-mansions there, ripping them down, and replacing them with butt-ugly skinny houses. Rich or poor, we all have a stake in keeping our communities’ identities intact. But it’s a matter of scale. For those of us who own houses, and have the dough to dine where we want and take our yuppie dogs to groomers on the other side of town, the lickity-split plastic surgery on our neighborhoods is largely cosmetic, more of a philosophical conundrum than a state of emergency.

For our friends and neighbors without this kind of economic freedom, we’re talking about a crisis. This isn’t about where they spend their money, but rather where they lay their heads at night. That kind of loss of place is something we should all have trouble swallowing, much like the bullshit excuse that developers don’t need to build adequate parking for their high-end apartment buildings because all their tenants ride bikes. Our neighborhoods have sucked down all of your backwash that we can stand, and it’s high time we started spitting back.