One of these days I will update my article from moons ago about how to make gentrification not be a dirty word.

So first no cracks on how there are no black people in the Pacific NW. It is more than just my family. However because of the smaller % of black people in the first place the NW is experiencing this later than most major metropolitan areas, but it also costs more. What do I mean? When you are looking at a smaller community population to start with..... There is not much to absorb the loss.

The reality is as housing prices escalate on the west coast way faster than salaries you will start seeing a black migration back to the less expensive south just out of necessity and desire to be closer to family ,etc.

This article raises a question. Black people often go back and forth when we talk about protecting our community. Do Asian, Greek. Hispanic/Latino, Jewish, etc communities go through this? Or do they just realize the importance and do it?

I have sent this article to alot of emails lists I am on and others have forwarded it on and I have been really interested in the discussions that came from it. The reality is black organizations, churches, etc are going to continue to be overextended and having to find ways to expand their reach as their is going to be no "community."

I don't knock those who want to claim back their City and former locales they fled and gave us our communities. I mean hell I am an urban planner. I hate sprawl so come back in and get off the urban fringe. However we have to start thinking not only about the physical costs of everything, but also the social.

So now in most major locations minorities are less and less likely to be able to afford to live near work. Transportation from where they can live to the jobs short of maybe 5 cities isn't adequate.... So just think about it that way. Put someone 45 miles from the jobs and have no public transit and think about what your community looks like. But then again this is Capitalism at it's finest.

In Parts of U.S. Northwest, a Changing Face
Economics Drive White Gentrification of Core Black Neighborhoods of
Seattle and Portland

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 19, 2006; A03

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Already the whitest major city in America, Portland
is rapidly becoming even whiter at its core.

"The heart of the black community is gone," said Charles Ford, 76, a
black activist whose neighborhood in Portland has flipped in recent
years from majority black to majority white. "There ain't no center
anymore."

About 150 miles north in Seattle, the nation's second-whitest major
city, the same process of downtown demographic bleaching is
accelerating for the same reasons.

An invasion of young, well-educated and mostly white newcomers is
buying up and remaking Seattle's Central District, the birthplace of
Jimi Hendrix and the once-bluesy home of the young Ray Charles. What
had been the largest black-majority community in the Pacific Northwest
has become majority white.

"I am concerned and I am frustrated because I don't know what the
alternatives are," said Norman Rice, who in the 1990s was Seattle's
first and only black mayor. "It clearly isn't racist; it's economics.
The real question you have to ask yourself is: Is this good or bad?"

White gentrification is hardly unique to Portland and Seattle. It is
changing Harlem, the District of Columbia and many other cities.
Demographers say it is especially noticeable in major California
cities -- a function of population density, the desire to escape long
commutes and the relative housing bargains in black neighborhoods.

But as white gentrification accelerates in Portland and Seattle, where
the percentage of black residents was already the lowest among the
nation's largest cities, it is erasing the only historically black
neighborhoods these cities have ever had.

In many cities with large black populations, gentrification has caused
only marginal racial change. In the District, for example, the
percentage of white non-Hispanic residents increased 2.7 percent
between 1990 and 2004, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at
the Brookings Institution.

Still, Washington remains less than one-third white and about 60 percent black.

In Seattle's Central District, though, racial change is anything but
marginal. The non-Hispanic white population in the area jumped from 31
percent in 1990 to 50 percent in 2000, according to the census.

Local demographers say white growth since 2000 has gained momentum,
while the percentage of black residents appears to have fallen to less
than 40 percent. With real estate prices rollicking upward at about 25
percent a year, the Central District appears to be getting whiter and
richer by the month.

As black residents leave the central areas of Portland and Seattle for
the suburbs -- either because they have sold their homes or been
forced out by higher rents -- their community is being splintered by
geographic dispersal and racial integration.

"It's destroying us, socially and politically," said Ford, the
neighborhood activist from Portland. "It is just a total inconvenience
and disrespect to black folks."

Rice does not view the changes as nearly so dire, especially for
people who have been able to sell their homes at a substantial profit
and set aside money for retirement.

Census figures suggest that blacks in Seattle and Portland have not
been displaced into homelessness and that they are not economically
worse off in the suburbs than they were downtown. In many cases,
housing in the suburbs is newer, schools are better and crime is
lower.

But Rice said that newly suburbanized African Americans in Seattle and
Portland are being isolated from one another and "will have to find
new places to embrace our black heritage."

With attendance falling, some black churches in Seattle and Portland
have moved or are opening second sanctuaries in the suburbs.

"I have begged our people not to sell their properties but to no
avail," said the Rev. Reggie Witherspoon, pastor of Mount Calvary
Christian Center, a church in the Central District that is trying to
open a second location in Seattle's southern suburbs, where many
parishioners have moved. "A good majority of them have decided they
cannot afford to drive into the city, so they have joined suburban
white churches."

Neither blacks nor whites, Rice said, appear to have found a way to
stop or slow the disappearance of core black neighborhoods. "They are
concerned, but they don't have an option or a plan," he said.

The pressures of growth, worsening traffic congestion and the rising
price of gasoline seem certain to make the hunt for close-in, upscale
housing even more obsessive in the next two decades.

"The location of the Central District is so superior to the suburbs --
it has great views, it's close to downtown and to the University of
Washington -- that there's a tremendous incentive to buy, especially
for people with no kids or the money to send them to private schools,"
said Richard Morrill, a demographer and professor emeritus at the
University of Washington.

Over the next two decades, Seattle is predicting the creation of
50,000 jobs in the central city, which amounts to nearly a 25 percent
increase in a job base that tends to be high-wage and highly skilled.
Portland, too, is growing, largely by attracting young, well-educated
newcomers from California and the East Coast.

In both Seattle and Portland, which take considerable pride in being
green, liberal and tolerant, the fading away of black inner-city
communities has occasioned considerable hand-wringing among the
overwhelmingly white population. Portland is 75 percent white, and
Seattle 68 percent white.

"Many of the white liberals who condemned white flight are just as
angry at the white folks who are moving back into the cities," Dan
Savage, editor of the Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle,
wrote last month in his blog about movement from Seattle in the 1950s,
'60s and '70s.

The dispersal of African Americans is also an embarrassing reminder of
why they were concentrated in the first place -- and of a time when
neither Portland nor Seattle was especially tolerant.

In the '50s and '60s, when the black population was growing in the
region, restrictive real estate covenants and racial prejudice kept
most African Americans in selected central areas of the two cities.

"Finally, the African American community is able to make the same
choice about where it's going to live as the white community," Rice
said. "They are choosing to move. Is that bad or not? Stay tuned."

In northeast Portland, where Ford has been complaining for years about
gentrification, he acknowledges that the tipping point has come and
gone. White folks are taking over, he said, and blacks folks are all
but gone.

Recently, Ford took a reporter on a tour of his gentrified
neighborhood. En route, he discovered that a not-so-handsome house was
for sale for $400,000. The price astonished him, especially because
the house was considerably smaller than his own.

"When I see prices like that, I wonder who . . . of my race can
continue to live here," he said.

Ford began ruminating about the price -- and the profit -- he might be
able to get for his house, which he has owned since 1968 and which
sits on a fine corner lot near a fixed-up city park.

"I have said I would never sell," Ford said. "But who can resist these prices?"

(c) 2006 The Washington Post Company