Uneven development of the sustainable city: shifting capital in Portland, Oregon

Abstract

Portland, Oregon, is renowned as a paradigmatic “sustainable city.” Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland’s sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning documents, and secondary source histories, we attempt to elucidate the structural origins of Portland’s “uneven development,” exploring how and why the urban core of this paragon of sustainability has become more White and affluent while its outer eastside has become more diverse and poor. We explain how a “sustainability fix”—in this case, green investment in the city’s core—ultimately contributed to the demarcation of racialized poverty along 82nd Avenue, a major north–south arterial marking the boundary of East Portland. Our account of structural processes taking place at multiple scales contributes to a growing body of literature on eco-gentrification and displacement and inner-ring suburban change while empirically demonstrating how Portland’s advances in sustainability have come at the cost of East Portland’s devaluation. Our “30,000 foot” perspective reveals systemic patterns that might then guide more fine-grained analyses of particular political-socio-cultural processes, while providing cautionary insights into current efforts to extend the city’s sustainability initiatives using the same green development model.

Keywords:

• built environment
• gentrification
• suburbanization of poverty
• sustainability fix
• uneven development
• urban sustainability

Acknowledgments

All authors contributed equally to this article. We extend our warm thanks to Sy Adler, Henrik Ernstson, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and to Dillon Mahmoudi for his assistance with census data. Thanks are also due to Carl Abbot and Karen Gibson for talking through historical details, and to the organizers and participants of the “From Dreamscape to Nightmare? The Life, Death and Resurrection of Suburbia in the 20th and 21st Century” sessions at the 2013 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles. All remaining errors are our own.

Notes

1. We focus on East Portland at the city scale given drastic changes to the area over the last decade or so. We identify our study area to include all of the area east of 82nd Avenue, in addition to three neighborhoods (i.e., Cully, Mt. Scott-Arleta, and Brentwood-Darlington) just west of this dividing line, given their similar histories of development and annexation to neighborhoods east of 82nd Avenue. It is important to note, however, that East Portland is not homogenous; a finer-grained lens reveals considerable heterogeneity, in terms of both urban form and socioeconomic characteristics, where some families, blocks, neighborhoods, and census tracts experience much greater poverty than others. Conversely, pockets of destitution remain in inner Portland. It is not our intent to obfuscate such diversity of experience or understate hardship experienced elsewhere in the city.

2. Original longitudinal census data (LTDB, 2013) combines both population and area-weighted calculations to construct estimates of a census data set using 2010 census tract geographies. This data set, which includes census years 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010, adjusts count and mean variables for tracts whose geographies have changed (Logan, Zengwang, & Stults, 2014).

3. See Loving (2011) for a detailed account of displacement of businesses from the Albina area as a result of city policies.

4. Portland had performed over 200 small annexations in the 1960s and continued this trend for the next two decades. The average parcel size was 40 acres, however, with mean populations of less than 80 people per parcel (Abbott, 1983), a scale much smaller than the annexation that was to follow.

5. Clark County, just across the state line in Washington, has grown in a particularly sprawling fashion, however, leading some to argue that it has acted as a “safety valve” for developers and population.

6. Even federal funds have failed to make their way east of 82nd Avenue; when federal stimulus funding was distributed during President Obama’s first term, for example, less than 1% of Portland’s share was invested in East Portland (Mirk, 2010).

7. Notably, Portland is the remaining large city in the United States to have a commission form of government, in which commissioners have legislative, administrative, and quasi-judicial powers and are elected at-large rather than by district. As a result, East Portland residents lack the political power that a district or ward system might afford (Schmidt, 2014).

8. Furthermore, many East Portland multifamily apartment complexes themselves are of poor quality. According to a recent City auditor’s report, for example, complaints of mold in rental units are higher in East Portland than the rest of the city, in large part due to a prevalence of cheaply constructed metal windows and baseboard heating (Griffin-Valade, Kahn, & Gavette, 2013).

9. Due to the age of housing stock and historical disinvestment in Albina and other inner-core neighborhoods, the 1995 assessed values (in contrast to rapidly climbing market value) of homes in those neighborhoods were depressed compared to East Portland. In recent years, however, the median home price in five of the six zip codes east of 82nd Avenue was more than $150,000 lower than the citywide median home price (City of Portland, 2009). Notably, this area also has substantially higher rates of high-cost conventional mortgages as well as foreclosures than other parts of the city (City of Portland, 2009). Moreover, the only census tracts to lose median home values in the city between 2000 and 2010 were in East Portland. In contrast, some tracts in lower Albina saw their median home values increase by 100% (CLF, 2013).

10. The three-county Portland Metro region (Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties) receives approximately $170 million in housing support annually from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the form of support for county housing authorities that oversee Section-8/Housing Choice Voucher distribution, state-administered federal tax credits for affordable unit construction, and federal block-grant funds that can be directed toward housing projects (Schmidt, 2012). In accepting these funds, the county, city, and state are obligated to conform to the Act, which stipulates that affordable housing must be evenly distributed across the city, and that it must not be placed in areas of concentrated poverty or encourage racial segregation.

11. Notably, the census tract with the lowest Median Household Income ($25,022) in East Portland (Tract 83.01) is also the most diverse in the city, with a 54% non-White population (ACS, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon the work supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) IGERT [grant number 0966376]: “Sustaining Ecosystem Services to Support Rapidly Urbanizing Areas.”