Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland Oregon

Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland Oregon

Directed by Cornelius Swart (2016)

Film Review

As of 2015, Portland was the most “gentrified” city in the US. The term “gentrification” describes the large scare displacement of African Americans from their traditional inner city communities. It typically occurs when city authorities create significant amenities in Black neighborhoods to lure white residents back from the suburbs. This new trend reverses a 100 year process in which whites migrated great distances to avoid living near Black people.

Growing demand from white professionals for inner city homes, leads to exponential increases in house prices and rents that make homes unaffordable for low income African Americans.

In Portland the first area to be gentrified was Albina, a neighborhood just Northeast of downtown Portland. During the fifties and sixties, it was a thriving Black community with flourishing Black-owned businesses where most residents knew one another. In the 1970s, as manufacturing jobs moved overseas, economic conditions in Albina tanked and criminal activity increased.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Portland city authorities began investing in Northeast Portland by building a light rail service and funding various redevelopment projects. More than 1100 African American homes and scores of Black businesses were demolished for an Interstate hub, a sports stadium, and a major hospital complex that was never built. At the same time, city authorities enacted a ban against landlords renting to federal Section 8 subsidy recipients.

The mass displacement of Albina’s Black residents reached its peak after the 2008 economic crisis, which resulted in an epidemic of subprime mortgage foreclosures in many low income communities. Ironically the current house price bubble means the majority of white working class residents are also being displaced from Portland. At present 49% of Portland residents live in rental housing, and half of them spend more than one-third of their income on housing.

Fortunately since 2013, there has been significant organized resistance to continuing gentrification. It’s now the number one issue for city government. In 2015, activists forced Trader Joe to withdraw from a city-subsidized scheme to demolish yet more rental housing for a huge shopping complex. The same year, city authorities passed a right to return law, ending the ban on Section 8 housing and granting former Albina residents preferential access.

Homelessness: The Low Income Housing Scandal

Poverty in America

Frontline (2017)

Film Review

Poverty in America is about the massive corruption scandal behind homelessness and the dearth of affordable housing for low income Americans.

Despite the nearly ten years that have passed since the 2008 economic crisis, 2.5 million Americans are made homeless through home eviction every year. The limited stock of affordable housing has no way of absorbing this many new renters. This, in turn, drives up rents at a time when real wages are decreasing. In many cities, families are forced to pay over 50% of their income in rent – a precarious situation leaving them one family emergency away from the streets.

This documentary focuses on two grossly inadequate federal programs dedicated to increasing access to affordable housing. The first is the Section 8 voucher program enacted in 1968. Under this program, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awards vouchers to low income renters that pay the different between the rent a landlord charges and the rent a tenant can afford based on income.

There are currently 2 million Americans on the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers and only 25 percent will ever receive vouchers. The filmmakers follow three women who have waited six years or longer to qualify for Section 8 vouchers. None of them can find a landlord willing to accept their voucher within the 90 day limit they are given.

The second federal program Frontline explores is one in which the IRS allocates tax credits to states to grant to developers – who, in turn, sell the credits to investors. An entire tax credit industry has grown up around this scheme. Owing to inadequate IRS monitoring (only seven companies have been audited in 29 years), the scheme has been plagued by bribery and kickback scandals.

In Florida, for example, developers routinely cheat the program by over inflating the cost of development projects and either pocketing the difference of siphoning it off to shell companies (including one in Costa Rico specifically created for this purpose).

Despite heroic efforts of a handful of Department of Justice attorneys and Senator (R) Charles Grassley from Iowa, there seems to be little interest on the part of federal or state authorities to end this corruption. The IRS and HUD declined to be interviewed for this program.