Portland has the third lowest percentage of black population of any major metropolitan area in the United States and it’s lost 11.5% of that over the last four years. This article at City Journal examines what’s going on:
Portland is part of the fifth-whitest major metropolitan area in America. Almost 75 percent of the region is white, and it has the third-lowest percentage of blacks, at only 3.1 percent. (America as a whole is 13.2 percent black.) Portland proper is often portrayed as a boomtown, but the city’s tiny (and shrinking) black population doesn’t seem to think so. The city has lost more than 11.5 percent of its black residents in just four years. Metro Portland’s black population share grew by 0.3 percentage points from 2000, but that trailed the nation’s 0.5 percentage-point growth. This implies that some of Portland’s blacks are being displaced from the transit- and amenity-rich city to the suburbs that progressives themselves insist are inferior.
The San Francisco Bay metro area has lost black residents since 2000, though recent estimates suggest that it may have halted the exodus since 2010. The Los Angeles metro area, too, has fewer black residents today than in 2000. The performance in the central cities is even worse. America’s most liberal city, San Francisco, is only 5.4 percent black, and the rate is falling. It’s a similar tale in Seattle—“one of the most progressive cities in the United States,†as a Black Lives Matter protester noted. One city bucking the western trend is Denver. Though the Rocky Mountain city has a small black population—6.1 percent in the region and 9.5 percent in the city proper—that population is growing in both areas, if slowly.
These figures might not be important if they merely reflected a choice by blacks to move to more auspicious locations, but the evidence suggests that specific public policies in these cities have effectively excluded and even driven out blacks. Primary among them are restrictive planning regulations that make it hard to expand the supply of housing. In a market with rising demand and static supply, prices go up. As a rule, a household should spend no more than three times its annual income on a home. But in West Coast markets, housing-price levels far exceed that benchmark. According to the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, the “median multipleâ€â€”the median home price divided by the median household income—should average about 3.0. But the median multiple is 5.1 in Portland, 5.1 in Denver, 5.2 in Seattle, 8.1 in Los Angeles and San Diego, 9.4 in San Francisco, and 9.7 in San Jose. As the Demos/IASP report found, differences in homeownership rates between whites and blacks account for a large share of the racial wealth gap. Policies that put the price of homeownership out of reach for black families exacerbate the problem.
In Chicago Mayor Emanuel’s policies have led to the funding of various amenities that appeal primarily to people in upper income brackets while neighborhood schools are closed and the homicide rate is higher than it’s been in more than a decade. The latter problem is particularly grave in the largely black South and West Sides.
Real estate prices rise, the poor are pushed out, and those poor are disproportionately black. Not really a mystery, is it?
San Francisco has a small activist group pushing for new home construction, taking the position that anything helps, even if it’s not a set-aside low-income development. The problem is to really bend the housing cost curve downward we’d be talking hundreds of thousands of new homes and apartments. Even then it probably wouldn’t work long-term because of basic geography: a beautiful peninsula with great weather, which pretty much everyone wants to live on, is just never going to be cheap.
Don’t forget to consider the fact that only about 0.1% of visitors to our national parks and forests are Blacks and few are Hispanics, in spite of the fact that they all pay taxes to buy and maintain those public lands.
I think there have been a number of articles about this in the Portland newspapers over the years. One of the main underlying explanations is that there are not enough blacks for a lot of black people to feel comfortable.
Under the “tipping point” model of racial segregation, groups have preferences to reside with the same group or in a mixed neighborhood, but there may be a point in which they no longer perceive the neighborhood as mixed. Most of the analysis in this area is about white tipping points, but nonwhites exhibit social preferences as well, though their tipping point is higher.
I note that Denver is fairly segregated by neighborhood (in top-third), lying between Washington D.C. and Memphis, on the Frey index of segregation. Maybe some level of fine-grain segregation is necessary, or at least inevitable, for a city to be diverse?
Clearly the racism of white progressives at work.
Fun Fact: When Oregon was a territory, blacks were explicitly prohibited.
If it were right wing people getting rid of black people, they would be racist, but when progressives do it, too bad so sad. It is quite a formula you all have worked out. No sheets, no crosses, no nooses, you just increase the property taxes and rent until the poor black people cannot afford to live there.
It will be interesting to see how history judges you all. I predict it will not be as racially tolerant as you think you are.
“Daddy, why was great grandpa such a racist?”
“Well son, during those times white people did not understand that saying one thing but doing another does not absolve you of the sin of what you are doing. Great grandpa thought he could absolve his racism by calling everybody else a racist.”