Ousted

On a rainy Wednesday night, a city bus half-filled with mostly black passengers rolls past six blocks of new restaurants, bars, boutiques and record stores on North Mississippi Street. It doesn’t stop at Mason or Skidmore, or near the new condominium construction sites. The bus is headed further north, where (along with the other outskirts and suburbs) much of Portland’s black population is rapidly relocating. On a nearby sidewalk, a double-date of tweed-clad, white thirty-somethings leave the year-old Moloko Plus cocktail bar for a nightcap at Crow Bar across the street.

When Portland is mentioned in the national press — a phenomenon the locals aren’t yet comfortable with — words like “liveable,” “laid-back” and “hip” checker the page. The city is more a collection of “spritely neighborhoods crackling with youthful energy” than a stuffy metropolis, The New York Times recently gushed. It’s a reputation well-earned by neighborhoods like Mississippi and the sprawling nearby Alberta arts district, home to small and locally-owned businesses, bars and plenty of stages for live music. But as Portland grows, the homes surrounding these spritely
neighborhoods have become hot commodities, pricing out both the once-majority black residents and the oft-paler musicians and artists that unwittingly spearheaded the change.

“I’ve copped to being somewhat responsible for this development,” says 32-year-old Eric Isaacson, owner of Mississippi Records. His store, a rustic, living-room-sized space dedicated almost entirely to vinyl and record players, was one of the first to change the face of the neighborhood four and a half years ago. “I did open the door for other stuff in a lot of ways,”
Isaacson, clad in a small stocking cap and Dead Moon T-shirt, says regretfully. He says most of the business owners on Mississippi are sweet, passionate people, and that many have done charitable things in the neighborhood. But when it comes to their business models, the boutiques and specialty shops (which include a high-end salt shop and a dog boutique) don’t reflect the neighborhood in which they sit. “They moved into a neighborhood with a lot of needs and they ignored those needs,” Isaacson says. “I don’t think they’re doing it out of malice, but they’re doing it over ignorance.”

Isaacson has grown so annoyed by the rapid growth and gentrification (he calls it a “conspiracy” among a handful of city-favored real estate developers) that during Mississippi’s annual street fair, when a sea of visitors crowd the street, he closed up shop. “I thought [the street fair] was a mockery of community,” he says. Potential Mississippi Records customers were greeted only by signs in the windows that read, “Fuck Your ‘Progress.’”

On the heated back porch of the Moloko Plus, 31-year old Tim Perry, frontman for the band Pseudosix, sips a beer and recalls his move to the Rose City ten years ago. When he first arrived from Seattle (via his hometown of Renton, Washington), Perry saw uncomfortably little diversity in Portland’s streets. But the Mississippi area, where he and three other musicians bought a home together last year, is more diverse with regard to both race and class. “There are poor people and better-off people, and they’re all on the same block.”

Drawn by what was once one of the cheapest areas in Portland, musicians took refuge in the Mississippi neighborhood. But buying a Mississippi house in 2006 meant entering a neighborhood full of fixer-uppers and “flipping.” It proved surreal for Perry. “We would be looking at these houses that would ordinarily only be for people like us — scraps — and instead there’d be 20 people showing up … 19 of the 20 were all contractors. They’d look around and poke at the foundation and shit. We were like … man, we actually want to live there.” While he knows it sounds hypocritical, Perry would like the neighborhood to stay as diverse as it is now. “It’s the classic ‘pull the ladder up, I’m already on’ scenario,” he says.

“When you look at musicians and artists, many times they are very sensitive to the community,” says Jeri Williams, of Portland’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement. “They don’t want to contribute to a problem.” But it’s a complex problem, Williams says, and she suggests that musicians and artists are already feeling the gentrification squeeze themselves. “It may have been affordable for a moment,” she says. “But it’s totally not affordable now.”

That’s an idea many black Portlanders have been dealing with in North Portland for over a decade. And as the black community is spread to the fringes of the city, with Portland proper seeing a 77.9 percent white population compared to a 6.6 percent black population according to the 2003 Census Bureau statistics, their own artistic communities have faced challenges as well. Marlon Irving, who goes by Vursatyl with his successful group, the Lifesavas, has been making music in Portland for over a decade. And while his group’s fanbase has grown, it has been harder to keep up with the community that supported them in the early days. “We used to hang up posters down Killingsworth, and you’d kind of know what you were hitting. Now we have to go way out to 188th and Powell, because the ’hood is living deep in Southeast now.”

Irving connects Portland’s change to the tearing down of Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects and other “urban renewal” initiatives worldwide, saying it’s a phenomenon that has both invigorated and diluted hip-hop culture. But when he heads to Northeast Portland, he says that, on a gut level, “I almost feel like a stranger in my own neighborhood.”

As much as the house-flipping culture bugs Tim Perry, he says every community is subject to change. “In the ’70s and ’80s, [North Mississippi] was primarily African American, but prior to that it was Finnish, and that’s what it started off as.” Eric Isaacson is less sympathetic to that argument, but he knows that his “poor arts neighborhood” is all but gone. “I feel like it’s a battle that’s already lost. People are going to move away, and the new people that come are going to be less oriented toward [community and art], I think … but I think I’m staying, just out of stubbornness.”