(Name-mce) ListServ Conference sites

[Villanueva Anselmo]

Two other conference sites that might be considered are Denver, Colorado
and Honolulu, Hawaii.

 

As for Portland, Oregon, it is a great city and it would be great to
have the conference there... but if NAME is looking for a diverse city,
Portland is not the place (see article below).  And Seattle is a close
second behind Portland on that score.

 

Anselmo

--------------------------------------------------

Anselmo Gary Villanueva, Ph.D.

Equity Assistance Center, Region X

Pacific Resources for Education and Learning

900 Fort Street Mall, Suite 1300

Honolulu, Hawai'i  96813-3718

Tel: 808.441.1425  800.377.4773

Fax: 808.441.1385

E-mail: villanuevaa at prel.org <mailto:villanuevaa at prel.org> 

www.prel.org <http://www.prel.org/> 

 

Building Capacity Through Education

--------------------------------------------------

 

Northwest Cities Flip Demographics

 

By Blaine Harden

 

The Washington Post

 

Published: Tuesday, June 20, 2006

 

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/06/20/a1.seaport.0620.p1.php?sect
ion=nation_world

 

PORTLAND, Oregon - 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 Washington, D.C., for example, the percentage of white non-Hispanic
residents increased 2.7 percent between 1990 and 2004, according to
William 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 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.'' 

 

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. 

 

 

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