Bike Lanes Are White Lanes by Melody L. Hoffmann

Author:Melody L. Hoffmann [Hoffmann, Melody L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026030 Social Science / Sociology / Urban
ISBN: 9780803288201
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2016-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

In Detail: The North Williams Avenue Upward Mobility Influx

“This place looks like a crime scene.” 50

In the summer of 2013, my friend Djordje Popovic met me in Portland. New to the city with fresh eyes and without knowing I was researching the street, he came back from apartment hunting perplexed by what he saw on North Williams Avenue. When he described the street as a “crime scene” he was not referring to the abandoned lots, graffiti, and deteriorating storefronts. The crime scene he saw was the obvious disinvestment from the working class and the overt attention paid to the upwardly mobile residents who are slowly taking over the area.

Initially, a lot of the new development happened on the north end of North Williams Avenue, closest to Northeast Alberta Street, where efforts to cater to the bourgeoisie have already resulted in a full conversion of the street. “Alberta twenty years ago would have been, well a friend of mine owned a business called Thorn. She said, ‘no one would come to my business because they were afraid to come to Alberta.’ Now it’s a default destination,” explained Biel.51 Laura Koch from the Community Cycling Center, located on Northeast Alberta Street, told me that while they used to serve low-income residents within a five-block radius of their shop in the late 1990s, they now have to go beyond a five-mile radius to make those connections.52

North Williams Avenue is going through hyper-gentrification. By this I mean that the area essentially skipped a typical step of the process. The migration of artists and students is usually a dependable predictor that an area will undergo gentrification in the near future, but in this case the artists and students seemed few and far between. When I asked Biel about this he responded, “[They’re] still there, they are just blocked off. . . . You watch the gradual transition and in the end the punks and artists are gone. It’s just a matter of time. You are sealing your own fate by moving in. . . . But they are still there, I do know that. And I do know they still have [loud punk shows] within two blocks of Vancouver and Williams, on weeknights.”53

In the early 2000s, much of the land was “virgin territory, an open land.”54 Before 2014 an empty lot stood on nearly every block along North Williams Avenue. This was especially true of the south end of the street, near Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. Down the length of North Williams Avenue, the state of the empty lots varied. Some were overgrown with grass, others surrounded by chain link fence and barbed wire. Others are now being developed.

The most contentious lot, if lots could come with emotional baggage, is a section of land that spans almost two blocks. The site of the New Seasons Market, a high-end grocery store, went from mounds of dirt in May 2012 to a quickly built green-and-yellow building; construction took only a few months in early 2013. New Seasons

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