Posted on JULy 3, 2006

Blacks don't lose when whites move in

By EARNI YOUNG
younge@phillynews.com

A HEADLINE IN the Washington Post recently caught my eye and raised my ire. "Portland, Ore., the Whitest City in America," it read, and the story lamented that the city seems to be getting whiter by the day.

This was a cause for lament, according to the Washington Post writer and his sources.

The article bemoaned the "displacement" of African-Americans from Portland's traditional black core. It was never very big - Portland is not on the road most traveled by the African-American diaspora. The 2000 census counted about 36,000 African-Americans among Portland's 529,000 residents.

Now, booming real-estate prices and the influx of whites returning to the central city are overrunning the area once reserved for blacks. It wasn't as if African-Americans had chosen to live there. Historically, it was the only area in which Portland's white power structure allowed them to live. As times changed and Jim Crow laws were banished, many blacks remained on the reservation because it was what they knew.

Since the demand for the homes of blacks was limited to other blacks, the real-estate values there were well below the rest of Portland.

Now that whites want back into this urban core, their homes are commanding prices of $400,000 and up. It's a big payday for homeowners who held on.

Of course, that payday is only for those who sell - and leave. "The heart of the black community is gone," Charles Ford, an elderly black Portland resident, lamented to the Post.

But wait a minute. Ford's former neighbors are not ending up homeless on the street. Their homes are not going under the hammer at sheriff's sale for foreclosure or back taxes. They're selling out, moving off the reservation and into the suburbs - just as their white counterparts did back in the day.

In many cases, housing in the suburbs is newer, schools are better and crime is lower.

How is this a bad thing?

White folk did it and they made out pretty good.

Why can't black folk prosper too?

White gentrification isn't unique to Portland. It is changing Philadelphia, Harlem, the District of Columbia, Seattle and many other cities. Urban sprawl, the fatigue of long commutes and the relative housing bargains are attracting young white professionals to black neighborhoods their parents and grandparents fled during the last half of the 20th century.

Low-income African-Americans, especially renters, fear displacement, and our political leaders foster those fears either for political gain or out of ignorance.

They want us to believe black homeowners are too poor, too ignorant or too shiftless to cope with the new prosperity. They will inevitably lose their homes because of unpaid taxes, lose them to con artists or - gasp - sell and move elsewhere.

It is insulting and patronizing.

Tax relief is a policy problem that City Council and state legislature can solve with common- sense legislation. Counseling and education can help homeowners avoid mortgage scams.

And selling your home for profit is the American way.

When our parents and grandparents bought their homes in Strawberry Mansion, Overbrook, Grays Ferry, Parkside, West Oak Lane and Germantown, they thought they were buying a better future for their children. But the dream went sour when whites fled to the suburbs, taking with them the jobs and businesses that were the city's lifeblood.

African-Americans were left without the economic resources to sustain their communities. Once-prosperous middle-class neighborhoods deteriorated into crime-riddled ghettos in a few short decades.

So, I don't blame those black homeowners who take the money and run for greener suburban pastures. They fought the good fight and deserve a big payday.

Others choose to stay put in the city and neighborhoods they love. These are the better days they waited for all these years.

But still others have a "man-the-barricades" attitude, fearing displacement by the influx of wealthy white folk. They blame the newcomers for raising property values that will lead to higher property taxes that the old-timers may not be able to pay.

This is taking a positive and turning it into a negative. Anything that raises the value of your home increases your personal wealth. Think of your house as a piggy bank that keeps going ka-ching.

You don't want to silence the ka-ching by blocking redevelopment. You want to get local and state politicians to enact property-tax-relief measures like a lower tax rate, a homestead exemption or rebate. And, while they are at it, a workable strategy to assist the development of moderate- and low-income housing.

Some of my friends have chosen the suburban idyll rather than the grittier reality of life in the city. I just hope the American Dream will work as well for them as it did for a generation of white baby boomers.

But I have a nagging fear that white intolerance will cause a reverse flight back into the cities, leaving these new African-American suburbanites economically isolated in much the same way their parents were.

I wish I could say this was an improbable scenario born of paranoia, but America - in matters of both race and development - has a disturbing record of repeating the mistakes of the past. *