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News
Street Roots • Nov. 3-9, 2017
Street Roots • Nov. 3-9, 2017
News
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‘This is not home anymore’
Cornelius Swart
Cornelius Swart's
new documentary,
Triced Out,' reveals
the heartbreaking costs
o f gentrification in
Portland's Albina district
Nikki Williams, who spent her entire life in Portland’s Albina neighborhood, is the focus of Cornelius Swart’s documentary about gentrification.
distinction between “cultural gentrificatipn,”
like in Albina, where you have a community
that was a safe space for a population that is
being displaced from that area. Even if the
neighborhood wasn’t entirely safe at times,
it provided what’s been called ^cultural
warmth.” That’s different from, a ,housing
crisis, in which it’s a matter of how can I
afford rents this high with wages that are
this low. There is a big difference in the
experience.
BY AMANDA WALDROUPE
•STAFF W R ITER
A nyone who has lived in Portland for at
ZA least a few years knows how much
j L A the northeast neighborhood around
Williams Avenue has changed.
There are condo buildings and a New
Seasons where there were vacant lots and
boarded-up buildings. African-American-
owned businesses closed long ago, replaced
by Ruby Jewel Ice Cream, Bishops .
Barbershop and boutique stores.
The wholesale displacement of African-
Americans from the Albina neighborhood,
an area that includes much of Northeast
Portland, is the subject of “Priced Out:
Gentrification in PDX,” a documentary film
written and produced by Cornelius Swart
Stwart is a Portland journalist, filmmaker
and former publisher of the Portland
Sentinel, a community newspaper that
folded in 2010.
“Priced Out” is the sequel to “NorthEast
Passage: The Inner City and the American
Dream,” a documentary that explored early
gentrification in the Albina neighborhood.
Both films tell the story of Nikki Williams,
a single African-American mother who spent
her entire life in the Albina neighborhood.
In “NorthEast Passage,” she welcomed
gentrification to her neighborhood, affected
by disrepair and crime.
“Let it come, please,” she said in the film.
She approached Swart in 2012, urging
him to do another documentary about how
much her neighborhood has changed.
Swart interviewed many of the same
characters from “NorthEast Passage,”
focusing on Williams. Whereas she and her
fellow long-time residents of Albina first
welcomed gentrification, they now use the
PHOTOS COURTESY O F N O R TH W EST D O C U M E N T A R Y
A home is demolished in Northeast Portland, part of a gentrification trend that began in the1990s.
words pain, loss and grief to describe
Albina’s gentrification.
“When I used to look out my door, I used
to see people who looked like me,” Williams
said in the film. “Even if they were cussing
me out or whatever... I don’t even*have that
anymore.”
As “Priced Out” was in production,
Portland’s citywide housing crisis began,
prompting Swart to incorporate the crisis
into the film, showing how the gentrification
of Albina through the 1990s and 2000s was
symptomatic of a problem now affecting all
Portlanders.
“Priced Out” debuted Nov. 1, as part of
the Northwest Film Center’s Filmmakers’s
■Festival. A second screening was recently
add for 7 p.m., Nov. 7, at the Whitesell
Auditorium. Swart sat down with Street
Roots to discuss the film and the impacts of
gentrification.
Amanda Waldroupe: You bought your
house in Northeast Portland’s Eliot
neighborhood in 1998. And you consider
yourself a gentrifier.
Cornelius Swart: I do. I say that I’m a
gentrifier right at the beginning of the film.
It was the very early days, obviously. But in
’9 8 ,1 was doing a film about gentrification.
At that time, some people were aware of
gentrification as a threat, even though it did
not threaten a tremendous amount of
people, as compared to today. Most people
didn’t see it coming.
A.W.: What do you consider gentrification
to be?
C.S.: Gentrification is really when new
investment doesn’t benefit the local -
population, the pre-existing population. New
investment just serves to displace the local
population. It’s not targeted for. them. It's -
targeted toward newcomers who have
money. (Gentrification) wasn’t as visible as
it was in 2010 and 2011. That’s when people
started, en masse, having awareness.
A.W.: Talk about the gentrification that was
happening in the ’90s.
C.S.: In the 1990s, crime declines
dramatically. When that occurs,, new
investment starts to come in. People - white
people, middle-class people - begin to look
around and seethat houses are extremely
cheap. Mom and pop developers come in,
start flipping houses. New businesses start
coming in, once there’s a population to
support th a t Thisis the artistic, Bohemian
first wave of gentrification. Chez What was
one of the first OSes. You also had Roslyn’s
coffee shop on Alberta Street Fresh Pot
was fairly early. Mississippi Pizza was fairly
early. You have those types of-businesses
start to mix in with the existing black
businesses. This is a first wave of
gentrification, and some of the folks in the
film would say that these are folks from big
cities, so they’re used to cities that have
crime. They’re used to communities that are
racially mixed. They’re not intimidated by
active crime in the neighborhood.
A.W.: They were thinking, “Yeah, we can
start a business here.”
C.S.: Yeah. We’re not talking high crime.
Fred Stewart is a (real estate broker) who
has been in the community a long time. He
said that for the white people who moved
into the area then, there wasn’t nearly
enough shootings to intimidate them. They
were from Detroit, Chicago, New York.
A.W.: And crime in Portland was probably
like nothing to them.
C.S.: Exactly. But even that population
gets replaced by a new population 10,15
years later that has very suburban or
mainstream expectations of the community.
They want on-street parking, they want
convenient shopping, they want it to be
quiet at night
A.W.: They want a New Seasons in the
neighborhood.
G.S.: They want a New Seasons in the
neighborhood. And so there’s that shift on
that sort of first-wave versus second-wave
gentrification. That’s the distinction there.
A.W.: I would argue that an important
aspect of gentrification in Portland is race.
The people who, by and large, were displaced
were African-Americans. But one thing I hear
you saying is that with second-wave
gentrification, white people start to become
displaced.
C.S.: We try in the film to really make a
A.W.: Do you think one of the reasons
People are becoming more aware of
gentrification is because of the housing crisis?
I wonder if what was happening 10,15 years
ago, people were a little more complacent
because it only affected the African-American
community.
C.S.: That’s a difficult question for me to
answer^ because I would havetoanswer for
other people.
I would say that activists like Jo Ann
(Hardesty) have stated publicly. Why do you
care about gentrification now? We’ve had it
for 20 years in Albina. You could point to
that as a feeling there.
What I saw was an interest in
gentrification in the last few years; only
recently, has it become overtly visible that
there has been a massive displacement of
the black population. Even though that
change seemed incremental in the
neighborhood and it seems like it has been
going on forever. That period of realizing
that there’s a giant displacement of people
not living in that neighborhood quickly fell
on the heels of the housing crisis around
the whole city.
What we say in th e film is that
gentrification in the Northeast merged with
a citywide housing crisis. Really, over the
period of a couple years, 2013 to 2015, you
went from people^aying, “Whoa, there’s ,
massive gentrification in Albina,” to “Whoa,
I can’t afford my rent here in Southeast.”
And that’s because Portland real estate
market and so many urban markets just
catch fire by 2015.
found homeownership. She had a house but
lost a home. This is a story about how you
can even have a house, but your community
can be wiped out
A.W.: As you were making the film, the
housing crisis began, and'affordable housing
suddenly became the most important issue the
city is facing. Dow did you decide to integrate
it into the film?
Á.W.: That sense of loss, how the housing
crisis is affecting Portland, the emotions
connected to it, is what vaulted (Portland City
Commissioner) Chloe Eudaly to power. I don’t
think she, or anyone else running on a
platform solely about affordable housing,
would have been elected in any other cycle.
C.S.: The way people will see this film is
almost completely different than when we
originally started the project The housing
crisis is going to be put in the context of ,
Albina’s experience of gentrification. It’s a
film about Nikki Williarns and how she, went
from embracing gentrification or the idea of
gentrification in the 1990s from being fully
disenfranchised in 2015 to the point of
giving up on i t Within that journey, we see
gentrification going from an Albina issue to
a mainstream issue. Everybody finds
themselves in the same boat as Nikki.
C.S.: I think that’s absolutely true, and
one of the things we try to capture about
the housing crisis is that, whether it’s
Albina or the city as a whole, things don’t ,
really happen until people find agency and
take to tibe streets and take it into their own
hands. It doesn’t stop the process from
being a messy and imperfect one, full of
conflict and disappointment, punctuated by
moments of progress. That’s just what a
healthy democracy looks like. You never -
arrive. It’s just a journey.
A.W.: It’s heartbreaking.
C.S.: It’s a sad story. I think there’s a lot
of hope and resilience in it, but it’s an
emotional story.
A.W.: One filing I ’ve realized from the
housing crisis and the increase in
homelessness is that our economic system is
failing an entire class of people.
C.S.: You can see ovér the past five years
how the working poor have been
Systemically converted into a homeless
population. It’s almost like we’re taking a
rung out of the ladder of American society,
one rung at a time. I think Nikki’s story is a
heartbreaking example of how you can get
the American dream, and it can still turn
into a nightmare. She owns her house. She
A.W.: We’re constantly working at
perfecting ourselves.
C.S.: It’s a ceaseless social struggle. And
what we see with the housing advocacy that
happened in this community, where
promises were made to build affordable
housing decades ago when there was still
timé to offset some of the displacement
The advocates I talked to say that we took
our foot off the gas pedal. Now it’s come
back in force. It should never have let up to
begin with. Even when it seems to be going
good, you have to keep going.
A.W.: What do you hope the main takeaway
for viewers will be?
C.S.: You need to engage constantly. It’s a
ceaseless struggle.