Every few months, a national news outlet travels to Oregon to trek through a familiar narrative.
, they report.
, shut down.
Yes, at 76 percent white, Portland is less diverse than Omaha or Salt Lake City. And gentrification did displace and disperse what was once a dense black community in North and Northeast Portland. Others left willingly, realtors said, for bigger lots and better schools.
But those are not the only stories black Portlanders have to tell. Frustrated by the steady dirge, some of Portland's black leaders have begun sharing another narrative. African-Americans aren't disappearing, they say. Some are thriving.
African American population growth
1970 African American: 21,572
1970 city total: 382,619
1980 African American: 27,734
1980 city total: 366,383
1990 African American: 33,530
1990 city total: 437,319
2000 African American: 35,115
2000 city total: 529,121
2010 African American: 36,695
2010 city total: 583,776
* Source: Census data
The number of black Portlanders increased 4 percent between 2000 and 2010, they note. And new Census data, released this year, shows the metro area had nearly 5,000 black-owned businesses in 2012, a 42 percent increase over five years.
"We just don't all live in Northeast Portland anymore," said economist Stephen Green, a 39-year-old African American who grew up in Aloha but lives in Woodlawn, among a few Northeast neighborhoods that have added black residents in recent years.
Green understands why the other narrative proliferates. Older black people miss knowing their neighbors. Young white liberals feel guilty for driving up rental prices.
But that story has outlived its use, he thinks.
If people think Portland has no black residents, they won't support its black businesses. Smart, ambitious young African Americans won't stay or move here.
The whitest city in America will become only whiter.
***
Customers at Deadstock -- a black-owned coffee shop -- feature several "sneaker-heads" due in part to the shop's proximity to Pensole, a black-owned footwear design academy located nearby. August 4, 2016. Beth Nakamura/Staff
National news outlets take apart Portland's gentrification, in part, because other metro areas are experiencing the same shifts. Gentrification has so reshaped New York City's boroughs that Mayor Bill DeBlasio this spring rezoned most of East New York -- more than an hour's subway ride from Manhattan -- to keep the poor from being pushed farther out.
And in Oakland, the gritty Bay Area city where 2Pac began his rap career, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is nearly $2,300.
In Portland, gentrification has an added tension: The city never had as large of an African American population as those cities and others.
The state's original constitution prevented black people from moving here. When Oregon joined the United States in 1859, it was the only state that forbid black people from working or owning property. Lawmakers lifted the ban in 1926, but Oregon's black population remained negligible for another 20 years.
During World War II, when 20,000 African Americans came for jobs in the shipyards, few found landlords willing to rent to them inside city limits. Magnate Henry Kaiser had to build a new community between Portland and the Columbia River, Vanport, just to house them. When Vanport flooded a few years later, city leaders gave African Americans one option.
"Instead of allowing people to naturally permeate the Portland region, it was like alright, you can live in Northeast Portland," Green said. "That wasn't their choice."
Corralling most of the city's black residents allowed discrimination to proliferate, Green said. City leaders razed African Americans' homes for freeway and hospital expansions. Banks set minimum mortgage amounts that effectively redlined inner North and Northeast Portland. Gangs and drugs tore through.
Still, there was community there, close-knit if poverty-plagued enclaves where parents looked after each other's kids and neighbors met for barbecues.
In the 1990s, Portland added about 100,000 people, pushing the city over half a million residents for the first time. And as Portland grew, the inner city, with cheap housing and easy bike and bus routes downtown, became more desirable.
As white people moved in, city leaders tried to spruce up North and Northeast Portland. They built a light-rail line and offered tax incentives to spur development. But those moves only accelerated the neighborhoods' growth without helping longtime residents.
Rents crept higher. Home values and taxes quadrupled.
By 2010, nearly 10,000 black residents had left the inner city. When "Portlandia" debuted on IFC the next year, the neighborhood's fate seemed sealed. The hipster-critiquing comedy's most iconic sketches took place in historically black areas.
But in the sketches, there wasn't a black person in sight.
***
As "Portlandia" lampooned brunch lines and quirky bookstores, news outlets rushed to reveal the real story.
Vice, Gizmodo and the Smithsonian Magazine all published articles about the city's racist past and gentrified present. Governing.com named Portland the nation's most gentrified city.
As white Portlanders grew richer, the median black income fell to less than $30,000. The city later created a program to help 65 displaced people return to the inner city, but a 2015 Portland Housing Bureau report found not a single Portland neighborhood where an average African American can afford a two-bedroom apartment.
At first, some black people welcomed the stories. New white neighbors didn't say hi the way black elders had. Young black men felt ostracized in their own neighborhoods. Overpriced kombucha joints replaced a restaurant that sold three chicken wings for $1.50, one man explained on comedian W. Kamau Bell's CNN documentary this spring.
But eventually, that narrative began to wear on some black residents.
Chris Guinn has lived and worked his entire life in Northeast Portland. In the 1990s and 2000s, he helped many African Americans sell homes in the innercity.
Chris Guinn, a 51-year-old real estate agent, felt like the numbers didn't tell the whole story. He had helped black homeowners sell their aging bungalows to white newcomers.
Guinn has lived his entire life in Northeast Portland. But many of his friends wanted to move, he said. They had been born in a Portland that forbade them from living south of East Burnside or west of the Willamette River. Now they had a choice.
"Some of us chose to move out," he said. "We're motivated by the same thing everybody else is -- schools, yards, safety, a good life for your kids. We wanted to live in Beaverton. We wanted to go to Atlanta."
Many benefited from the market's rise, he said.
When Guinn's uncle died, his aunt asked him to list their house at Northeast 18th Avenue and Alberta. They had lived "right in the thick" of the black community for 50 years.
"She was 70 years old, called me the same way a white person would," Guinn said. "She said, 'Chris, I'm ready to go. This house is too big.'"
Twenty years later, she's still living off the money, Guinn said.
"You think I feel bad about that?" Guinn said. "That was my own family. I never felt like I was destroying my neighborhood. I was helping my people, I know for a fact."
***
By spring 2016, North and Northeast Portland had changed so dramatically that even middle-class white families couldn't afford homes there. In King, the neighborhood that includes much of Northeast Alberta, the median home value is $438,000 -- up from $265,000 in 2007. In the mid-1990s, many homes went for less than $30,000.
The communities' shared frustrations -- the sense that soon Portland would be unaffordable for everyone -- had only whetted the appetite for gentrification coverage.
The national stories didn't include Guinn's 91-year-old aunt. They didn't list the 10 black-owned businesses still operating on Northeast Alberta Street. The most common story was the one that is the simplest to convey: White hipsters had driven up home values, pushing black people to the city's far eastern reaches.
After CNN's documentary ran in May, Green, the economist, grew disheartened. African Americans made the news only when they were victims, he said.
"Those stories are true takes on folks' experiences here, but they aren't the only ones," Green said. "The layers of Portland's black community should be out there as well."
He decided to publicize the positive stories himself. A few days after the CNN piece ran, Green tweeted W. Kamau Bell, the comedian who narrated the documentary.
"Just to be clear," Green wrote, the number of African Americans in Portland "is going up not down." The city has more black businesses than ever, he explained.
Green and other economists attribute the growth to a number of factors. The minority population is growing nationwide, he said, and Portland tends to attract creatives and entrepreneurs. Portland's urban renewal agency, also tasked with economic development, has a slew of new programs aimed at bolstering minority entrepreneurs. The lagging economy also contributed: When opportunities are few, people of color create their own.
"Some of the founders I work with have told me they just don't find a place for themselves in the dominant culture workplace, so they start their own thing," said Katherine Krajnak, a Portland Development Commission liaison focused on recruiting minority entrepreneurs. "People of color are used to having to survive in a white society any way they can. Often they want to create a place where their own thing, their own culture can thrive. They know their story needs to be part of the narrative of what a successful business owner can look like in Portland."
Every few weeks, Green sends Bell another missive. Think of Portland as coffee country? Check out Ian Williams, a coffee shop owner who worked his way up from janitor to shoe developer at Nike before opening Deadstock, a sneaker-themed cafe in Old Town.
Heard of Silicon Forest? Look up Tyrone Poole, a once-homeless entrepreneur who hopes to revolutionize the way people rent apartments. Investors across the country have stepped in to back NoAppFee.com, a rental application website Poole will launch this month.
Pitch Black
What: Black entrepreneurs pitch business ideas in a "Shark Tank" style competition
Where: Instrument, 3529 N Williams Ave
When: Aug. 25, 5:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Cost:
Green sent tweets about a black-owned drone company and a footwear-design academy owned by a black man who once ran the Jordan brand for Nike. He mentioned two different black women who hosts podcasts. He invited Bell to Pitch Black, an Aug. 25 event geared at black entrepreneurs.
For Green, the relentless tweeting wasn't venting. He was telling stories to help his community survive.
Though gentrification is often cast as a race issue, it's actually an economic one. If black Portlanders are going to survive the second and third waves of gentrification that will eventually raise rents in the city's outer reaches, they have to have money.
Green has spent his career helping black entrepreneurs find financial backers. It's harder to raise money, he said, if investors think black people don't exist or can't succeed here.
In the past two years, only 2 percent of Portland venture capital deals went to black-owned firms, according to a development commission survey of investment deals.
"I told people, 'The number of black entrepreneurs is growing. Why aren't you providing capital?'" Green said. "At the end of the day, the implicit bias was they really don't exist. 'Stephen, why would I try to find out a hunting strategy for unicorns when unicorns don't exist?'"
Ian Williams, left, owner of Deadstock Coffee, talks with Steven Green, a Portland economist who is active in supporting black-owned businesses in the city. Green is a regular at the shop. August 4, 2016. Beth Nakamura/Staff
***
Support Black Restaurant Days
When: Aug. 27 - 28
Where:
Jomo Greenidge, a black web developer who lives near North Portland's Peninsula Park, worries it's not just investors who don't know black businesses exist. As the community disperses, black residents don't know where to find black-owned spots.
In the old days, they could stroll down North Williams or Northeast Alberta and buy records, have a drink or get a haircut at a black-owned business.
"Now we're so spread out, we have to be more intentional about huddling together," Greenidge said. "So many people say, 'I don't know these people exist.'"
Greenidge was heartened last year when a white woman created a "support black restaurant day." More than 5,000 Portlanders -- of all races -- RSVP'd on Facebook. That response inspired Greenidge to create a website where Portlanders can find not only black restaurants but black attorneys and accountants, too.
"I need this site for me," Greenidge said. "I started researching, and I had no idea we had an award-winning black architect. How do we not know these stories in our own community? I don't want them lost."
As he built the directory, Greenidge's BlackPDX.com morphed into something larger, a community hub aimed at telling black Portland's stories.
"There are not enough portrayals of the black beauty of Portland," Greenidge said. "Some of us are having a great time. We want to enjoy our lives. So miss me with the rhetoric that's all doom and gloom. It doesn't mean those issues aren't real. There are times in the day to shout black lives matter. And there are times to speak about inequity. And then there's time to sit back and play some spades, to enjoy black Portland life."
Maxime Paul gathered a group of new friends together recently at Solae's, a black-owned jazz club on Northeast Alberta Street in Portland.
If Portland's black community is going to survive, Green believes, young African Americans have to believe they can have fun here. He is still tweeting at Bell, in part, because he knows growth is not assured.
Though the number of black people has gone up, the number of white Portlanders is growing at a slightly faster rate. In 1990, African Americans made up 7.6 percent of the city. In 2010, they made up 6.3 percent.
Planners estimate 750,000 more people will move to the Metro-area by 2035, pushing the regional population to 3 million. What if "Portlandia" and well-meaning news stories are doing what the state constitution did 100 years ago? What if the prevailing message about Portland's future tells black people they don't belong? What if those 750,000 people are all white?
For now, Green acts as a one-man black welcoming committee. He keeps tabs on promising black tech entrepreneurs from across the country. Earlier this year, he met a young couple visiting from Washington, DC.
Looking for a black-owned business?
Mercatus
This PDC-sponsored website showcases businesses owned by ethnic minorities and women. It includes a directory as well as short documentaries, each produced by female and minority writers and photographers. So far, the agency has spotlighted Asian-, Latino- and black-owned businesses.
Where:
BlackPDX
A community hub created by a group of black tech students, BlackPDX includes a business directory, a community calendar and a blog documenting black success. Recent blogs highlighted musicians, barbers and a black-owned children's book publishing company.
Where:
on Twitter
Maxime Paul and Stephanie Ghoston fell in love with Portland for one of the same reasons white visitors do: its food scene.
"We landed and immediately went to brunch," said Paul, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur.
"We just ate for an entire day," said Ghoston, a 29-year-old life coach.
They had tired of the capital's constant bustle and wanted to live somewhere more relaxed. Paul applied for a job as a technical product lead at Jaguar Land Rover. When he got it, the couple announced they were headed west.
Then came the articles, from friends, suggesting maybe Portland wasn't right for them.
Paul and Ghoston had both lived much of their lives in black communities. She grew up in Milwaukee, he in St. Louis. As Ghoston watched the gentrification documentary "Future: Portland," she worried they'd made a mistake.
"When we were in Portland, we had fun. When I was reading these articles, I felt like, this is not going to work for me," Ghoston said. "I imagined a desert with a tumbleweed going down and it hit one black person."
"You hear stories," Paul said. "You've seen Portlandia. You don't see yourself in that. It scares you. Why would you even come?"
They had already quit their jobs and given up their apartment, so they chanced it.
When the couple arrived in May, Green introduced them to his black Portland. They spent hot evenings on the patio at Solae's, a new black-owned jazz club on Northeast Alberta Street. They grabbed coffee at Deadstock, breakfast at Pink Rose. They attended plays where all the actors were black.
"I think there is more to the story," Ghoston said. "It's not 'Either it's the whitest city in America or there's lots of black people here.'"
It's both, she said.
"It's the whitest city in America. And there's lots of black people."
Stephanie Ghoston, center, and her partner, Maxime Paul, recently moved to Portland from Washington, D.C. They gathered a group of new friends together recently at Solae's, a black-owned jazz club on Northeast Alberta Street in Portland. August 4, 2016. Beth Nakamura/Staff
-- Casey Parks
503-221-8271
cparks@oregonian.com; @caseyparks