This draws some protest, sometimes, in the form of people who wish to “save Portland homes”, a tag you see grafitti’ed on construction signs around my neighborhood sometimes. I have to say, I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for the “save Portland homes” people. Old houses are not in any danger of going extinct in Portland.* Most often, you see this grafitti on signs along Division Street or Belmont Street, where old houses are being knocked down in favor of condos and shops. In this case, I find it almost entirely misguided. I think that one of the many lessons of history — especially of 20th century American history — is that cities change, or they die. The change may be weird and frightening, but it’s better than the alternative. I have no desire for Portland to turn into Cleveland or Detroit. Some of how you prevent that is to knock down the derelict and replace it with the new. A city by its nature must be a palimpsest.
*I realize that in some degree this is about gentrification, about which I have mixed feelings. Gentrification does in fact atomize communities, usually consisting largely of people of color. Portland’s historically-black neighborhoods up north have undergone an almost literal whitewashing, as young, white people have filtered in and made the rents too expensive, and the house sale prices too tempting, for people whose families have lived there for generations. But painting “save Portland homes” in a sign isn’t a program to change gentrification, so that neighborhoods can simultaneously become healthier and remain diverse. It’s just another bullshit Portland quasi-protest.
Anyway, I have more sympathy for this protest than the others, because this isn’t about houses — it’s about trees. A signal feature of Portland’s east side neighborhoods is that they’re heavily foliated, both with towering firs, and with fat swishing elms and oaks. A house is a house — it’s mutable, the people inside it matter more than the building itself. But a tree is a tree. Trees take decades to grow. They live longer than any human. And they give Portland something it otherwise wouldn’t possess: grandeur.
Portland is, in most ways, a small, cloistered, homey place. It lacks the rampant vitality of New York or Los Angeles. It lacks the history of Memphis or New Orleans. There are some hills in the west, there’s a mountain in the east, but in many ways, it could be a place that’s no different to any other big-ish city in America. It’s got almost exactly the same population, in the city proper, as Las Vegas. Do we want it to be Las Vegas?
