Nice find, and a well written article.

What Grumpy said!

Thanks goodness we now have an Office of Equity that will take care of that ;)

When I left Oregon fourteen years ago, I had a lot of friends who were shocked that I'd leave. I mean shocked, because they'd all heard the same exact stories, over and over, about how Portland was a perfect little artistic utopia, and not one of them had bothered to visit. Almost to an individual, they related that they wanted to move to a place where "everyone was just like me," and I was trying to relate to them that this can be a curse. (As it was, when pressed, I described Portland as being a horrible cloning experiment involving the characters in the Britcom The Young Ones, only with far too many Ricks and Mikes and nowhere near enough Vyvians. "All of the Neils are down in Eugene.")

Thank you, Jack.

It's A Beautiful Day ~ White Bird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN-woJ3pzAI

Portland also has a dirty little secret in regard to the redlining of certain neighborhoods by banks. Essentially there were no mortgages granted by banks on homes in the areas traditionally occupied by blacks. To further compound matters it was considered perfectly legal for the developers who created neighborhoods such as Laurelhurst and the like to place restrictive covenants into the deeds that prohibited the sale of the property to blacks and other minorities. These practices continued well into the 1960's.

TUK - I think some would argue that the planners' Sim City experiment that Portland has become has served as a de facto redlining practice to this very day. Many of the African American community have been priced/pushed out of the traditional NE neighborhoods into mid-County, e.g. Rockwood areas, and Portland Proper will become even less diverse.

Will liberals ever move beyond the concept of skin color equaling diversity? Seems to me that the population of Portland (and especially the political class) is lockstep liberal – maybe the author of this piece should expose himself to some real diversity – rather than bemoaning the lack of “progressives of color” in Portland.

Good article. The article said nothing about urban Indians. Just last week we learned that Portland has one of the largest urban Indian populations. But I don't see them when I go downtown. What's that all about?