Portland's Secret: Urban Renewal via Negro Removal

The New Urbanists strike back: Readers reply:

Just have to write a quick defense of my home town of Portland. I read that page you linked to with all the transit and planning lingo. Yes it's true Portland is quite insistent about planning and "livability" and defends its "urban growth boundary" to the hilt -- the law that says certain densities shall not exist outside of an arbitrary line, so as to keep growth and density confined to a smaller area.

Does it work? I would say it works for those who are fans of this aesthetic. Portland has experienced pretty good growth over the past few years, attracting an outsized number of young (and yes, usually childless) professionals to it from bigger metropolises all over the country. Thus, Portland has retained a sort of small town European charm, I would say -- it sprawls in places, but there's enough stuff downtown and in inner core neighborhoods that you don't need to go to the sprawl if you don't want to. However, I can attest that a few of these young professionals my age are now starting to reproduce as they hit their early to mid 30s -- but have yet to flee to the suburbs. The main reason is because they have all the amenities they need within a reasonable distance, and hardly ever have to come into contact with minorities. In fact, neighborhood after neighborhood in the 1990s has been "reclaimed" and gentrified and turned from a ghetto-ish situation into a nice "artsy" district. Thus, we now have a small and shrinking ghetto, and any hispanics are largely combined to the suburbs where most of the young hipsters don't go (in fact, most meth use, the city's biggest crime issue, is confined to the suburbs instead of the central city now because the suburbs are so cheap compared to the central city). The biggest visible minority is Asian, which is the "acceptable" minority, as we all know. It's very funny -- as much as Portlanders talk about how much they love "diversity," their city council is composed of five white males!

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Why are big yards so important for families, when few children over the age of six would be caught dead in their own? Wouldn't it be better for them to shrink the yards and bring their friends, and everything else, closer, as the Victorians did? Why is a rarely-used private yard better than a giant shared backyard, like Fairmount Park in Philadelphia? And if space is so important, how come my maternal ancestors were more than twice as fecund in Brooklyn, Queens and even Manhattan than their descendants are in spacious Texas and Florida?