Boutiquification of Cities Renders Them Sterile

Portland is an inland city that has artificially created its own Dirt Gap by declaring much of what would normally be its suburbs off limits for development on environmental grounds. This has raised housing prices in the city so much that Portland is not only resisting the illegal immigrant tidal wave, it's ethnically cleansing itself of blacks. In Jonathan Tilove's 2003 book Along Martin Luther King, Portland's MLK Boulevard was the only one he knew of where whites were moving in. Portland is going so upscale that its one of the few cities in the country with a growing Jewish population.

In many ways, this is a successful strategy in response to illegal immigration, but there's just one problem: Portland is just too expensive for families. The NYT reports Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children. Schools are being shut down because, while there are many trendy restaurants, there are few children. (By the way, can we lose the cliché "vibrant cities"? What does it mean? Usually, newspapers use it to imply "a whole bunch of Hispanics live there," but here it's being used to mean the opposite. I don't think it actually means anything.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer