[......] My experience of people who have bought flats is that they don’t actually want to live in a diverse community. Shop prices have gone up locally, expensive coffee shops and restaurants have opened. It has created a class and race divide that didn’t exist here before......Continue Reading

Portland, US: ‘We are currently building our way to hell’

“I am a 70 year old carpenter and I have seen more decay in the quality of life in the last three years in Portland, Oregon – pearl of culture in the Great Northwest – with the one-term mayor ‘Chainsaw Charlie Hales’ who was previously a lobbyist for the the ‘home builders’ – read developers. Towers built into the sky on alluvial soil – the stuff that turns to pudding in an earthquake. Hundred-year-old classic neighbourhoods injected with ‘cereal box’ buildings invalidating residents’ privacy and daylight.

From my perspective, I would call this a travesty: ‘Bankers gone wild’. A spreadsheet vision of creating investments that spread the risk, with total disregard for community culture which, prior to this, was well protected by zoning. The people here have a campaign called Stop demolishing Portland. Such beauty is being replaced by such tastelessness, as though the reason the people want to live here is to be housed like gerbils. The cult of efficiency, unchecked and ungrounded is the universal salve that greases the way to community destruction and dislocation. We are currently building our way to hell.” (David Chinook Bean)

Top image: A member of the Mountain View Tenants Coalition. Photograph by Daniel DeBolt

> via The Guardian