Daily Cosmonaut #3: Real-Estate Reality Check

A few months ago I stood in shock as a house on a major commercial strip in my neighborhood was demolished by a wrecking crew. A few days earlier activists had climbed onto the roof and attached themselves to the structure in protest. Protesters lined the sidewalk and police stood in my way as I tried to walk to the grocery store. The police shouted at me as I walked in the street, it being the only place not occupied by the skirmish. I replied, “You made this mess. I’m just trying to get out of the way.”

For those unaware, Portland has found itself in the grips and throes of a major real estate pinch increasingly over the last decade. Over the past year we’ve had the highest rent increases of anywhere in the U.S. brought on by big tech starting to settle into our “affordable real estate.” This situation has long affected Microcosm. Our office from 2003-2006 suffered a 25% rent increase in 2007. Having long overgrown the place, we moved out as a result. But real estate wasn’t quite understood by our peers and community until the last year or two when similar hikes began affecting residential rents. We’ve seen numerous giant condo buildings appear only to be found not profitable enough and replaced by luxury apartments. In our transient city, landlords now target a renter with a much higher income who doesn’t plan to stay more than a few years, treating the city like their childhood playground.

The resulting housing crunch and lack of vacancies drove prices up all over the city. As density increased to manage demand, the residents weren’t scandalized by the gross abuses of capitalism to profit on this housing crunch but rather by the fact that historic buildings were being demolished and trees were being displaced to increase housing density. Worse, instead of banding together to take a stand for affordable housing and the city’s homelessness rate that has spiraled out of control, people took a stand against demolition, seeing it as the scourge of a changing city. There’ve been homeless sweeps and the eradication of camps over the past year. I watched in horror one day as a prison work crew tossed the contents of a homeless camp into a garbage truck as a neighboring luxury apartment was being built. It was as if the sight of the homeless was enough to reduce the value of these apartments. I felt like I was watching the cycle of capitalist life in a vomit-inducing abuse of power to protect wealth.

Worst of all is the response of people who are in a position to effect change. There seems to be a strong disconnect from the reality that the people who moved here a decade ago are not “victims” of this development but rather part of the cause. A popular bicycling blog runs a series of stories about how bike thefts are on the rise and how a homeless “bone yard” is the place where the spoils are fenced. Their fans and readers escalate it further in the  comments section, decrying that the poor are looking to escalate their crimes into violent ones and that the police are virtually complicit in trying to ignore the rampant theft.

For me it’s hard to understand this response. Nobody wants to live in a homeless camp or sets out to rely on a life of crime. It’s a matter of sustenance; a downward spiral that capitalism virtually demands. It’s in the definition: The wealth of some is reliant on the cycle of others to live in poverty and some to be without any jobs at all. We are encouraged to demonize the people at the bottom as lazy and of poor moral character despite the fact that if they didn’t exist, the foundations of our own struggling ability to subsist would be threatened.

If we are serious about protecting housing rights and taking a stand against displacement, it will be a matter of working together. Sure, it’s disgusting to watch a neighborhood association raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to save trees and it sucks to have your bike stolen (I can attest to this several times myself), but capitalism is our real enemy. Unless we work together and organize to protect the most vulnerable among us, we will all eventually lose.