The Urban West

This article was previously published in the Oregonian on August 20, 2006.

82nd Street Bar in Portland, OR

The Pearl District may be fashionable, and North Mississippi Avenue may be extremely cool, but 82nd Avenue is necessary. This corridor of asphalt, car lots, and old-world politics keeps Portland honest.

I’ll admit that it’s not beautiful. I know that it doesn’t have the hottest clubs or gallery-hopping First Thursday crowds. But 82nd Avenue from Sandy Boulevard south across the Clackamas County line does things that no city can do without.

First, the street reminds us that our economy still requires things. Words and ideas may be the stock in trade of college professors and the creative class, but cities need places to find used travel trailers, scout out discount appliances. and get new sound systems to install in beat-up Toyotas.

A couple years ago I bought a small pickup and wanted to cover the cargo bed so that my elderly twelve-year-old golden retriever could stay dry when we drove around on errands or headed up Mount Hood. The Qwest Yellow Pages list four firms on 82nd Avenue that fabricate and install pickup canopies, including Canopy Corner and Canopies Unlimited, and two more within shouting distance.

Every city needs a place for its own version of Canopy Corner and similar businesses that need affordable space and lots of elbow room to sell things that aren’t available on Amazon.com. The same goes for start-ups. Fifty years ago, companies like Tektronix and Electro Scientific Industries could get their start in cheap space on the inner east side. In these days of inner city gentrification, their best bet would be low-cost commercial buildings on streets like 82nd.

82nd Avenue also runs through the heart of the multicultural city. A few years ago, the irascible urban critic Mike Davis wrote a short book called “Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City.” As I think we all know, the title should have been “Magical Suburbanism”– because the suburbs are where most immigrants now choose to settle.

Portland’s real Chinatown is now growing around 82nd, not in Old Town with PDC’s streetscape project is hoping that curb extensions and exotic trees will substitute for a lively, growing community. If we expand our vision from 82nd itself to the swathe of neighborhoods from Mount Tabor east to Gresham, we’ll also find many of the city’s Vietnamese, Latino, Russian and Ukrainian businesses, markets, and churches.

Numbers confirm the impressions rolling past our windshields. According to the 2000 census, Multnomah County has eighteen census tracts (out of nearly two hundred) where at least 20 percent of the residents are foreign born. Half of these tracts border 82nd. These are the neighborhoods where you might hear Russian, Vietnamese, and Spanish spoken on one block, Chinese and Ukrainian on another, Spanish again if you’re toward the north end of the street or Rumanian if you’re further south.

Immigrant populations are young populations. It takes gumption to change countries, and immigrants typically arrive in their twenties and thirties and raise relatively large families. Madison High School at 51 percent minority is one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in the state (it has a higher minority percentage than Mount Angel and Hood River high schools, for example). A little further east, Parkrose High School is 42 percent minority.

This brings up a third way that 82nd and its neighborhoods keep Portland honest. When these kids grow up, they’ll be a potent force in Portland and Multnomah County politics. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, Portland annexed a large chunk of eastern Multnomah County (while Gresham took in much of the rest).

The result has been to dilute the political clout of the comfortable West Hills and the trendy inner East Side. The precincts east of Mount Tabor are consistently more skeptical about government and more forthright about bread-and-butter issues. They voted overwhelmingly for a conservative view of property rights (Measure 37) and against renewal of the Multnomah County income tax for schools and social service. They are also conservative on questions of cultural values like the definition of marriage.

It’s no surprise that Portland’s religiously conservative colleges and seminaries concentrate around the 82nd corridor–Multnomah Bible College, Warner Pacific College, Cascade College, and Portland Bible College.

This political and cultural divide is a reality check. It brings Portland’s political profile a bit closer to the rest of the state–not to mention the nation–and pushes candidates toward the middle. It keeps Portland progressives from being too satisfied with themselves.

You might think of this as Randy Leonard country rather than Vera Katz country. To put it another way, it prevents us from turning into Santa Monica or Santa Cruz.

The political effect is currently muted because close-in Portlanders are more likely to vote than those in the outer east neighborhoods. But as immigrants become accustomed to American political styles and as their children grow up, however, the effect will accelerate.

The real problem with the failed City Council run of Emilie Boyles is not the misuse of campaign funds but the partially lost opportunity to bring more eastern European immigrants into the political process.

So hop in your pickup, crank up the stereo, and drive out to 82nd Avenue–or Foster Road or far NE Glisan or the outer stretches of NE Sandy–to see one of the most necessary parts of Portland and check out a street where the future of Portland is being shaped.