Spread of Poverty is Bigger Urban Challenge for Portland than Gentrification, Report Says

Monday, December 29, 2014

Annie Ellison, GoLocalPDX Reporter

Poverty is spreading in the Portland Metro Area, according to a report by urban thinktank City Observatory, which examined population change over forty years in Portland, Vancouver, and Hillsboro's poorest neighborhoods.

More than twice the number of neighborhoods in Portland, Vancouver and Hillsboro considered to have high poverty rates in 1970 have high poverty areas today.

A high poverty neighborhood is defined as one in which 30 percent of the population or more live below the poverty line.

In 1970, 7,615 residents were below the poverty line, while eight areas -- what the study identifies as tracts -- were considered high poverty. By 2010, the population in poverty went up to 22,961, and the number of high poverty areas had risen to 18. Nationwide, the number of neighborhoods with high poverty rates tripled in the same time period.

Still, the number of areas in considered to have chronic high poverty between 1970 and 2010 was only three. The number of people living in chronic high poverty neighborhoods in Portland, Hillsboro and Vancouver changed only slightly between 1970 and 2010, from 3,511 to 3,704.

On a national scale, study author Joe Cortright writes gentrification is not the biggest urban challenge of modern cities. Instead, he said poverty is the greatest challenge of cities.

"A few places have gentrified, experienced a reduction in poverty, and generated net population growth. But those areas that don’t rebound don’t remain stable: they deteriorate, lose population, and overwhelmingly remain high-poverty neighborhoods," the study's author, Joe Cortright, writes.

"Meanwhile, we are continually creating new high-poverty neighbourhoods."