Rebuilding Community: A Disparate Impacts Analysis and Cross-Cultural Agenda to Prevent Displacement and Gentrification

INTRODUCTION

Oregon’s history of displacement is steeped in the targeted and intentional genocide, exclusion and displacement of people of color. We have witnessed this from the time the Chinook Peoples called what we now recognize as the Portland Metropolitan Area “home”; through Oregon’s Exclusion Laws of the late 1800s to keep African Americans out of the state; and into mid-20th-century redlining and exclusionary zoning. Exclusionary and segregating policies carried out through public planning agencies, real estate, banking and insurance companies have consistently led to remaining communities of color living in disinvested areas. Many of these areas become gentrified later as a result of newer public plans and investments.