The Economist has an article up about the gentrification of Seattle:
Although the black exodus is happening across the country, its consequences are especially vivid in Seattle and nearby Portland, two of America’s whitest big cities. In each of these cities, blacks were squeezed by restrictive property covenants and racial prejudice into a small but highly visible central district—black-majority islands in a white sea.
By 2010 the islands had largely gone. Seattle and Portland had become “smart cities”, magnets for hordes of young, highly educated and highly paid newcomers, most of them white and childless. Hungry for “diversity” and rushing into relatively rundown black neighbourhoods, they snapped up the only housing bargains left. White-owned banks were eager to make loans to yuppies. Tens of thousands of houses were gutted and rebuilt. As gentrification gathered pace, property prices exploded. Black homeowners cashed in, taking their windfalls to the suburbs. Black renters were squeezed out by higher rents.
“My clientele has all moved away,” says Charlene Williams, owner of De Charlene’s Beauty & Boutique in Seattle’s Central District. Her neighbourhood was 79% black when she set up shop in 1968. It was 58% black as recently as 1990. Now it is 21% black. Ms Williams once had 13 hairdressers on her payroll; now she employs none. The young Ray Charles once performed in black-owned nightclubs in the Central District. Those clubs are gone, as are the restaurants where Ms Williams used to buy pork-chop sandwiches and peach pie. Eateries now offer crepes, wood-fired artisan bagels and north-west fusion cuisine.
In describing the "island" of the Central District, the Economist misses a few things that probably just weren't put in for length's sake. The Central District was historically the second largest outpost of Black Panther political organization. The area now is a bizarre caricature of its former self, with drive in restaurants like Dick's suddenly surrounded wall to wall by restaurants with no parking.
The Central District is now completely overrun by hipsters who are probably blissfully unaware of this past. The soulessness and vapidity of indie rock music illustrates desperately lacks the quality of the soul, funk and hip-hop that Seattle has produced undercover. Quincy Jones is from here, as is the great Sir Mix-A-Lot, who like many Central District natives, including yours truly very soon, lives out in the suburbs.
It's not only the Central District that has been lost. Gentrification has hit the black population the most holistically but the general blue collar ethos that Seattle was historically built on has been uprooted. Seattle once had a great supply of military surplus stores, an effect likely of Seattle's longstanding past as a military town and airplane manufacturer. Chubby and Tubby's was a store with several outposts in Seattle and a source of everything from work clothes to Converse All Star shoes. Around 2002, it closed its doors.
Portland has changed itself even more from a former "hick town" to an outpost of hipsterdom. The television show Portlandia takes a brickstone to this, devouring the culture and all of its absurdities:
That feminist bookstore is a real place, actually called "In Other Words." The owners have a good sense of humor, apparently, as they allowed themselves to be mocked nationally. The owners of the store released a video about the bookstore, which can be seen on Vimeo, in which some of them consciously concede to being "part of the problem" of gentrification:
Moving In: A Non-Profit Feminist Bookstore and the Politics of Place from Dawn Jones on Vimeo.
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