The Neighborhood Today
A German-Russian named Al Schreiber is interviewed in the article and gives his perspective on the changes in the neighborhood over the past 50 years.
Newcomers alter Northeast neighborhoodStarbucks and other stores in Portland's Sabin district signal rising home prices as African Americans are edged out
Monday, December 13, 1999
By Wade Nkrumah and Scott Learn of The Oregonian staff
German Americans, as memory serves Al Schreiber, came first to the Sabin neighborhood in inner Northeast Portland.
They preceded African Americans.
Who preceded yuppies.
Who preceded Starbucks.
Barely.
"When you have to go pay five bucks for a cup of coffee, you know something's up," says Schreiber, who has lived in the same Sabin house for 50 years.
It's not entirely fair -- Starbucks doesn't actually charge $5 for any of its stock drinks, for example -- but the signs are that America's largest coffee chain is slowly but surely becoming a national symbol of yuppie gentrification.
In San Francisco, Boston and Starbucks' hometown of Seattle, the chain's openings have roused gentrification critics who have something against no-foam double tall skinny decaf vanilla lattes -- and the people who drink them. In San Francisco, a new Starbucks helped foment a not entirely tongue-in-cheek "Yuppie Eradication Project."
Nobody's protesting the latest Starbucks to open in Portland, at Northeast 15th Avenue and Fremont Street along the Sabin neighborhood's southern edge. But it is the first in a traditionally African American part of town. And the numbers show that, in Portland anyway, a new Starbucks is a pretty reliable sign that an area has grown richer -- and whiter.
It's also clear that, love it or hate it, the people who live nearby see the arrival of a Starbucks -- along with a new Nature's Northwest and a Hollywood Video store -- as a sure sign the neighborhood they know is going, if not gone.
Some see the area booming, with crime dropping and houses getting spruced up; others see a white-initiated cultural shift that is jacking up housing prices and driving many African Americans out of a part of town that has been their power base for half a century.
The coffee chain's arrival already has helped herald transitions in other trendy Portland neighborhoods, from 23rd Avenue and the Pearl District in Northwest to Hawthorne Boulevard in Southeast and the Broadway corridor and Beaumont in Northeast.
As Portland State University associate professor Gerard Mildner puts it, with Starbucks in residence, "can Niles and Frasier Crane be far behind?"
To track the progress of gentrification in Portland, you can slog through reams of census data on housing prices, incomes, and racial shifts and find aging areas being converted into trendy middle-class ones with remodeled dwellings and increased property values.
You'll find rampant housing-price increases in the 1990s in Sabin and most of inner-east Portland, higher household incomes and an African American population shifting north and east, toward the Columbia River and Gresham.
Or you can look up the Starbucks locations in the phone book.
Starbucks lists 39 shops in Portland, up from one a decade ago, including 22 shops in neighborhoods other than downtown. With the exception of St. Johns, it has none in neighborhoods nearer the Columbia River where the population of African Americans increased from 1990 to 1996. It has one east of 50th Avenue.
Choosing where to set up shop
Greg Jackson, Starbucks' Portland spokesman, says the chain is simply going where traffic is high and where it's wanted by nearby residents.
"We don't have necessarily a target customer," Jackson said. "We get a lot of requests to come into various neighborhoods. Inner Northeast has never had a Starbucks before, and we've had a lot of requests for one there."
Starbucks, which has more than 2,300 coffee shops nationwide, has opened shops in Harlem and, most recently, Oakland, Calif., as part of a partnership with National Basketball Association legend Magic Johnson. The store in Oakland, a predominantly African American city, is the 11th joint venture between Starbucks and Johnson Development Corp.
Rivers Janssen, editor of Fresh Cup Magazine, a Portland-based national publication for coffee retailers, said Starbucks, like most businesses, has never publicly shared its target market. But it obviously has one.
"Their public line is they want to share the coffee experience with as many people as possible," Janssen said. "But they're charging $3.50 for a latte. Is the traditional blue-collar worker going to plunk down 3 bucks for a foo-foo espresso drink? I don't think so."
In neighborhoods, Starbucks is among a handful of indicator businesses that function as anchors the way Nordstrom and Target do for mega-malls. There's a Starbucks shop, a McMenamins brewpub or a Zupan's Market in Portland's most recognized "we've-made-it" neighborhoods.
Such trendy outlets aren't the best predictor of gentrification to come, said Mildner, who recently co-wrote a study on gentrification in Portland. But it is a good indicator that gentrification has arrived.
"People aren't going to move into Sabin because there's a Starbucks there," Mildner said. "It's representing the neighborhood change that's gone on. And there has been quite a bit of change."
The Irvington neighborhood, well along the gentrification path, is just south of the new Starbucks. To the north is Sabin, where houses with stylish three-tone paint jobs are steadily gaining on houses with security bars across the windows.
From 1990 to 1996, the latest year census data are available, Sabin's housing prices soared 136 percent. Average household income grew about 5 percent after inflation. And the neighborhood lost about 300 African American residents while gaining about 150 whites.
Decades of change
Schreiber, a German American, has been watching the neighborhood change for years. As a boy, his parents shopped in a German grocery store at 13th Avenue and Failing Street, now home to a church.
The homes around him started off German, then began shifting to African American after the Vanport flood of 1948 destroyed that community. During the 1990s, he says, yuppies have moved in.
Schreiber said he's always liked the neighborhood, black or white, until gangs arrived in the 1980s. From his point of view, the recent changes in Sabin are good.
"Let's face it," said Schreiber, who lives two blocks north of the new coffee shop. "There was a lot of gang activity here for a while. It's quieted down. . . . I just know there were a lot of beautiful homes around here, and people just moved in and ran them into the ground."
Terry Bins and Charletta Malone, who are cousins, also are lifelong residents of Sabin. The two African American women say the attraction of Starbucks and Nature's, like the change in the neighborhood, is mainly a white thing.
More white people are walking the neighborhood, Malone said. More come to her door to sell things. More whites drive on the residential streets, instead of using thoroughfares. And the people who often ask to buy Malone's house are almost always white, she said.
"I think whites feel it's safer to come to Northeast now," Malone said, "whereas before it was roll up your windows, lock your doors. The only thing that's changed is Nature's."
"When (Vanport) flooded, they put us here," Bins said. "Now they're pushing us out to Gresham, Beaverton, Tigard. . . . Everybody knows in 10 years you're not going to be able to afford to live here."
The gentrifiers include all creeds and colors. But for the most part, "the prevailing racial identity of a gentrifying household is white," Mildner and co-author Leah Halstead found in their study, which included a review of gentrification studies nationwide. The gentrifiers are also young, highly educated single people or couples with fewer than two children, if any.
Popularly known as yuppies.
A recent morning at the new Starbucks provides some fodder for the yuppie thesis. A real-estate assistant wanders in, animatedly negotiating a sale on her cell phone. Sport-utility vehicles outnumber sedans in the parking lot.
But, if this morning is typical, Starbucks isn't serving solely white customers. About a third of the customers who come in are African American.
Among them is Marcus Irving, a pastor who has lived in Sabin since 1968. Irving said he usually goes to Roslyn's Garden Coffee House on Northeast Alberta Street or Reflections Coffee & Books on Northeast Killingsworth Street. He stopped by Starbucks to see what the buzz was about.
"I've seen people here that I've never seen at Roslyn's or Reflections or Stellar's Coffee," he said. "We've had something to offer the community. They apparently have not felt comfortable about what we have to offer in terms of coffeehouses."
A Starbucks moving into those Alberta or Killingsworth neighborhoods could prompt protests from nearby independent coffee shops, a cry Starbucks also has faced nationwide.
Irving's church has felt the pinch of the area's soaring property values. High prices forced him to move the church a year and a half ago to Vancouver, Wash.
"I was looking for a church at an inopportune time because people were buying up property like crazy," Irving said. "We basically had to move out of this community because there was nothing available here."
Positive signs
East of 15th Avenue, Sabin resident Laurie Kellar sees the arrival of Starbucks as unequivocally positive. A drab office building, an independent video store and a run-down library branch were transformed into a hip, corrugated steel-clad building with a meadow fronting the parking lot.
Foot traffic has picked up since Kellar, her husband and their two children moved in five years ago, giving the neighborhood a better feel. The Kellars fixed up the inside of the house, doing most of the work themselves. Now they're working on the outside, chipping dingy white paint off the clapboards.
"I just think Starbucks saw an opportunity for a great location," said Kellar, who is white. "You get excited when somebody comes in there and cleans it all up."
As recently as 10 years ago Sabin was among several inner North and Northeast neighborhoods with depressed property values and hundreds of boarded-up houses.
Today, housing code inspectors say, the area has only the normal inner-east smattering of vacant houses. Crime and gang activity are down. Hearing gunshots used to be routine, Schreiber and other neighbors said. Now it's a rarity.
Michael Byerley, who is white, moved in west of 15th Avenue 10 years ago as a renter with three Dobermans in tow. Now he has a house of his own. He helped persuade the city to raze a suspected drug house across the street. His Dobermans are gone.
Byerley is upset at the traffic and parking hassles that have come with the new stores. He worries about high-priced housing. But overall, he said, "this neighborhood has come up quite a bit."
"It's a changing of the guard."