Held to answer

Coming soon to the corner of Martin Luther King Blvd. and Alberta Street in Northeast Portland: The MLK Felon Recovery and Residential Center.

Now that’s the kind of project the Portland African-American Leadership Forum might get behind (as long as forum leaders get in on the action).

Anything is better than a popular grocery-store chain like Trader Joe’s. Invite white people into the ‘hood, and it becomes a neighborhood. That’s gentrification, and it attracts the wrong kind of people.

“A new Trader Joe’s will increase the desirability of the neighborhood to non-oppressed populations … ,” the Portland African-American Leadership Forum wrote to Portland city officials in a letter opposing the project.

Who would have thought that in 2014 a black organization in Portland, Ore., would sound like Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1963 calling for segregation.

The protests from the Portland African-American Leadership Forum didn’t end in the kind of victory they wanted. They wanted to assert their authority, show their influence and force developers and the city to build affordable housing, presumably only for black residents.

But Trader Joe’s quietly pulled out. Company representatives said they prefer to go where they are welcome. They offered no attempt to suck up to a noisy group of self-proclaimed black leaders skilled at working the media.

Even the forum seemed to realize how inconsequential their victory was. They tried to shift attention away from Trader Joe’s – saying they had nothing against the store (even though “non-oppressed” people shop there). Instead, they zeroed in on the behind-the-scenes deal that didn’t include them.

Was the deal a giveaway? Considering that the 1.9-acre parcel has been vacant for years, perhaps the appraised price of $2.9 million was unrealistic. Portland Development Commission finally sold it to California developer Majestic Realty for $502,160, which in turn lined up Trader Joe’s to be the anchor tenant on the site.

When the Portland African-American Leadership Forum learned of the difference between the sale price and the appraised value, they screamed “subsidy!” as if the $2.1 million difference were a sure thing. As if this pile of cash already existed, and they didn’t get a shot at it.

It’s understandable the forum would think like that. Since the 1960s, billions of dollars have been spent on anti-poverty programs for the cause of urban renewal.

When I was a reporter in California, many cities had Redevelopment Agencies that operated like the PDC. I sat through Redevelopment Agency meetings and listened to one grand plan after another that was going to bring new life to a blighted neighborhood or a downtown. (What constituted blight was highly subjective. In Palm Desert, redevelopment funds were used to renovate a golf resort. In 2012, with California facing financial ruin, the state disbanded its Redevelopment Agencies.)

For a few years in the Bay Area, I lived in a Community Development Block Grant area, a marginal neighborhood teetering on the verge of either going to the gangs or going middle-class.

These CDBG areas also were targeted for government subsidies. How did these neighborhoods turn out? Some went to the gangs, and some gentrified into middle-class neighborhoods.

Urban renewal and CDBG efforts were doomed to have mixed results. Government agencies are limited in where and how they can tell a business to operate, and where and how they can tell people to live. Government can nudge in one direction or another, but it can’t compel results.

To a professional anti-poverty activist or organization, however, even failure can spell success.

One of the finest examples of how this works is in journalist Tom Wolfe’s 1970 book “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.”

In the “Mau-Mauing” half of the book, Wolfe hangs out at San Francisco’s Office of Economic Opportunity, which administered anti-poverty programs. Fashions have changed (do any bureaucrats still wear Hush Puppy shoes?), but the same money racket is alive and well in 2014:

“By the end of 1968 there were eighty-seven different groups getting into the militant thing, getting into mau-mauing. …  at all the poverty agencies, at boards of education, at city halls, hospitals, conventions, foundations, schools, charities, civic organizations, all sorts of places. It got to be an American Custom … Mau-mauing was the ticket. The confrontation route was the only road.”

The flak catchers, then and now, react with the same shit-eating grins: “Why do so many bureaucrats, deans, preachers, college presidents, try to smile when the mau-mauing starts?” Wolfe asks.

One mau-mauer, a flamboyant black man, wearing a dashiki, led a group called “Youth of the Future” to San Francisco City Hall to confront then-Mayor Joseph Alioto and demand summer jobs. When the mayor’s Flak Catcher explains that the mayor is tied up on other business, the Dashiki Chief replies, “We’ll wait for the cat to get through. … Hell, man, we’ll stay here all night. We’ll see the cat in the morning. … We ain’t budging man. We’re here to tend to business.”

Eventually, the Dashiki Chief wears down several levels of Flak Catchers and comes face-to-face with Mayor Alioto. The Chief gets down to business with his demands: Money for sewing machines for Youth of the Future’s dashiki factory, “black-designed, black-made, black-worn dashikis to be manufactured by the youths themselves.”

No sooner did Mayor Alioto take care of Youth of the Future, then here came a group called The New Thang with its own demands.

“The New Thang?” said Mayor Alioto after the group presented itself at City Hall.

Yes, the group’s founder explained. “Thang. … That’s Thing in African.”

This would all be in good fun except we are still living the repercussions. Bureaucrats unwittingly supported and financed gangs, allowing them to thrive.

“The idea that the real leadership in the ghetto might be the gangs hung on with the poverty-youth-welfare establishment. … From the beginning the poverty program was aimed at helping ghetto people rise up against their oppressors. … Therefore, when somebody rises up in the ghetto and confronts you, then you know he’s a leader of the people. So the poverty program not only encouraged mau-mauing, it practically invented it.”

Wolfe noted that the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago “so terrified the youth welfare poverty establishment that in one year, 1968, they got a $937,000 grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington. The Ranger leaders became job counselors in the manpower training project, even though most of them never had a job before and weren’t about to be looking for one.”

Gangs everywhere lined up for grants to be job counselors and neighborhood organizers.

As Wolfe points out, 99 percent of the time the white bureaucrats had nothing to fear from the mau-mauers: “The brother understood through and through that it was a tactic, a procedure, a game. If you actually hurt or endangered somebody at one of these sessions, you were only cutting yourself off from whatever was being handed out, the jobs, the money, the influence. The idea was to terrify but don’t touch.”

The Portland African-American Leadership Forum is probably trying to calculate how much damage they have done to their own influence by running off Trader Joe’s. It’s clear from comments in the news coverage that there were residents and businesses looking forward to what Trader Joe’s would add to the neighborhood.

What’s the future now for that vacant parcel?

A spokesman for the Portland Development Commission told The Oregonian that given the furor over Trader Joe’s, the agency’s next move will involve a “holistic community discussion.”

Spoken like a true Flak Catcher.

— Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Portland: Weird and White