GOODBYE PDX, LINGERING MEMORIES

the "salon daily" email that was still lingering in the inbox of my tertiary email account advertised an article on the ten most segregated urban areas in america, and i finally opted not to delete it and click through, sure that portland would have made the top ten -- and because i'm still waffling on the usefulness of purchasing one of those new digital subscriptions to nytimes.com. (new york, incidentally, is the second most segregated urban area in the country.)

portland, however, was nowhere on the list. granted, i wasn't at all put off by that result -- it was encouraging, really -- but i was very certainly surprised. portland has a not so illustrious history of racial discrimination and housing segregation, as well as a contemporary reputation as one of america's whitest cities. in fact, it's possible that portland is still so white that the maps that accompanied the salon.com article wouldn't have shown much contrast from one section of the metropolitan area to another, simply because no section isn't majority white -- and nearly all of them to an extreme degree.

lucky for lazy statisticians like me (i briefly visited censusscope.org, but couldn't find any easy to read city maps or ranking for cities outside of the top ten), the "oregon housing blog" recently ran a post on metro area residential segregation data in the northwest. according to that post, although white-hispanic/hispanic-white segregation in portland stayed roughly the same from 2000 to 2010 (dissimilarity dropped from 34.3 to 34.2), white-black/black-white segregation fell significantly over the same period (from a dissimilarity of 47.4 to 40.9).* maybe we're not so hypocritically intolerant as we thought. or if not, at least we're getting better. it's always difficult to gauge the relative awfulness of our immediate situation with what's going on outside of our progressive bubble. it's probably also true that, if it's not our generally overwhelming whiteness, our relative in-dissimilarity as compared to other educated, progressive-leaning metropolitan areas like chicago, new york and philadelphia is a reflection of our relative lack of money. the disparities of racial underclassing would seem to be less apparent where the really wealthy are fewer. (while similarly white, seattle is, probably by force of that argument, more segregated than portland.)

nonetheless, we're on an undeniable upswing of development and urban beautification. oregon was well ahead of the curve on cleaning up its meth house problem by requiring prescriptions for drugs containing pseudoephedrine. mississippi followed us last year. bills that would enact similar requirements were recently defeated in arkansas, kansas, kentucky and west virginia, but others have so far withstood attacks from the pharmaceutical industry in several other states (i'd read that article in the times already, so i don't think that clicking back to it today will count against my monthly nonsubscriber limit). portland, or: first in meth no longer! follow us, nation, unto the more mildly segregated future of sustainable urban development!

longtime residents love to lament how the city has changed over the last decade, but maybe there was something to the whole hipster thing after all.

*i'm not exactly sure what calculations are made to determine dissimilarities or in what units we should imagine the numbers, but the lower the number, the less segregated. by comparison, new york's overall dissimilarity was listed at salon.com as being at 78.04.