Priced Out: The Podcast

Portland, Ore. and Long Beach Calif, are similar and at the same time very different.  Portland is known as the "whitest city in America" while Long Beach has long been the country’s most diverse. The two mid-sized, West Coast cities have historically had no rent control and no restrictions on landlord evictions.  When the housing boom hit in 2015, both cities saw waves of mass eviction as investment poured in.  Since then, Portland and Oregon have led the nation in grassroots housing reforms.  Can Long Beach follow suit? We talk with advocates, activists, and locals in this short audio documentary, the third part in our three-part series on Long Beach.

Our other two Long Beach showsEP 34: The Tough Latina and the Racist Landlord: Tales from Long Beach, Calif.

Listen in to our first ever Priced Out Podcast debate!  Meg Hanson is a data activist and historic preservation advocate. Michael Andersen is a Senior Researcher at Sightlines Institute. We've interviewed both of these excellent folks on the show in the past (see below).

Today's edition is a grudge match debate about a City of Portland and statewide proposal to end single family housing as we know it.  These two proposals are controversial. These types of homes and these types of neighborhoods have been the foundation of the American Dream for generations. Portland's Residential Infill Strategy would eliminate the single-family housing zone in the vast majority of the city, allowing for duplexes, threeplexs, and quads as the lowest available zone.  House Bill 2001 would roll out a ban on single family zoning across the entire state. 

Would such moves help to provide more housing and lower costs? Would outlawing single-family zones wind up displacing even more vulnerable people and bulldozing historic and popular neighborhoods? 

Listen in

Listen to Meg’s Interview about Fighting Gentrification with Historic Preservation

This is a short episode,  as we gear up for the release of an audio documentary on Long Beach, California.  Cornelius talks about the upcoming Oregon Public Broadcasting premiere of Priced Out the documentary, some local screenings and throws shade on the OTHER "Priced Out."  Andru talks about his son's graduation. And no one talks about the X-Men.

OPB Broadcast [Portland Channel 10} Premiere of Priced Out, July 2nd, 9 pm 

OPB rebroadcast, July 4, 2 am 

More from Priced Out:

This episode is part of a new occasional series we're calling Getting to Know You.  Andru and Cornelius talk about the issues from their own personal experience.  Andru was a homeless outreach worker in Tulsa for many years and Cornelius is from a part of NJ that has recently been lauded for "ending homelessness" or achieving what is called "functional zero."

The two talk about what functional zero means, the flaws with counting unhoused populations and their philosophy on interacting with homeless neighbors.

More from Priced Out:

This episode is a panel discussion for the Society of Applied Anthropology with podcast co-host Cornelius Swart and activist, and entrepreneur Stephen Green. Stephen was featured in Priced Out, the documentary, and was the interviewed on a previous podcast [EP: 32] about black business and the black middle class’s role in gentrification.  At the panel, he talked about reframing the discussion on gentrification in Portland.  Stephen stated that the black community is growing in metro Portland, just not in the old black neighborhood. With that growth comes challenges but also opportunities.

More from Priced Out:

Cynthia Macias grew up in the black and Latino neighborhoods of Long Beach, California. It was an idyllic "hood" growing up. But as an adult, she led a harrowing and heartbreaking life filled with domestic violence and housing discrimination. But Cynthia became a fighter and a housing activist instead of a victim. By the time she was confronted with a stunning race-based eviction, Cynthia was prepared to become a racist landlord's worst nightmare.

Join us for a very personal edition of the Priced Out Podcast, as we listen to the pain, the struggles and the victories of one Long Beach resident who has finally had enough.

We are mid-season here at Priced Out and your hosts Andru and Cornelius what to hear what city you think we should be covering.

Andru and Cornelius talk about their recent travels and the gentrification that they've seen in a bunch of places including Cartagena, Colombia, Kansas City, Missouri, and Vancouver, British Colombia. Listen in and see what they saw happening in those places.  

In Colombia, where Cornelius' mother was born, Cartagena has transformed from a third-world city into a resort town with almost no full-time domestic residents, virtually overnight. In Kansas City, Andru returned to his childhood stomping ground and found Brad Pitt, of all people, had taken up shop and was fighting gentrification. In British Colombia, Cornelius found the slums of Gastown and Chinatown full of homelessness, drug addiction, boarded-up buildings, and extremely expensive rent!

Those are just a few stories a future Priced Out Podcast could pursue. Tell us which one you like best. Or, if there's a city you think we should cover (your city?) let us know.

Get ahold of us at pricedoutmovie@gmail.com or through any of our social networks.

More about Priced Out here:

Stephen Green is featured in our documentary Priced Out, but not nearly enough.  Born in a suburb of Portland, Stephen moved into the heart of Oregon's black community when he started a family. An economist, venture capitalist and activist, Stephen has worked in both government and in the private sector.  He oversaw property acquisition for the City of Portland during some of the most volatile years of gentrification in the black community. He is also on a committee that distributes funds from Portland's largest affordable housing bond. He serves on the board of the city's premiere black community organization (Self Enhancement Inc.). And he helped create the nation's first nonprofit brewpub.

The black community is far more broadly defined than simply a neighborhood for Stephen. He also sees wealth creation, rather than social justice, as the most vital challenge in charting an equitable future for Portland and the nation's African American community. Listen in as Stephen talks about the emerging role that the black middle class will come to play in urban America and all the things that Priced Out the documentary failed to cover.

Stephen Green's Ted Talk:

Cluj-Napoca is a historic city of about 300,000 residents in northeast Romania. The city is considered the unofficial capital of Transylvania and it contains the country’s largest free university.

Since the fall of communism in the 1990s, Romania's housing stock has been re-privatized. That's created the first generation of renters in 50 years while at the same time little rent regulation and low-cost housing have been put in place. Recently, a new mayor has pushed free-market reforms, tax breaks and zoning changes in a bid to make Cluj-Napoca into the hipster, tech-hub of Romania. The result has been skyrocketing rents and displacement of the region’s students, renters, and Roma (gypsy) population.

Sound familiar? 

It’s gentrification with a post-communist twist.  

Cornelius speaks with tenant organizers Vlad Muresan of the Cluj Tenants Union for an amazing look at how global capital puts the pinch on working people around the world.    

If you have ideas that can help people in Cluj, please reach out to Muresan via the groups Facebook Page:

Join us for a live recording of a panel discussion about the threat by a mass transit project poses to the working class, and minority residents of Tigard, Oregon.  Tigard is a suburb immediately to the southwest of Portland. There is a large streetcar project (known as light rail) planned for the area.  

As viewers of Priced Out (the documentary) know, that fifteen years ago local government built a light rail system that  caused massive displacement of black and other residents in North Portland. The City of Portland anticipated that the project would create gentrification and promised to build 2,000 units of affordable housing to offset displacement. But 15 years later the city had only produced about 500 units. 

Priced Out producer Cornelius Swart, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Unite Oregon, the Fair Housing Council of Oregon and City of Tigard teamed up to sponsor a screening and discussion aimed at engaging the residents of Tigard, and helping them avoid the mistakes of the past.

Find us at:

Donte Moss, T. Walker, and Brad Simmons are three young black men from North Carolina, and they think Portland is great. You don’t hear that kind of message too often and certainly not on this show. So, for Black History Month, we’re happy to share what these energetic and positive young men have to say. 

After a five-year struggle, [documented in part in Priced Out (the documentary)] housing activists are getting the impossible. The Oregon Legislature is poised to be the first in the nation to impose rent control on an entire state.  Coming on the heels of a housing crisis that scorched Portland and other cities with double-digit rent increases, many see rent control as a massive win for stabilizing working-class renters.   Or is it?   Housing activist and founder of Portland Tenants United, Margot Black, talks to us about what is in the bill and why she thinks it doesn’t go far enough.  She also says what voters can do to help.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Priced Out Podcast.

People use a lot of different terms when referring to gentrification. What’s the differences between revitalization, gentrification and a housing crisis?  Why can't the government build affordable housing to compensate communities of color for years of housing discrimination? 

Join Cornelius as he has an in-depth discussion with John Malpede about gentrification in and around L.A.'s Skid Row. Malpede is the founding artistic director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department. 

In recent years downtown LA has made a spectacular comeback. The area is now brimming with new museums, expensive condos, and lavishly restored movie palaces.  But just a few blocks away sits Skid Row, the nation’s largest homeless community.  Skid Row often looks like a third world country, and it now sits next to the gleaming street of the newly rebranded #DTLA.  Skid Row is littered with outdoor residents and lined with clinics, social services, and SRO hotels that house the ultra poor.

Now, a move by the city to rezone the area and make it more attractive to developers could put many, if not all of the thousands of Skid Row who actually have indoor living back onto the street. Listen in to this tale of two cities.