The latest buzzwords

I've written previously about the special level of the inferno that awaits the developer weasels and construction dudes who are using Black reparations as the supposed rationale for spending oodles of public money to cover the I-5 freeway near the Rose Quarter to make a place for more of their soulless apartment bunkers and other "mixed use" claptrap. As if those greedy operators cared one whit about the families who were displaced 50 or 60 years ago when the freeway came through. As if their new high-rise schlock will do anything meaningful to honor or benefit the descendants of those who lost their neighborhood. 

Those bunkers will be occupied by the same white hipsters who live in all the projects these guys have slapped up over the past two decades. With a Jersey Mike's and an AT&T store on the ground floor. Maybe there'll be a plaque with Sammy Davis Jr. on it somewhere, since he used to perform and hang out in that 'hood.

Now the exact same line of malarkey – reparations for the urban renewal misdeeds of the '60s ad '70s – is being used to justify the developers' getting their hands on the public school headquarters building over that way, and razing it for more high-rise human warehousing. It's to make it up to the African Americans, they say. 

Oh, and for that property, they don't need a freeway cover, but they'll get tens of millions of tax dollars anyway. Because homeless.

The marsupials and their construction buddies have been drooling over the school board parcel since back in the late 20th Century. But it hasn't been until lately that they've figured out the magic words to get it into their clutches. Now they know: It's "Albina Vision." What a crock. That development may go where the Black people used to live, but just wait and see, it will be about as Black as a Franz extra crispy English muffin.

For more than two decades now, it's been clear that not only are the cr-apartment guys going to be allowed to erect their towers in every close-in neighborhood, but they also are going to get the neighbors to pay for them, one way or another. Just yesterday it was suddenly revealed that the state is going to hand over $25 million of public money to the weasels, just like that, for the school property project.

"There is a lot I'm proud of in the Emergency Housing Stabilization and Production Package, but I’m particularly excited that we will be sending $25 million to the Albina Vision Trust to redevelop the former Portland Public Schools Headquarters," said Sen. [Kayse] Jama who chairs the Senate Housing and Development Committee. "This critical funding will give the state the opportunity to heal the harms of historically racist land-use decisions by investing in the historically Black Albina neighborhood, which has been fractured by redlining and the construction of Interstate 5.”

There's a sucker born every minute. Unfortunately, many of them wind up being elected to represent you and me.

And so the hucksters and construction goons win again. But making this out to be a racial justice thing is evil on their part. If there's a hell below, they're all gonna go.

You've got to hand it to them, though, they don't miss an opportunity. I'm sure they're also looking with lust at the $400 million that Phil Knight has pledged to restore "equity" in Albina. A different nonprofit is doling out that pork. One has to wonder what Knight thinks is going to happen to all that money. By the time the Jersey Mike's opens, he will probably have gone to the Duck Bowl Game in the Sky.