\nThe west side of the river is the “nice” one in Portland, and old money in the West Hills aside, the wealthy suburb on this side of the hills is Lake Oswego, around an artificial and still access-restricted-in-defiance-of-state-law lake. Locals my age say that since at least elementary school it was called “Lake No Negro”, and I can only imagine what it took to get a reputation as monoethnically white in 1980s Portland.
Honestly maybe it’s cause it was so close to the 1980s inner city that was noticeable. Our MLK Boulevard was the first north-south artery just across the river (it had originally been “Union”, early Portland was “Free State, Free Labor” Republicans that appreciated “freeing the slaves” as something akin to “deporting the illegals”).
In Along Martin Luther King, the 2003 coffee table book about America’s MLK Boulevards to get your Afrocentric dad for Christmas, it’s mentioned as the only one where the author saw white people living by choice, but then again I remember people challenging the official civic history of “we stopped residential segregation by asking realtors not to in the 1990s” by saying that no, that was just when the ghetto started to gentrify, reducing our official segregation metric of people who had no one of a different race on their block.
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