Portland’s Maine-born population has dropped to 40%. Is that a problem?
At the top of Munjoy Hill on a weekday morning this month, residents of the neighborhood crisscrossed Congress Street carrying coffee cups and holding dog leashes. Among them were an international student at Southern Maine Community College, a Washington Avenue restaurant owner originally from Massachusetts, a filmmaker who relocated from Michigan in 2019 and a Vermont native who moved here three years ago, maybe for good.
Beautiful Maine city’s native population drops by a third since 2000… and no one born in state will live there by 2050 if trend continues
A demographic shift is underway in Portland, where the number of residents born in Maine has plummeted by almost a third in the last 25 years. As of 2024, just 40 percent of the city’s population was Maine-born, per the latest American Community Survey. It means natives are now outnumbered by transplants in the city, stark change from 2000 where 59 percent of Portland’s residents were from within the Pine State.
What do former grisly mob haunts say about modern day Greater Boston?
Where there was once bloody violence and criminal plotting, there is now preaching of salvation and grace. The auto garage that once acted as the de facto headquarters for one of Greater Boston’s most notorious organized crime outfits of the past century is now the Greater Works Church of God Somerville.
What do former grisly mob haunts say about modern day Greater Boston?
It’s a transformation playing out across the region. As Greater Boston has gentrified, it has become less of a backdrop for working-class, clannish noirs that hinge on loyalty and limited life choices directed by Ben Affleck or Martin Scorsese. It’s now more of a hub of gentrifying young professionals, skyrocketing housing costs, and concerns about displacement.
Briefly Noted: “Cape Fever,” “A Very Cold Winter,” “Strangers,” and “The Death and Life of Gentrification.”
This wide-ranging study explores how the term “gentrification” has slipped the bonds of its original, “brick-and-mortar” usage, becoming a way to signal loss while addressing “structural inequalities and concomitant social changes.” As a metaphor, its meaning has become fluid; it is now commonplace to read of the “gentrification” of subjects as varied as music, the internet, sandwiches, and queer culture. Brown-Saracino also zeroes in on a crucial aspect of the term’s appeal: in an era of ideological land mines, “gentrification,” she writes, “is politically charged without evoking a specific, narrow political stance.”
How I Let Go of Gentrification
Today, talk of gentrification abounds and that talk is increasingly heterogeneous. On a field trip with my students, a tour guide used the term not to describe class turnover in post-industrial neighborhoods, but to gesture to a much longer history of population replacement. For him, gentrification conveyed a century of racialized displacement: from the replacement of Black populations by changing industrial uses, to urban renewal, and, finally, to present-day real-estate speculation. Used in this manner, gentrification encompasses the displacement of marginalized populations, regardless of form, decade, or origin. This example is just the tip of the iceberg. All kinds of people rely on gentrification to talk about transformations, many of them unrelated to cities. For instance, reporters refer to the gentrification of the churro and the gentrification of Burning Man. Here, gentrification denotes the upscaling of entities that aren’t neighborhoods; the churro has become more expensive and Burning Man has transmogrified into a festival-destination for the wealthy and celebrities.
You Can Gentrify Anything Today. What Does that Say About Society?
Boston University ethnographer Japonica Brown-Saracino says gentrification means more than a fresh coat of paint and rising real estate prices in old neighborhoods. It’s about how the market can turn anything into a hot commodity—and take it out of the hands of the people who nurtured it.
Are YIMBYs winning the housing wars? Not so fast, these people say
From city council hearings to the halls of academia, the debate raged for years. Then came 2020, and Americans raced to buy homes during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Prices shot up, pushing the U.S. median to $410,800, a 30 percent increase in five years, Federal Reserve data shows. Median prices go significantly higher in the West ($531,100) and Northeast ($796,700). Now even starter homes are increasingly out of reach.
Raising incomes essential to lifting residents out of deprivation says report, but what about affordable homes?
Louisville’s Anti-Displacement Commission finally gets off the ground
Members of Louisville’s Anti-Displacement Commission met for the first time Tuesday afternoon. The meeting was a long time in the making. The Louisville Metro Council passed the Anti-Displacement Law nearly two years ago. It directed city officials to work with researchers to develop a tool that could analyze proposed developments and determine if they were likely to displace neighborhood residents through higher rents or property taxes. Any project that would lead to displacement would no longer be eligible for public funding.