A while ago I stumbled across something that still trips me out.

We like to think of red lining as being a terrible problem of the past. But so much of that urban legacy still lives with us. The past as they say is not even past.

So I live in Portland, near a neighborhood call the Irvington Historic district.

You know the deal. It's a leafy neighborhood with grand houses, where the NIMBY neighbors got together to raise their property values and restrict development by getting the area zoned as historic.

When I moved to PDX and was trying to figure out the neighborhoods, I ended up going down a rabbit hole one night and looking up the National Register of Historic Places documentation for the neighborhood. (Exciting I know.) But that's where I came across the jaw dropping thing.

A significant part of the historical claim being made to qualify as a Historic District was that the neighborhood originally banned Black people.

And this isn't some artifact of a neighborhood group from the 1960s.

The neighborhood won it's Historic designation in 2010.

To recap: A bunch of rich white folk got together just 10 years ago to make their exclusive neighborhood even more economically inhospitable (esp. to people of color) by getting it blessed by the National Historic Register -- on the basis of it having historically banned blacks.

It's tidy inter-generational example of structural racism at work. Where the sins of the past get recapitulated in the present by honoring racism as heritage.

I'd bet a lot of money it's not a rarity in the historical register.

This blew up. I don't have a soundcloud.

So instead lets start an overdue discussion about NIMBYism and gentrification as being forces of structural racism.

Who gets to decide when to completely change the character of an "up and coming" neighborhood?

White gentrifiers.

Who gets to decide "no more change please," halt development and box out poorer browner people in the name of preserving "the character" of the neighborhood?

White NIMBYs

Getting a bit further down this rabbit hole, there was an Eastmoreland Historic district near Reed college that also cited restrictive covenants as part of the historical character of the place. Generous setbacks! No Negroes!

To clarify, this is a proposed historic district, it's had trouble getting approval.