Gentrification, Specialty Coffee, and Third Wave Cafés in Portland, Oregon | 2023 Re:co Fellow Feature — Dennis Cote
Coffee has changed and continues to transform societies and landscapes all over the world, most recently in the process known as gentrification.
2023 Re:co Fellow DENNIS COTE, an ALM (Master of Liberal Arts in History) graduate candidate at Harvard Extension School, shared some of their thesis work on specialty coffee and gentrification in Portland, this year’s host city, from 1995-2020.
This Fellows seminar from Re:co Portland is supported by Fellows Program sponsor, Toddy. For over 50 years, Toddy brand cold brew systems have delighted baristas, food critics, and regular folks alike. By extracting all the natural and delicious flavors of coffee and tea, Toddy Cold Brew Systems turn your favorite coffee beans and tea leaves into fresh cold brew concentrates, that are ready to serve and enjoy. Learn more about Toddy at toddycafe.com.
I began my Re:co fellowship presentation with a land acknowledgement. I wanted to remind participants that they were standing on land, drinking water, and breathing air, where people who spoke the now extinct Chinook language once lived for thousands of years.[1] These places were stolen from and unceded by Indigenous, native, and First Nations people. However, their memory lives on in those who remember. This was accompanied by an image from a drone showing the Albina District in Portland, Oregon and an arrow pointing “WE ARE HERE” indicating the Oregon Convention Center.
My presentation, titled “$150 cup of coffee: Gentrification, Specialty Coffee, and Third Wave Cafes in Portland, Oregon 1995-2020,” referenced a US$150 cup of coffee available in Portland, the top scoring coffee (a natural processed Geisha) from the Best of Panama competition. In my research, one of the questions I ask is—from a historical perspective—how did a place which had been previously economically depressed and divested come to have consumer demand for such an expensive coffee? I also wanted to understand why some people say that third wave cafés and specialty coffee have come to symbolize gentrification.
People say that gentrification is symbolized by new amenities that weren’t there before in a neighborhood whether it is a third wave café, a community garden, or bike lanes. These spaces are occupied and serve a purpose for the newcomers who arrived. However, at the same time people feel a sense of displacement and many times are physical displaced. Gentrification is about displacement, not dis-spacement. Space is a blank space waiting to be filled with memory, meaning, and history—at which point, it becomes a place. Paul Dourish is quoted as saying: “We are located in space but we act in place.”[2] The history of Oregon has a repeating history of displacement of people: through exclusionary laws and land use policies, it has continued to achieved this displacement through a process of gentrification.
A History of Displacement
The Indigenous people who lived at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers lived in small communities such as one on Sauvie Island. They engaged in subsistence farming and specifically produced and consumed wapato, an aquatic plant with edible tubers, which grew in the wetlands. As white fur traders expanded their hunt for beaver pelts, then a significant item of trade with Europe, their presence disrupted the waterways and transformed the landscape. Wapato not only became increasingly hard to find, but the diseases carried by the fur traders weakened the Indigenous populations. The Americans had established a small outpost at present Oregon City in 1829 and incorporated in 1845 near the Willamette Falls, a natural barrier to river navigation. Under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which legitimized earlier land-claims available to white settlers, white men could receive 320 acres and their wives could also receive another 320 acres in their own name. In what is now Washington County, people would begin growing wheat (which continues to be an important commodity of Oregon). In 1845, William Overton and Asa Lovejoy combined their land claims to establish the original 640 acres of the city of Portland on the west banks of the Willamette River. Portland was chosen as the port from which to export the wheat because of the construction of the Great Plank Road between Portland and Washington County on the other side of the rugged Western Hills: another transformation of the landscape for economic reasons.
The Organic Laws adopted in 1843 in support of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance stated that there could not be slavery. Further, in 1844, all slaves had to be freed and removed within three years from Oregon, otherwise the former slaves would face punishment including lashing. The Oregon Constitution was submitted to the United States in 1857 and approved for admission in 1859. Unique to the Oregon Constitution in Article I, Section 35 it stated: “No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state.” Although not enforced by law, the black population remained relatively small in Oregon with only 1800-2000 before World War II. Article I, Section 35 was repealed by referendum in 1926 because it was in conflict with the 14th Amendment of US Constitution for due process under the law. Interestingly, Oregon narrowly ratified the 14th Amendment in 1866 but then “de-ratified” 1868 because of a change in political balance. It was not until 1973 that the 14th Amendment was formally ratified by Oregon. The black community still struggled to find homes in Oregon.
In 1924, after considerable debate in Portland, new zoning laws were adopted. These established four different zones for either residential, mixed residential, commercial, or industrial. The master city plan was for most residential lots to be 5000 sqft with dwellings being approximately 1000-1500 sqft. The first zoning residential laws also served to restrict housing for renting: affluent neighborhoods were the first to receive single family housing zone while other became working class neighborhoods. This, in many ways, followed a long history in Portland over land use to enforce economic and many times racial segregation.[3] The Albina District became the center of Portland’s black community where people could buy homes. However, soon in the 1930’s and into the 1950’s it was the only place that they were permitted to buy homes according to rules set by the Portland Realty Board.[4] The Federal Home Loan Bank Board redlined the Albina District for home loans and mortgages (i.e., they believed the area was a high risk of default).
The Oregon Convention Center, located on a city street now called Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, occupies what was previously a historically black neighborhood, part of the Albina District. An US$8 million bond measure was approved to develop the neighborhood as a form of urban revitalization in the 1950s. The families who lived in this district were evicted and their homes bulldozed. At the same time, more of the Albina District was cleared for the I-5 Interstate further fracturing the black community that lived there. Although the 96 neighborhoods of Portland are formally defined by borders, the Albina District had no specific clear boundaries.
However, as Portland expanded with many suburbs there was an uneasiness that natural resources and farmland was being converted to residential and commercial purposes. In 1973, Governor McCall, looking at the suburban sprawl of California, helped pass Oregon Senate Bill 100, which established the Urban Growth Boundary requiring municipalities to set development boundaries. Although this protected farmland and forests from being developed in a haphazard manner, it limited residential density in Portland and how far the city could expand with periodic review.[5] Sauvie Island which was the population center of indigenous people consisting of hundreds, now remains sparsely developed and outside the urban growth boundary.
The above land use policies and zoning ordinances limited the amount of housing available in Portland. Unlike many other cities that expanded outwards or in-filled with dense housing, Portland permitted low-density housing. The Albina District in particular experienced government divestment in the 1980s and 1990s. As neighborhoods aged, they became less desirable and real estate values plummeted: residential lots in the 1990s could be bought for US$5,000-$8,000. In 1993, The City of Portland implemented revitalization efforts that attempted to reverse the trajectory the Albina District. In some ways, it did help homeowners with rising real estate values and keeping property taxes low; however, it also attracted new residents to the area seeking housing. With the rise of real estate prices, rents also increased: many residents could not pay and were evicted, further attracting new residents—with the required income—to move into the area.
In the 1990s, Portland was one of the smaller and cheaper cities on the West Coast. Many of the higher income jobs were not present at this time; some attribute this to the fact that there weren’t major research universities or knowledge-based industries. In addition, the low-density housing meant less tax revenue generated on each property.
Specialty Coffee and Gentrification in Portland
Stepping back for a moment it becomes necessary to explain the three food regimes and how it connects with the history of Oregon, gentrification, and coffee. Scholars on food systems identify three food regimes, or waves: colonial, developmentalist, and corporate neoliberal.[6] During the 1980s, new economic policies called neoliberal economics emerged, where government regulations and international agreements would no longer control supply and quotas of production. The lack of controls would lead to price fluctuations across food systems and larger global economic systems. Coffee is one product among many that experienced this de-regulation with the collapse of the International Coffee Agreements in 1989.
Throughout its history, Oregon has experienced all three waves of food regimes: first, with its non-industrial export of wheat and forestry products (colonial); second, with New Deal food production programs that emerged after World War II, which controlled and regulated food production and pricing (developmentalist); third, with the deregulation of prices (neoliberal). Prices fluctuated and floated creating uncertainty but also the question how to differentiate among so many uniform products: if coffee from Guatemala and Brazil both tasted the same, would consumers ultimately choose the cheaper product? (Attempts to lower prices and maximize profits would, often, result in farmers receiving the lowest wages.) However, Oregon is in a unique position to understand seasonality of food: due to the fertile nature of the region, many varietals of berries were developed. For example, the Mount Hood strawberry is at peak flavor for only two to three weeks a year. This local appreciation of seasonality and distinctive flavors extended to other foods and beverages including coffee.
The third wave café is a unique place (and, in my thesis, I do describe it as a place—not a space). Although they are often interchanged, identifying a “third wave café” is more subjective than defining “specialty coffee.” The definition of specialty coffee has itself changed over time and for my thesis, I use the 2004 definition for specialty grade coffee—and it is important to point out that not every third wave café serves specialty grade coffee. I offer some questions for you, coffee professionals, to consider: Would a US$150 cup of coffee still be the same if it wasn’t prepared and consumed in a third wave café? Would it still taste the same? Would the overall experience, impression, and memory be different depending on the place?
Based upon previous scholarly literature, it is possible to work through the historical background of gentrification, but it doesn’t answer the question: why are third wave cafés seemingly emblematic of gentrification? One reason could be that people perceive the places of these third wave cafés as a sign of changing neighborhoods. For many, spending US$150 on a cup of coffee is discretionary (not essential), which makes third wave cafés a form of retail gentrification. Sharon Zukin puts it best, recognizing that retail gentrification and boutiques not only fulfill basic needs of newcomers but also serve as social and cultural capital.[7] However, there are many other symbols of gentrification: for example, bike lanes,[8] the implementation of new practices in community gardens (which often excludes longtime residents),[9] and even areas of tree foliage[10] have been used to map gentrification.
Many of these studies on gentrification use data based upon census tract, primarily tracing changes to income levels within the ten-year period between each US Census, but in my work, I examine the changes in real estate prices. This is because it offers a chance to look at data in more detail outside of the ten-year census cycle.[11] Although I’ve not completed my data collection and analysis at the time of writing, my early findings follow the same patterns of gentrification: a consistent pattern of decline in 2008, aligning with the “Great Recession,” before an increase 18-24 months later. Between 1995 to 2020, the price per house jumped from US$5,000 to US$600,000. For many families, houses are their largest form of equity, so when they can no longer afford to live in their house, gentrification displaces them from the neighborhood that they know. Many of the people who moved into the neighborhoods as early gentrifiers had the benefit of generational wealth from their parents who often times helped with a down payment or bought a house for their children. After twenty years of gentrification, even these early gentrifiers are no longer able to afford to live there and are pushed out.
City centers, formerly bustling with people, are now empty: high office vacancy suggests city centers cannot support third wave cafés. However, specialty coffee roasters can now be found in the suburbs as well as rural and remote locations. In gentrified neighborhoods, there is a higher amount of “work-from-home” households, with approximately a third of workers using a remote or hybrid setup. Consumers are educated in how to prepare and consume coffee at home, suggesting the place of consumption and enjoyment for specialty coffee has become even more intimate as it has entered their homes as part of a daily routine.
Before I leave you with some questions, I want to quote Taylor Swift as I did in my presentation, “It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me,” because we all participate somehow in the structures and processes that contribute to gentrification—but we can also support solutions. The future of specialty coffee and third wave cafés remains unclear: will farmers consider coffee production a sustainable livelihood with climate changes and low wages? Will third wave cafés persist? What does the fourth wave look like? My personal belief, looking forward, is that there will be more labor organization through both unions and alternative foodways. Consumers in the Global North have become accustomed to expecting cheap products from the Global South and not to question the colonial legacies and economic policies that led to their creation. US$150 for a cup of coffee may seem obscene too many people, but my final question is: what would be an acceptable price to pay for a cup of coffee that was produced in a sustainable manner?
[1] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People, Second edition (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2022), 14.
[2] Pascale Joassart, The $16 Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification, (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2021), 22-23.
[3] Abbott, Carl. 1983. Portland : Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 81.
[4] Abbott (2022), 132.
[5] Abbott 2022, 160.
[6] Joassart-Marcelli and Bosco 2018, 18.
[7] Zukin, Sharon, Valerie Trujillo, Peter Frase, Danielle Jackson, Tim Recuber, and Abraham Walker. 2009. “New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City.” City & Community 8 (1): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6040.2009.01269.x.
[8] Flanagan, Elizabeth, Ugo Lachapelle, and Ahmed El-Geneidy. 2016. “Riding Tandem: Does Cycling Infrastructure Investment Mirror Gentrification and Privilege in Portland, OR and Chicago, IL?” Research in Transportation Economics 60: 14–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2016.07.027.
[9] Elliott, Brian. 2018. “Urban Agriculture, Uneven Development, and Gentrification in Portland, Oregon.” Environmental Ethics 40 (2): 173–83. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics201840216.
[10] Hoffman, Jeremy S., Vivek Shandas, and Nicholas Pendleton. 2020. “The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas.” Climate (Basel) 8 (1): 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli8010012.
[11] Walker, Samuel, and Chloe Fox Miller. 2019. “Have Craft Breweries Followed or Led Gentrification in Portland, Oregon? An Investigation of Retail and Neighbourhood Change.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 101 (2): 102–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2018.1504223.
DENNIS COTE is currently writing their thesis about specialty coffee, third wave cafés, and gentrification in Portland, Oregon 1995-2020. They decided to use the COVID lockdowns to pursue online an ALM (Master of Liberal Arts in History) at Harvard Extension School. They have worked in many positions in coffee starting since 2001. They also spent time away in the United States Marine Corps and is a service-connected disabled veteran. Coffee has changed and continues to transform societies and landscapes all over the world, most recently in the process known as gentrification.
About the 2023 Re:co Fellowship Program
Over the past 15 years, we’ve watched Re:co repeatedly create a vibrant network of emerging and existing leadership within the specialty coffee industry during its brief emergence every year. This year’s Re:co Symposium Fellowship, evolved in keeping with changes made to the structure and intentionality of this year’s programming, is designed to highlight individuals working to address the challenges and opportunities of specialty coffee’s emerging future and who wish to develop their leadership capabilities in the sector in order to further this work.
Thanks in part to the generous support of the 2023 Re:co Fellowship sponsor, Toddy LLC, we awarded eight fellowships to qualified applicants, which covered the registration fee of Re:co Symposium and the Specialty Coffee Expo; three nights of accommodation in Portland, Oregon; and up to US$500 of a fellows’ travel expenses.