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Author’s name: Eric Fowler Location: Arcata, California Title of essay: Gentrification and the ‘Yipster’: Portlandia’s Representation of a Weird and White Northeast Portland Abstract:

Locally enforced by a citywide mantra of “Keep Portland Weird” and nationally enforced by a Portlandia television series, Portland is frequently touted as a “hip and creative” metropolis to which a perceived in-city fetishization of "all things independent" and "cool” is often attached. Though, as a contrast to the presumed creative diversity lacing these cool cultural confines, demographics indicate a stark deficiency in ethnic diversity within Portland. In this context, the neighborhood-changing process of gentrification has herein displaced an African-American population from their historic roots in Northeast Portland since the early 1990s. Gauging Portlandia to be a work that does work by shaping meanings towards social/racial justice issues like gentrification in its on-screen representation of Portland, this paper argues the following: Portlandia's content bolsters (1) Portland's garnering of a national reputation for whiteness/weirdness and (2) the marginalization of a gentrified populace (NE Portland nonwhites) by normalizing a decidedly white ideal of consumer capitalism.

University affiliation: Humboldt State University

Contact information:

Email: ehf9@humboldt.edu Phone: 503-957-5842 Address: 1092 ½ 10th street. Arcata, CA. 95521

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Eric Fowler

Gentrification and the ‘Yipster’: Portlandia’s Representation of a Weird and White Northeast Portland

INTRODUCTION

Portland is recognized by academia and mass media alike for not only its livability, but

also its observed range of progressive politics, ethically responsible businesses, and

environmentally sustainable policy developments. Particularly enforced by the nationally

televised comedy program of Portlandia, Oregon’s largest city is frequently touted as “hip and

creative”, attached both with a fervent artisan economy and a general affinity amongst its

residents for “all things independent” and “cool” in line with its citywide mantra of “Keep

Portland Weird”(Moon 2013, 1; Turnquist 2010, 1). Amid the perceived tolerance and creative

diversity lacing these “cool” cultural confines of Portland’s urban spaces, demographic statistics

indicate a striking deficiency in actual ethnic diversity. With the 2010 census reporting in the

city’s population as 76.1% White (444,254 people) and 6.3% Black or African American (36,778

people), the metropolis of Portland is therefore indubitably white (US Census Bureau 2010). As

a contrast to perceptions of Portland’s seeming progressiveness, this assertion is supported by the

city’s recent entrustment with the title of “America’s ultimate white city” (Renn 2009). Here

within a context scarce diversity, the neighborhood-changing process of gentrification has

effectively displaced an already small African American population from their historic roots in

neighborhoods dotting the city’s Northeast side. The city’s lack of direct attention to social/racial

justice issues such as gentrification offers a foundation for the following statement to build upon:

Portlandia, set and filmed in the notably hip metropolis of its namesake, provides a lens through

which varied sociocultural effects of gentrification within Northeast Portland can be understood.

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Spanned from the early 1990s to present-day, a gentrifier group characterized between

the two phenomena of hipsterism and yuppiedom is implicated in the displacement of African-

American residents within Northeast Portland. Influxes of this emergent creative class of

gentrifiers who are designated by demographic traits (particularly whiteness and wealth)

attributed to yuppies and attitude/taste/value tendencies associated with hipsters, hereafter

referred to as “yipsters”, are seen by applied methods in the ensuing research as part and parcel

of a television “reel” representation of a “real” Portland (Aitken 2006, 327). The reel refers to the

“cinematic city” of Portlandia’s on-screen images of Portland. The real, in contrast, appertains to

the real-life “concrete city” of Portland—the inspiration and subject of which Portlandia’s

content is concerned (Da Costa 2003, 192). Drawn upon a methodological framework used

previously by scholars within the film geography subdiscipline, the reel’s representation of the

real is examined via textual analysis (also known as content analysis) of three seasons of

Portlandia. Given this reel-real relationship, a broad aim of the paper is to gain insight into how

a Portlandia depiction of the interrelated facets of yipsterism, whiteness, and weirdness is used

to create meanings towards gentrified Portland places/spaces and their predominant occupants of

past (non-whites) and present (white yipsters). This examination expands into an analysis of how

Portlandia’s visual setting and portrayal of gentrified areas (e.g. NE Portland coffee shops,

bookstores, restaurants opened since the early 1990s) operates to encapsulate/enhance/intensify

the gentrification process’ marginalizing effects upon an increasingly displaced populace of non-

white NE Portland residents.

With textual analysis investigating both the NE Portland-gentrifying group of yipsters

and a three season-spanned television series of Portlandia in their active roles as value-loaded

social drivers for which (1) Portland’s image can be enforced or further contrived and (2) the

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sociocultural effects of Portland-area gentrification can be bolstered, the research aims to answer

the following questions: how does Portlandia’s representation of NE Portland reflect and/or

ignore the sociocultural impacts of this area’s gentrification? And, therein, how does this

Portlandia portrayal work to construct meanings towards the gentrifying yipsters’ place

identities in relation to gentrified spaces?

Employing a textual analysis of Portlandia bounded in a theoretical framework

constituent of concepts put forth within radical geography/Parmenidian philosophy/filmic

geography (Fowler forthcoming), the writing examines implications of Portlandia’s meaning-

laden construction of Portland’s image as a seemingly natural setting for the intertwined

sociocultural features of whiteness, weirdness, and yipsterism to exist in sync. In this analysis of

the value-loaded meanings created by Portlandia pertaining to (1) gentrified NE Portland

spaces/places and (2) the consumption habits lacing the lifestyles/attitudes/demographics of

Portland’s yipsters, an argument is developed. The research contends that, first, Portlandia acts

as a force in Portland’s further garnering of a national reputation as a weird and white city.

Second, Portlandia contributes to the marginalization of a gentrified populace of nonwhites in

NE Portland by normalizing Portland as a “white space” and enforcing the “white ideal” of

consumer capitalism by glorifying deemed “yipster” (Fowler forthcoming) consumption habits

(Atkinson 2011, 112; Burnett 1986; Gordinier 2012; Guthman 2003). Iterating whiteness as a

crucial module of the yipster lifestyle symbolically tied to the pleasures of a consumption-led

identity, Portlandia’s on-film representation of Portland is thus seen as a cinematic/social agent

or something that does work to shape meanings towards the array of harrowing real-life

consequences that the process of gentrification in NE Portland holds for a gentrified populace of

working class non-whites (Aitken 2006; Atkinson 2011; Da Costa 2003).

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Gentrification is broadly defined as a process that modifies a neighborhood’s character

and composition, culminating in the “direct and indirect displacement of lower income

households with higher income households” (Papachristo 2011, 216). In the case of NE Portland,

arguments in the proceeding writing assert that consequences of gentrification (and its associated

displacement) are glorified, intensified, and normalized by way of the content, visual setting, and

commentary of a Portlandia TV series.

THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Seeking to understand how Portlandia’s depiction of NE Portland ignores the

sociocultural impacts of the area’s gentrification transpiring from the 1990s to present, I draw on

relevant literatures of representation, yuppiedom, hipsterism, and gentrification in order to situate

Portlandia (and its portrayal of yipsterism) as a value-weighted social/cinematic space that

creates meanings in relation to NE Portland locales. This literature review therein formulates a

theoretical context for the ensuing filmic geography investigation to proceed within.

Representation

Historically, the most powerful engagement in filmic geography studies with the

relationship between the cinematic city and concrete city (ie: Portlandia and Portland) has been

advanced on the level of representation (Shiel 2011). The complex notion of representation, a

description/portrayal of “someone or something in a particular way or as being of a certain

nature”, is at the core of scientific practice, intrinsic to geographic research, and is even seen as a

summarization of the “whole process of knowledge production” itself (Oxford Press; Soderstrom

2011, 11).

Suggested in its Greek etymology as “earth writing”—geo denoting earth and graphia

denoting writing—geography is inherently involved in the act of representation (Gren 1994). In

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effect, the discipline bears the world as it is experienced or understood and proceeds to represent

this world as images defined within the interweaving categories of written (e.g. novels), oral (e.g.

podcasts), and/or visual (e.g. films) mediums (Gomez 2010; Gren 1994). Exemplifying the latter

category (visual medium representations) and iterating a fluidity present amongst these varying

mediums’ depiction of earth’s geography, film content such as Portlandia combine visual and

oral aspects through both moving-images and sound film/audio.

Viewing representation as central to the discipline, attempts by geographers to theorize

this labyrinthine notion are drawn upon the work of—among others— Foucault, Heidegger,

Lefebvre, Derrida, Rory, Harvey, Deleuze, Plato and Parmenides (e.g.: Soderstrom 2011; Gren

1994; Heidegger 1962; Soja 1989). Regarding the latter duo in this list, scholarship on

representation is perceived to be rooted in a foundation split between two primary schools of

thought: the contrasting Ancient Greek philosophies of Plato and Parmenides. Accentuating

Ancient Greece’s influence in the shaping of Western civilization as it is known today (in areas

of politics, medicine, sport, law, etc.), Soderstrom (2011, 12) explains the importance of this

Platos-Parmenides dichotomy as an undergird to the problematisation and conceptualization of

representation in geography:

For Parmenides, Man is taken in the flow of the world, s/he is primarily a ‘hearer’ of the world, and this is why the world cannot be an image. For Plato, on the contrary, the world is primarily ‘seen’, put in front of us, and can thus become an object of representation. Contrasting Plato’s perception of representation focused on contemplation and perceiving

the world as an image or “object” placed in front of us, Parmenides’ stance emphasizes a

dynamism, an action, and/or a “flow” inherent to representation processes. The stated dichotomy

exists as follows: Platonic philosophy stagnantly characterizes representation as an image of the

world simply channeling information via written/oral/visual mediums, while a Parmenidian

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philosophy glances into the diffusive, affecting power of mediums’ representation as a platform

for engagement between Man, medium, and the social realm. An evaluation of how the

Portlandia film medium writes the “world” of Portland is thus applied through a Parmenidian

lens. This viewpoint is employed because, in the manner to which its mythic on-screen spaces

create meanings feeding into a Parmenidian-designated flow between Man and medium, the

Portlandia cinematic city renders itself a social force that moves far beyond merely providing a

quirky or weird image of the Portland concrete city as an object of representation. Hence the

ensuing investigation heads past simply “seeing” from a detached Platonic perspective, but also

attempts to “hear” Portlandia by examining the sociocultural embeddedness of its works—or its

filmic landscapes and depicted characters (i.e. yipsters)—as social agents which do work through

value-loaded meaning creation (Aitken 2006).

Looking at Portlandia’s portrayal of whiteness, weirdness, and yipsterism, the theoretical

conception of representation applied in this investigation also draws on literature concerned with

“alternative representations of the city” that emerged in the 1970s with radical geography

(Soderstrom 2011, 13). In the midst of a broader “crisis of representation” era in the 1960s and

1970s in which the notion of knowledge as the “assemblage of accurate representation” is

critiqued, the seminal works of Harvey (1973) and Bunge (1971) insist on an idea that

geographical representations have an ideological character.

Teamed with this radical view of geographical representations in Portlandia as

constituent of an ideology (a system of ideas/ideals representative of real-life Portland’s

economy, culture, and society) is Soderstrom’s assertion that representations of spatial realities

are often privileged in that they are principally “represented” by those in position of power—the

largely upper-class elite. Here applying inquiries raised within Soderstrom’s work, a number of

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broad questions in pertinence to the politics of representation of Portlandia to be included in the

following analysis are put forth. First, who in Portlandia has the power to produce authorized

representations of Portland? Second, what and/or who are the objects and/or subjects being

represented? And in this, what and/or who is denied representation in Portlandia? Regarding the

former two inquiries, Portlandia’s white and elite producers predominantly represent objects (the

“what”) and subjects (the “who”) in the form of (1) gentrified spaces and their newly acquired

establishments (e.g. quirky coffee shops, artisan knot stores) and (2) the gentrifier group deemed

at stake in the case of NE Portland—the ever-idiosyncratic yipsters (Fowler forthcoming). In

terms of the latter question, it is argued that Portlandia both denies/ignores a gentrified populace

of nonwhites in NE Portland in normalizing Portland as a white space and enforcing the white

ideal of consumer capitalism though a glorification of privileged yipster consumption habits.

Portlandia’s representation serves a dual mechanism of ignoring the gentrified and glorifying the

gentrifiers, which, in effect, further contributes to marginalizing effects of the neighborhood-

changing process of gentrification in NE Portland. Just as early radical geographers Bunge

(1971) and Harvey (1973) pointed to urban realities not yet represented by mainstream cultural

geography as lenses used to understand representations of social and racial justice (i.e. Bunge’s

examination of the ideologies of spaces of death and power-driven machines in Fitzgerald, a

small, integrated neighborhood in late 1960s Detroit), Portlandia can herein be used to

understand the relationship between a nationally viewed TV series and social/racial justice issues

surrounding the gentrification of NE Portland spanned from the early 1990s.

Examining this TV series’ threefold representation of Portland’s gentrified spaces,

whiteness, and weirdness as facets intrinsic to yipsterism consumption habits, the research

theorizes the concept of representation by applying a Parmenidian stance to evaluate

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Portlandia’s sociocultural agency as a broker of value-loaded meaning. This conception of

representation rooted in Parmenidianism is additionally occupied by radical geographic focuses

concerned with Portlandia’s ideological character and its politics of representation.

Yipsterism (Yuppiedom/Hipsterism)

The counterpart phenomena of yuppies and hipsters—formulating a group herein referred

to as yipsters—are aptly and accurately characterize the identity of Portland residents at stake

the gentrification of NE Portland in an examination of their attitudes, consumer values, and

demographics. The former, yuppies or young upwardly mobile professionals, broadly refers to

predominantly white and wealthy college-degree earners with materialistic consumption patterns

directly allowed for by their generally high-earning jobs (Belk 1983; Burnett 1986; Guthman

2003; Hammond 1986). The latter yipster fundament, hipsters, serves in broad reference to a

contemporary subculture of what Kiran (2013, 1) deems to be “young, semi-affluent, semi-artsy,

semi-ironic, and often white, though it is by no means confined to white people” with

attitude/taste/value tendencies driven by a fetishization of seemingly anything deemed to be

“authentic” (Lorentzen 2007). Chiefly at blame for catalyzing gentrification processes in NE

Portland (from early 1990s to present), yipsters are disproportionately depicted in Portlandia by

comparison to the obverse gentrified populace of working class nonwhites.

Amidst a historically barren body of academic literature on yuppiedom, Burnett and Bush

(1986, 27) profiled “young upwardly professional” yuppies by demarcating their

attitudes/behaviors/personalities via six hypotheses. Constituting a comprehensive illustration of

what “makes a yuppie tick”, these hypotheses are defined as: more “concern for personal

health”; “use of convenience products and services”; “confidence, optimism and

unemotionality”; “travel and relocation”; “positive attitudes toward advertising”; and “concern

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for achieving success and acquiring material possessions” (Burnett 1986, 27-35). The latter of

these hypotheses—yuppies’ concern for material wealth—is prudent to the purposes of this

Portlandia investigation. Yuppiedom is the yipsterism facet most exemplified in the group’s

propensity to indulge in luxury items (i.e. organic food, coconscious clothing, paintings, cars,

etc.), which Guthman (2003) notes are beyond both the “economic and cultural” reach of price-

conscious non-yuppies like a gentrified populace of working class nonwhites in NE Portland. In

an examination of the growth in the organic food or “yuppie chow" industry within both

geographic and historical contexts, Guthman’s work also suggests that the success of the organic

food industry is largely wrapped up with gentrification—as yuppies drove growth of organic

food consumption by obtaining “a keener interest in the constituent ingredients of food” whilst

gentrifying neighborhoods in cities such as San Francisco (Guthman 2003, 54). Therefore

iterating a divide in consumption habits attributed to class between yuppies and non-yuppies

(likened to Portlandia’s gentrifier yipsters and the “gentrified nonyipsters), yuppies will take

advantage of their economically privileged situation by showing concern for acquiring material

possessions and expensive luxury items as status symbols with little regard for price (Burnett

1986; Gordinier 2012; Guthman 2003).

The yipster identity is characterized at a convergence between demographic attributes

(particularly whiteness and wealth) attributed to members of a young college-educated class

termed yuppies and attitude/taste/value tendencies associated with hipsters, who are broadly

described by Eriksson in his qualitative study of hipster consumption as a subculture group

linked with “bohemianism and postmodern lifestyle” (4, 2006). Hipsters are often associated

with indie/alternative music, “progressive” and/or “independent” political views, and both

alternative lifestyles and non-mainstream consumption sensibilities that are in contrast to what

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are perceived to be norms of conformity (Eriksson 2006; Herbert 2013; Kellogg 2013). Building

off of the last point, central to the hipster identity is how members of this subculture group

represent themselves via an almost calculated consumption of fashion, media, and food that

“fetishizes the authentic”(Eriksson 2006, 9; Lorentzen 2007; Perry 2013). Thus evocative of

yuppies’ heightened concern with acquiring material possessions to solidify their class status

(Burnett 1986), attempts to define the hipster subculture largely emphasize consumerism, as

“scarcity, uniqueness, authenticity, and individualism” are all seen to be important topics

considered by hipsters when consuming (Eriksson 2006, 4).

Gentrification

Defined by Papachristos as a process that alters the “character and composition” of a

neighborhood resulting in the “direct and indirect displacement of lower income households with

higher income households” (Papachristos 2011, 216), gentrification has occurred within NE

Portland since the early 1990s (Coffman 2007). Involving a wealth “in-migration” and poverty

“out-migration” over an extended time period, negative outcomes of this neighborhood-changing

mechanism of gentrification are raises in median household incomes, property values, and the

“presence of lifestyle amenities” found appealing to the tastes and demands of wealthier

residents (Papachristos 2011, 216-219). Portlandia provides numerous examples of these

lifestyle amenities in its depiction of such businesses as co-op grocery markets, specialty art/craft

supply stores, and coffeeshops within NE Portland that are all tailored to the effective

taste/need/desire consumption palette of the yipster gentrifier group at hand.

With the growth of a fervent Portland artisan economy fueled by the ‘amenity’ and

‘luxury item’-oriented consumption values associated with the deemed yipster gentrifier group,

comes the effective disappearance of local manufacturing industries employing a predominantly

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nonwhite working class (Drew 2012). As such, gentrified spaces in cities have become

increasingly governed by an urban culture that Lloyd (2002) calls neo-bohemia, wherein culture,

likened to a latte purchased from a coffeeshop, is available to be consumed just as if it were a

commodity. Scrutinizing this idea of cultural production and consumption in the context of

Northeast Portland’s gentrifying Alberta Street commercial district, Shaw (2005) finds that

residents participate in the new neo-bohemian culture in varying manners. Particularly pertinent

to arguments presented in this Portlandia research regarding the show’s normalizing

enforcement of white space/consumerism, he revealed via interview data that long-time Black

residents largely articulate the neo-bohemian culture as both racialized and productive of

patently white cultural space.

To frame the historic and geographic setting of the NE Portland neighborhoods felled

victim to this process of gentrification, the first figure below displays the Willamette River’s

division of the city into neighborhood quintants (N, NE, SE, SW, NW). As the city’s historic

African American community center since the 1930s and 40s, NE Portland experienced

gentrification beginning in the 1990s that has changed its character and composition by

essentially shifting its demographics from predominantly nonwhite/working class residents to

white/middle-upper class residents deemed as yipsters (Coffman 2007).

One inner NE neighborhood, Albina (Fig. 2), maintains a community home to “17% of

Portland’s total population but 39% of the total people of color in the city. Most people of color

in Albina are African-American” (Art 2008; Coffman 2007, 7). Highlighting that Albina has

faced increasing development and investment pressures in the midst of gentrification spanned to

the early 1990s, the average home value in the area surrounding MLK Avenue (a prominent

central Albina street) rose “approximately 161% between 1993 and 2003, compared to a Portland

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citywide increase of 105%” (Coffman 2007, 27). Emphasizing a displacement of minority

populations coinciding with gentrification, the African-American population in the thirteen

census tracts surrounding MLK Avenue dropped from 45% to 36% of the total population

between 1990 and 2000 (PDC 2002). Rendering this evidence of minority populations’

displacement in the wake of gentrification in NE Portland neighborhoods such as Albina to be a

foundation, a primary argument presented within this investigation iterates that the harrowing

consequences of gentrification for the area’s predominantly nonwhite working class (i.e. said

data-supported displacement) are not only evident but also normalized via the content, depicted

characters, visual setting, and commentary of a Portlandia TV series.

Figure 1: Portland neighborhoods (Kelly, 2004)

Figure 2: Albina neighborhood in inner NE Portland

(Art, 2008)  

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ANALYSIS

To the attention of a massive national audience (amid its availability in nearly 70 million

homes on every major cable, satellite and TelCo provider), the collective works of Portlandia

take on the role of a value-loaded social force in the creation of meanings via a publicized

promotion, normalization, and glorification of consumption habits associated with yipsterism

(Nielson 2013). As support for this assertion suggesting Portlandia filmic landscapes as work (a

product of “human labor that encapsulates the dreams, desires, the locations of the people and

social systems that make it”) and doing work (its actions as a “social agent in the further

development of a place”) in its conveyance of an aspirational yipster lifestyle associated with

consumer capitalism, it is important to confirm and further characterize the white, “weird”,

consumption-led identity of this unique yuppie-hipster subgroup (Aitken 2006, 330). To achieve

this task, the ideologically charged representations in this Portlandia filmic text are textually

analyzed from a perspective rooted in both Parmenidianism and ideas conveyed in early radical

geography works (ideological character of representations, utility of alternative geographic

lenses per examination of social/racial justice issues, etc.).

The textual analysis applied within this investigation begins by confirming and

subsequently examining the degree to which the filmic spaces of the Portlandia ‘cinematic city’

represent the ‘concrete city’ of NE Portland. Gauging Portlandia as a work in its portrayal of

Portland’s people/places/spaces, the sample of skit locations presented below in Figure 3 outlines

a section of the geographic distribution of the TV series’ cinematic landscapes located

specifically within Portland’s NE neighborhood quintant (Aitken 2006, 330). The aim of this

graphic is to frame the geographic realism of Portlandia. Given the vast range of NE Portland

spaces depicted in this program over its three season stretch, a purposive sampling method

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guided the selection of in-show locations set in this area because this method is suited

particularly well for interpretive qualitative research (eg. textual analysis) and aptly befits

finding a “closely defined group for whom the research question(s) will be significant”(Smith

2007, 56). Identified from addresses indicated in title sequences at the beginning of each sketch

(see Figure 3 screenshots), this sample was thus chosen because of how its included locales’ on-

screen representations are seen to be collectively focused towards emphasizing the weirdness,

whiteness, and yipsterism of Portland’s perceived image.

Appealing to a customer base of high-income urban elites like yipsters, amenity

establishments (i.e. artisan-oriented boutiques, bars, restaurants, coffeehouses, yuppie chow

eateries and natural food stores) began to rapidly open up for business in Northeast Portland in

the early 1990s and have continued this artisan economy-bolstering momentum into the present

day (Coffman 2007; Shaw 2005). Characterized in their ability to afford increased commercial

rent in gentrifying neighborhoods and their costly range of offered products/services, these

businesses contribute to the detrimental displacing effects of gentrification by further

increasing the appeal of gentrified areas to wealthy in-migrants (i.e. yipsters) and decreasing

accessibility of these areas to the working class (Lesley 2003). With sites ranging from the Mint

820 Pan American Bistro and Oblique Coffee Roasters, to the Firehouse Restaurant, New

Seasons Market, and the fictional “Artisan Knots Store” based in reference to Portland’s real-life

Paxton Gate establishment (a self-described “eccentric gardening store”), an initial examination

of the cinematic spaces sample displayed in Figure 3 first articulates that the series’ depictions of

NE Portland revolve rather one-sidedly around illustrating these very amenity businesses

discussed prior.

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NE  Portland  quintant  map  

 Screenshots  of  depicted  locales    

 in  

Figure  3.  

  17  

In outlining the exact years that these establishments opened within NE Portland, the

chart shown below (Table 1) further bolsters an assertion conveying that Portlandia singularly

represents amenity businesses in its portrayal of the ‘concrete city’. Data within the chart’s

‘Opening Year’ column clearly indicates that all of these depicted businesses emerged amidst the

span of gentrification (1990-present) that occurred in the NE Portland quintant area.

Portlandia’s representation of the varied placemarks (illustrated in Table 1 and Figure 3)

act to publicize and glorify the weirdness, whiteness, and yipsterism of this gentrifying NE

Portland area in its seeming devotion to primarily depicting establishments that contribute to the

Placemark  on  map  

 

Northeast  Portland  ‘Amenity’  Business  

Opening  year  

2   Mint  820  Pan  American  Bistro   2003    3  

Artisan  Knots  Store  (Filmed  in  and  inspired  by  

Paxton  Gate  gardening  store)  

 2006  

5   Women  &  Women  First  Feminist  Bookstore  

1993  

6   Oblique  Coffee  Roasters   2007  7   Firehouse  Restaurant   2008  8   North  Portland  Wellness  Center   2007  

 9  

‘Put  a  Bird  on  it!’  Store  (Filmed  in  and  inspired  by  Land  gallery  for  independent  artists)  

 2009  

10   New  Seasons  Market   1999  

Table 1. Correlating with the placemarks connoting NE Portland amenity businesses depicted in Figure 3, the table above illustrates the years that these deemed amenity establishments opened up within NE Portland. The “Opening Year” third column shows that these businesses emerged in the NE Portland quintant area’s span of gentrification (1990-present)  

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city’s artisan economy. As opposed to offering cinematic representation to such thriving and

popular businesses within NE Portland’s expansive Albina district that have historic claim to the

Northeast quintant as Clyde’s Bar (a famed Portland-area jazz venue) or Billy Webb’s Lodge

(which served the African American community as a United Service Organization club and

temporary refuge for those fleeing North Portland’s infamous 1940 Vanport flood), Portlandia

presents what can be interpreted as a limited view of NE Portland that focuses primarily on the

area’s yipster-centric amenity businesses or “consumption amenities” that have proliferated as an

outcome and displacement mechanism of gentrification in divested areas (Papachristos 2011,

218).

Given Portlandia’s United States-wide availability, a narrow portrayal of NE Portland’s

locales can be seen to normalize the existence and cultural role of amenity businesses in the

popular national imagination as an effective neo-bohemian playfield of consumer capitalism—

wherein consumption of ‘quirky’ products/services (i.e. bird-embellished items in second

episode of season two) and associated ‘quirky’ antics (i.e. characters Lisa and Bryce yelling “put

a bird on it!” and the act of “sprucing things up” by embellishing them with images of birds that

is observed in the same episode) take place in an unrelenting manner. In this context of

Portlandia’s singular representation of NE Portland amenity businesses, the applied textual

analysis iterates that the marginalizing effects of gentrification are furthered in the series’ (1)

near complete denial of on-screen representation for the gentrified populace of nonwhites and (2)

parallel emphasis on the relationships, consumption habits, desires, anxieties, and activities of

white yipster gentrifiers. This leaves Portlandia to be not only a purveyor, but also a possible

glorifier of a specific, consumption-led Keep Portland Weird quirkiness that is, amid the

yipsters’ calculated consumption of luxury items like organic food from New Seasons Market

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(season one, episode 3) or artisan ropes from the knot store (season two, episode eight), all but

stringent upon the economy of amenity businesses.

CONCLUSION

In the observed absence of NE Portland’s historically nonwhite residents within episodes

of Portlandia, it is asserted that the oft-perceived hilarity in this show’s content is denigrated

when viewed through a Parmenidian/Radical Geographic lens as an ideologically charged social

agent. The TV series maintains sociocultural ramifications in the sense that it is seen to augment

gentrification’s marginalizing influence by actively normalizing a white ideal of consumer

capitalism (via a certain in-show glorification of amenity businesses like Lisa and Bryce’s

freelance bird art-decorating service) lacing its content, commentary, and visual siting decisions.

The textual analysis employed within this investigation emphasizes that Portlandia denies on-

screen representation to people of color and racial diversity within its three seasons. As a

collective cinematic work that does work, this cinematic city vision of the concrete city can be

viewed as limited in its noticeable focus upon predominantly portraying the consumption habits

and antics of the gentrifying, weird, white, and altogether quirky yipsters of NE Portland.

1 For purposes of this investigation, the term ‘geographic realism’ refers to a consideration of what real-life Portland locations are presented on-screen. Identifying these existent locations within Portlandia content confirms, to a degree, the accuracy of the series’ representation of Portland.  

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Sources

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