WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- Portland, Ore., and Seattle, the nation's two whitest major cities, are both rapidly becoming whiter in their downtown areas, The Washington Post reported.
An mostly white influx of young, well-educated newcomers is buying property and remaking Seattle's Central District. What had been the largest black-majority community in the Pacific Northwest has become majority white.
As white gentrification accelerates in Portland and Seattle -- where the percentage of black residents was already the lowest among the nation's large cities -- it is erasing the only historically black neighborhoods these cities have ever had.
Census figures suggest that blacks in Seattle and Portland have not been displaced into homelessness and are not economically worse off in the suburbs than they were downtown. In many cases, housing in the suburbs is newer, schools are better and crime is lower, the Post said.
As black residents leave the city for the suburbs -- either because they have sold their homes or been forced out by higher rents -- their community is being splintered by geographic dispersal and racial integration.
