Yes, sorry, I did misunderstand. This driving up of land values is insane. I can tell you what it did to SF. Back when I was growing up in the city, it was about 16 percent black. These blacks originally migrated into the city during WWII when workers were needed for the shipyards. Japanese-Americans were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps elsewhere, leaving empty housing in SF that was then utilized by incoming blacks from the south. As the city became wealthier, blacks moved across the SF Bay to cheaper housing, and now blacks account for less than 6 percent of the population. Oakland since WWII has historically had a lot of blacks, mostly on the flatlands (”ancestral lands” since WWII). They are now being driven out by incoming Asians; what happened in SF is now happening to Oakland. Wealthy whites have always been in Oakland, on the hills. My daughter lived there for a while until a few years ago, practically all white - Oakland is not as black as people think. It’s the poorer flatlands that are being gentrified (much of it by Asians).
I can’t make sense out of why land prices are sky high, except it parallels the loss of the industrial base in favor of hi-tech work. My dad bought his house in SF a few years after WWII for $6g, fully furnished. My mom sold it for $23g in the early 1970s to a couple yuppies who remodeled it. Now it’s worth between $1.5m to $2m. Kids can’t afford what their parents had. Crazy. What happened here will happen to Portland.
Is happening. Frankly, since I was party to public meetings of Portland shilling their policies to Eugene politicians, I wouldn't be surprised if Portland learned its ways from its sister cities both down south and up north. Without Federal dollars pouring into the city for its mass transit pork projects and all the welfare dollars, the city would be a lot more like Detroit. Ironically the story of blacks settling SF for shipyard work in WWII mirrors that of Portland...the race breakdown is the same roughly, too. As far a land/property prices, if you do a careful analysis of what's happened to residential real estate over the past 40 years or so, it looks a lot like a pyramid scheme. I realized that 20 years ago and it's only worse now, particularly due to political pressures to queer the market for 'social equality'...(aside from the bailouts given rather than letting things 'equalize' on their own).