Maintaining Portland’s progressive dystopia: Crisis, carcerality, and the real estate state

In the fall of 2020, a coalition formed between a local real estate developer, a nonprofit, and a senator soon to run for state governor, with the goal of turning a never-used county jail in Portland, Oregon into a homeless shelter. Reading with abolitionist anthropologist Savannah Shange’s concept of “progressive dystopia,” this thesis examines the case study of Wapato Jail’s original construction and subsequent redevelopment into the Bybee Lakes Hope Center as an in-depth look at how Portland’s localized real estate state utilizes the logics of carceral progressivism to maintain the city as a dystopia that works for them. Utilizing data from archival materials, news media, and twenty interviews, I argue that the real estate state, composed of local developers with long-standing stakes in the city, are forming alliances and coalitions in order to fundamentally shift the public provision of services away from a Housing First approach. These elite actors utilize what I call the “drive to maintain” as a way to dehistoricize place and property in order to renew practices of dispossession in the city. Cutting across literatures of abolitionist geographies, legal geography, and critical housing studies, I present an engagement with the maintenance of carcerality within Portland’s real estate state as intertwined with the unfulfilled promise of housing as a home, rather than as a financialized commodity.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Weber, Lauren

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cidell, Julie
• Butcher, Sian
• Wilson, David

• Portland
• Carcerality
• Abolition
• Housing
• Real Estate
• Crisis

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Lauren Weber

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121515

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121515