University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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

Weber, Lauren

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

Description

Title
Maintaining Portland’s progressive dystopia: Crisis, carcerality, and the real estate state
Author(s)
Weber, Lauren
Issue Date
2023-07-20
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Cidell, Julie
Committee Member(s)
  • Butcher, Sian
  • Wilson, David
Department of Study
Geography & GIS
Discipline
Geography
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • Portland
  • carcerality
  • abolition
  • housing
  • real estate
  • crisis
Abstract
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.
Graduation Semester
2023-08
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2023 Lauren Weber

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