Oregon

but i'm not going to do that. As for backing it up, try this article on the Vanport flood of 1948:
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/learning_center/dspresource.cfm?resource_ID=000BC26B-EE5A-1E47-AE5A80B05272FE9F

"Originally meant to be temporary, Vanport was shipbuilding-magnate Henry Kaiser’s answer to a lack of local housing in the early days of World War II, when he was importing men and women from across the United States to work in his Portland-area shipyards. At the height of the war in 1944, close to 40,000 people lived in Vanport, including 6,000 African Americans, three times as many as had lived in all of Portland two years before."

Those were African Americans who couldn't buy housing in much of Portland, and according to Oregon's 1st constitution couldn't even have moved into the state. Racist neighborhood covenants like the kind still lingering on my deed when i bought the property in 1994 had the force of law until 1948, and created a pattern of segregation that took decades to begin to undo. That's one cultural heritage i don't find worth preserving.

i could go on about it, but i'd rather not. instead i'll just propose to you that not everything new is negative, not every change and development represents destruction, and some of the people i knew in Laurelhurst who added the most to my experience of the community were probably among those you'd consider "outsiders". i think Mr. James McMurtry sums it up quite nicely:

I'm not from here
But people tell me
It's not like it used to be
They say I should have been here
Back about ten years
Before it got ruined by folks like me