>Recently spent a couple of days in Seattle and Portland and was
>surprised at how gentrified the downtown areas have become
Sam, I visited Vancouver - that's where you are, right? - for the first time last fall. I was staying at 56 E. 5th Ave, which has been a pretty funky working class/light industrial neighborhood, but my host told me it was being filled with folks like him - artists, writers, bohemians, the avant garde of gentrification. And downtown was truly a gentrifier's paradise, with warehouses being turned into condos, Planet Hollywoodish theme joints everywhere, movie sets everywhere, etc. (I saw one warehouse-to-condo conversion that had a sign in the window advertising the contractor as "rebuilding downtown Denver" - an actual transformation was doing double duty representing one in a TV movie!) Of course, downtown east side still looks like the poorest neighborhood in Canada I was told it was, but otherwise the city seems to be going this way too. Is my impression correct? Is there anyplace in North America this isn't happening? Seems like in addition to the old model of suburbanization we've got a transformation of older city cores going on at the same time - a mix of concentration and dispersal that it's hard to describe in a single phrase.
Doug