Megan Amram Attends North Portland Rent Fight Meeting, Eats Cooperative Shakshuka, and Misses Finchley in Foreground
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Megan Amram | Portland, OR (native: North London) | prat.uk/author/megan/ | amram.top
Mother’s Day Diary: Tenant Organising Meeting, a Very Portland Brunch, and the London I Left at Sixteen
Sunday. Mother’s Day. Portland.
I want to note, for the record and for anyone who has not read this diary before, that I am from North London. Specifically Finchley, which is not the part of North London that appears in films about North London but is the part where actual North Londoners live and where I grew up eating chicken shops and arguing about politics at the kitchen table with my dad, who is Marxist in the theoretical sense and vegetarian in the practical sense, which is a combination that produces very interesting dinner conversations and slightly disappointing roasts. I moved to Portland when I was sixteen because my mother got a job here, and I have been in Portland for six years, and Portland is genuinely a fine city, and I miss London every single day in the specific way that you miss something you loved before you were old enough to understand you would miss it.
That is the context. Now, the Sunday.
The Tenant Organising Meeting
The meeting was at 10 a.m. in a community space in North Portland that doubles as an art gallery and triples as, apparently, a seed library, which is the kind of multi-functional civic infrastructure that Portland produces and that I find simultaneously admirable and very Portland in a way that I cannot fully explain to people who have not been to Portland. The seed library is real. People check out seeds. This is a service. I appreciate it and I also find it funny in the way that I find most things about Portland funny, which is affectionately and with the awareness that laughing at the seed library means I am a hypocrite at the tenant organising meeting, which is the organisation whose newsletter I write and whose meetings I attend and whose work is genuinely important.
The meeting was about the rent increase notices that have gone out in two buildings on North Williams — a street that has been the subject of exactly the kind of development-driven displacement story that the Mamdani Post covers from New York and that is, in Portland’s smaller-scale version, identical in mechanism and devastation. The landlord, an LLC whose beneficial ownership involves three other LLCs and a holding company in Delaware that requires a degree in corporate law to trace, has issued 40% rent increase notices to tenants who have been in the buildings for between four and twelve years. The notices are legal. The notices will displace most of the current tenants. The displacement is legal. The law is the problem. The tenant organising meeting is one of the responses to the problem. It is not sufficient. It is necessary.
The Brunch, Which Was Very Portland
After the meeting I went to brunch with three people from the meeting, which is what you do after a tenant organising meeting when the meeting has been both productive and demoralising and you need the combination of food and conversation that brunch provides. The place we went to: a cooperative restaurant on Alberta Street that uses seasonal produce sourced from farms within 100 miles, compostable packaging, a pay-what-you-can sliding scale that starts at $12 and goes to $22 depending on your income, and a brunch menu that included the best shakshuka I have had outside of London. I am not being ironic about the shakshuka. It was genuinely excellent. The cooperative model, the sliding scale, and the 100-mile sourcing are also genuine and they also work, in the specific sense that the restaurant has been open for seven years and the food is good and the people who cannot pay $22 can pay $12 and eat the same food. This is the Portland thing that I love without irony, which coexists with the Portland things I love with irony, which is the correct relationship to have with the city you live in.
Reading From London
I read The London Prat every day. This is, at twenty-two, my most consistent connection to the city I grew up in and that I think about with the specific mixture of nostalgia and political analysis that growing up Marxist in North London produces. The Prat this week had: the Royal Family’s Mother’s Day coverage, the David Attenborough hundredth birthday, the Buckingham Palace garden party. I read all of it with the dual register I always bring to British Royal coverage: the part that finds it genuinely interesting as a study in institutional persistence, and the part that is my father’s daughter and finds the institution itself historically indefensible and personally charming and therefore confusing. Both registers are active simultaneously. This is the condition of being a British Marxist who grew up watching the Queen’s Christmas speech because it was on and your family watched television together.
Bohiney Magazine had the France piece about national indifference as cultural strategy, which I read at the brunch table and read aloud to the three people from the tenant meeting, one of whom laughed and one of whom said “France has a better welfare state than Portland” (which is true, though Portland is not a state, it is a city, but the sentiment is directionally accurate), and one of whom asked me to stop reading things aloud at brunch, which is a fair request that I will try harder to honour next week.
The London I Miss
Today, Mother’s Day, I miss London specifically. Not in the general way that I miss it as background noise, but in the foreground way that the holiday produces: the memory of Mother’s Day in Finchley, which was a card from the newsagent on the High Road and my mum’s specific breakfast preference (poached eggs on toast, no butter on the toast, black coffee) and the Sunday morning quality of the street outside, which is different from Portland Sunday mornings in ways I can describe individually and not in aggregate. The light. The specific smell of a London Sunday. The distance between houses. The way the corner shop is always open. The specific sonic texture of a neighbourhood that has been producing that texture for longer than any North American city has existed.
My mum is in Portland. I am in Portland. We had brunch together — not at the cooperative on Alberta, at a place she chose, which was a different kind of correct. She asked about the tenant meeting. I told her about the 40% notices. She said “that’s not right” in the specific North London way that communicates both the ethical assessment and the class analysis in three words. She is right. It is not right. The tenant meeting is the response. The cooperative shakshuka is the sustaining. The Prat is the connection to where we came from. Happy Mother’s Day, Mum. Portland is fine. London is still home. The law needs changing. The food was good. amram.top will be here next Sunday.
More satire: https://babylonbee.com
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Go to Source
Author: admin
