Priced Out Reaches Fundraising Goal

We did it! 

Priced Out hit its goal of raising $10,000 just a few hours before our Kickstarter campaign closed Thursday morning. 

Phew! It came right down to the wire. 

Over 100 people, with pledges ranging from $5 to $2,000, came together and made a commitment to seeing our project become a reality. 

To all of those who made a contribution, Thank You! 

I think I speak for producer Spencer Wolf as well, when I say it’s an honor to have so many people support this effort. It shows how many care about this community and how many trust that Spencer and I to do a good job of reporting on the important topic of gentrification and affordable housing. 

So what’s next? Well, Spencer and I are now accountable to 119 “Big Shot Hollywood Producers” so we better get to work. 

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sending out official Thank You postcards. Other Kickstarter rewards like the production T-shirt, Gentrification Spotter’s Manual and other items will be delivered as they become available towards the end of the year.

Our next goal is to have a test screening of the rough cut of the film by late fall. The screening will include our 17 new Associate and Executive Producers and a select group of folks from the community. We’ll take the feedback we get from that screening into the editing room for the final cut of the film. 

Spencer and I hope to release the documentary by the end of the year or by January of next year. I’ll continue to post updates and new reporting on the site blog at PricedOutMovie.com, on Kickstarter and on Facebook. 

Please follow along with this exciting project made for and paid for by the community. 

Cornelius Swart
Producer

Last Day of Priced Out Kickstarter Campaign

It’s the final day of our Kickstarter campaign, so please spread the word and if you haven’t already contributed, please do it now.

On Wednesday our campaign received its 100th pledge. That’s an impressive show of community support.

But there’s still a funding gap left to fill. It’s going to go right down to the wire, so please consider making a contribution to this important project right away.

Priced Out Kickstarter Campaign: HERE

Priced Out is a documentary about the complexities and contradictions of gentrification as one woman grapples with life after "the Ghetto."

Gentrification, once a phenomenon that only occurred in big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco is now cropping up in cities from San Antonio to St. Louis to Portland, Maine.

Why is this happening? What does it mean for Portland, Ore. and what does it mean for those people who have never experienced such dramatic change in their community?

Learn More About the Project: HERE

3 Days Left- New Rewards: Gentrification Spotter’s Manual, Tattoo

There’s only three days left in the Priced Out, Kickstarter campaign and the producers have added some new rewards to encourage people to help this important project.

Over the weekend, Priced Out was selected as a staff pick on Kickstarter. We set out to get selected by the staff and we did it. But the campaign still has a ways to go.  These last three days will be crucial so the producers have added some new rewards to the Kickstarter mix. 

$20 Pledge

Gentrification Spotter's Manual [PDF of eBook Cover]

How do you know gentrification is coming to your avant-garde enclave or sleepy working class neighborhood? What's the difference between a historic preservationist, a speculator, a gentrifier and an incumbent?

This eBook download written by producer Cornelius Swart is a handy, insightful and at times irreverent guide to the terms, characters and memes that make up the gentrification "movement."

$125 Pledge

Free Tattoo

Yes, strange, but a free tattoo has been donated to anyone who gives a pledge of $125, care of artist Peter Bagdanov from The Truth salon in Pacifica, Calif. Get the tattoo drawn and completed in Oct. at the Portland Tattoo Expo

These rewards join our existing ones, such as

$60 Pledge

“They Gentrified My Neighborhood And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt” T-shirt.

$120 Pledge

One of our more popular rewards is a ticket to a test screening and filmmaker discussion. This event promises to be one of the most pivotal in the project’s timeline, as the audience will have opportunity to give feed back on the film BEFORE it’s finalized.

Please share and contribute to our campaign today

Kickstarter Campaign: HERE

More about Priced Out: HERE

Documentary gets working title: PRICED OUT: 15 Years of Gentrification in North/Northeast Portland

The Portland gentrification documentary project that began filming in March of 2015 now has a working title – Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in North/Northeast Portland. Nearly 15 years have passed since the release of Northeast Passage: The Inner City and the American Dream, a documentary focused on gentrification and affordable housing in the then mostly black neighborhoods of Portland, Ore. Change has been stark.

WATCH: NorthEast Passage on Amazon Streaming

Cornelius Swart, an established reporter and Spencer Wolf are partnering once again on the production. The original film centers around Nikki Williams, a single black mother who welcomed gentrification at the time as a means to rid her street of flagrant crime. Now, most of the black and low-income community has been out-priced from Northeast Portland. Williams herself is leaving.

Priced Out will combine some of the original project’s 125 hours of footage with new material, retracing the journey of Williams and the neighborhood, creating a time lapse illustrating Northeast Portland’s rapid and extensive development. They intend to make the finished project free for distribution and released in fall of 2015. The filmmakers are launching a Kickstarter campaign for the film with a goal of $10,000. Early contributions are essential, the more people who contribute on Day One, even in very small amounts, the greater the publicity from Kickstarter.

“Priced Out” Wants to Raise 30 Percent of Kickstarter Funds on Wednesday

In “Priced Out,” Nikki Williams, the focus of original film, leaves Portland in search of a new black community.

We’re all set to launch our Kickstarter campaign this Wednesday, July 22, and we have to raise 30 percent of our goal on the very first day.

Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in North/Northeast Portland is the sequel to our 2002 film NorthEast Passage: The Inner City and the American Dream.

Read the review of the original film in the Willamette Week: HERE

I started filming in March of this year, doing everything out of pocket and on a shoestring budget.  Co-producer Spencer Wolf and I hope to raise $10,000 with Kickstarter. That money would go to pay off equipment loans and give us the ability to hire some folks to help out. Wolf and I intend to volunteer our time as much as possible.

The trick will be raising at least $3,350 on the very first day. Kickstarter likes to see projects raise a third of their money on day one. If they do, it’s more likely that Kickstarter will promote the project on its own website and network.

Either way, we’ve got 30 days to raise all the funds. If we fall short, all the money goes back to the funders. It’s all or nothing with Kickstarter. Wolf and I are keeping our fingers crossed.

Read more about the project: HERE

If you haven’t already, please sign up for our email updates. We’ll send you a note when we launch. If you get it, please pass it along.

Now the countdown begins.

Looking for early commitments to Kickstarter campaign

Below is the letter I just emailed out to a few hundred folks I know. Even though I’ve been filming and reporting for the documentary for weeks, I have yet to launch the fundraising campaign for the project.

When I do, I hope the Kickstarter funds will be enough to repay equipment and labor expenses.

As I’ve said, the project is aimed at a local audience and I want to eventually make it available for free. So raising a Kickstarter fund is the best way to go about it. If it’s successful, I won’t have to worry so much about making money off of a theatrical release of the film or through a distribution deal, as we did with the first film.

Hope you can make a contributions. Let me know if I can put you down for a few bucks. Email me at cornelius.rex@gmail.com

Here’s the letter:

Hi there,

If you are receiving this email, it’s because you are interested in the subject of gentrification in North/Northeast Portland or know Cornelius Swart (that’s me.)

I’m currently producing a sequel to my 2002 documentary on gentrification and affordable housing.

I’m about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to help defray the costs of the production and I was hoping you would be willing to make an early commitment to donate to the production.

To make a successful Kickstarter campaign will be key. I’m looking to raise $10,000 to pay for equipment and labor. Kickstarter, an Internet service, allows you to crowdsource a project through hundreds of very small contributions.

A Kickstarter campaign usually needs to raise 30 percent of its total funding on the very first day. I’m asking a handful of people if they can commit to making a small contribution on the day we launch (in about 2 weeks).

If you can make a pledge from $5 to $50, send me a note at cornelius.rex@gmail.com and I can plan out my campaign. Early contributors will be eligible for donation rewards ranging from tickets to screenings of the work in progress to an ironic T-shirt (of course).

The project

Northeast Passage: The Inner City and the American Dream was a critically acclaimed and prescient documentary that showed what life was like in the black neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland in the late 1990s as gentrification was making early inroads into the neighborhood.

Now, almost 15 years after the film was shot, Governing Magazine has ranked Portland as the “Most Gentrified City in America.” The black communities of North/Northeast Portland have gone from being a majority black to majority white. Rents are climbing, homes are being replaced with apartment blocks, and the word “gentrification” is on everyone’s lips.

The new film, working title Northeast Passage 2, will reconnect with the residents and activists featured in the first film to see what’s happened to the neighborhood and find out what will happen next as the community continues to struggle with its identity and its place in the American Dream.

Please consider giving to this important project [contributions are not tax deductible]. You can sign up for more updates and news here. More about the project here.

Oregon Affordable Housing Bill Might Not Help Portland’s Gentrifying Neighborhoods

Construction this Spring along North Williams Avenue at Mason, where three new multifamily building are in various phases of development.

An affordable housing bill in the Oregon legislature might not have much immediate impact in Portland’s gentrifying neighborhoods.

Even if it passed tomorrow, a new bill allowing the city to create affordable housing units in new multi-family developments would have little impact in fast-gentrifying communities because it wouldn’t impact renters in the market.

LINK: Monday April 27- Inclusionary Zoning Workshop in SE Portland

House Bill 2564 would allow cities in Oregon to create “inclusionary zoning” laws. Cities could get affordable housing built in new developments by waiving certain fees, permits and building restrictions in exchange for the inclusion of below-market units. While advocates see the bill as a major potential victory for affordable housing, HB 2564 would only impact condo developments, or housing units for sale.

Right now, affordable housing can only be created when an entity, like a government agency or nonprofit, can afford to financially subsidize the unit with cash or tax credits.

On Thursday Peter Wong reported that HB 2564 moved from the House to the Senate. The Oregon legislature banned local municipalities from enacting inclusionary zoning laws in 1999. This was during the filming of our original documentary Northeast Passage. At the time, affordable housing advocates saw the ban as a preemptive move by the homebuilder’s lobby, and pushed for Portland to enact an inclusionary zoning law of its own.

WATCH: Original Documentary Available on Amazon Streaming

Oregon and Texas are the only two states with such bans.

Inclusionary zoning is currently used in over 100 cities across the country, including Boston, SF, Denver and San Diego, according to the Chicago-based public policy think tank Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. That said, even if advocates can overturn the 1999 ban, which seems possible given the overwhelming strength of liberals in the statehouse, HB 2564 might not bring immediate relief to renters.

For example, on the rapidly gentrifying North Williams Avenue, once the heart of the state’s African American community, almost all of the new high-end housing is rental.

LINK: Sequel to 2002 Gentrification Documentary

New rentals on Williams Avenue can fetch as much as $2,300 a month for a two bedroom. All the while, the black community has shrunk to less than half of its size as former residents of the North and Northeast Portland get priced out of the area.

Still, the bill represents big progress in breaking an affordable housing policy log jam that has existed in Oregon for a decade and a half.

“HB2564 is critical legislation in our anti-gentrification work because it creates a path to affordable homeownership for first time buyers who currently can’t break into this market,”said Jessica Larson, director of the Welcome Home Coalition.“There are over 1,000 mortgage-approved families who have completed homeownership programs and are waiting to buy their first home but can’t find any homes left in their neighborhoods that they can afford.” 

Larson said that while the bill doesn’t impact renter, “indirectly, I believe HB2546 will have a positive impact on affordable rentals by lightening up pressure on the market.”

Larson said there was a long way to go and her own organization is launching a campaign to create stable funding for affordable housing across the region.

This Monday there will be an inclusionary zoning workshop at the offices of the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Coalition at 7 p.m.

The event drew an overwhelming response when it was announced on the coalition’s Facebook page. Over 100 people are expected to attend.

“I think people are feeling the pinch of not being able to find places to live,” said Katy Asher with Southeast Uplift. “We’re excited even if it’s (HB 2564) not what everyone wants.” The Welcome Home Coalition will be launching their campaign with a kickoff event on April 29th at El Centro Milagro.