"Change Is All There Is": Exploring Journalistic Coverage of Gentrification in the St. Johns Neighborhood of Portland, OR

Gentrification, as an increasingly significant characteristic of contemporary urban spaces, has been the subject of a vast body of literature. This has prompted further research into how gentrification is described and the implications of language used in both academic research and popular media accounts. This study explores discourse used in journalistic coverage of gentrification in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Guided by past work in discourse analysis and critical urban geography, this study attempts to understand how academic discourse on gentrification is both reflected in and divergent from neighborhood-level discourse. This study used data from the St. Johns Review in a qualitative discourse analysis, taking a case-study approach to understand the place-specific dimensions of processes of disinvestment and gentrification and how they are described in local journalistic coverage. Neighborhood discourse both exemplified and diverged from conceptual articulations of gentrification in this case. Writing in the St. Johns Review revealed varying degrees of engagement with academic theories, as writing on the neighborhood's stigma and sense of identity reflected academic concepts of territorial stigmatization and past research on place attachment, resisted false choice urbanism while centering practical rather than narrative constraints, expressed a lack of agency in development that did not align with previous academic research or explanations, and revealed an ongoing debate about physical displacement that is not well represented in academic literature.