In Parts of U.S. Northwest, a Changing Face

"It's destroying us, socially and politically," said Ford, the neighborhood activist from Portland. "It is just a total inconvenience and disrespect to black folks."

Rice does not view the changes as nearly so dire, especially for people who have been able to sell their homes at a substantial profit and set aside money for retirement.

Census figures suggest that blacks in Seattle and Portland have not been displaced into homelessness and that they are not economically worse off in the suburbs than they were downtown. In many cases, housing in the suburbs is newer, schools are better and crime is lower.

But Rice said that newly suburbanized African Americans in Seattle and Portland are being isolated from one another and "will have to find new places to embrace our black heritage."

With attendance falling, some black churches in Seattle and Portland have moved or are opening second sanctuaries in the suburbs.

"I have begged our people not to sell their properties but to no avail," said the Rev. Reggie Witherspoon, pastor of Mount Calvary Christian Center, a church in the Central District that is trying to open a second location in Seattle's southern suburbs, where many parishioners have moved. "A good majority of them have decided they cannot afford to drive into the city, so they have joined suburban white churches."

Neither blacks nor whites, Rice said, appear to have found a way to stop or slow the disappearance of core black neighborhoods. "They are concerned, but they don't have an option or a plan," he said.

The pressures of growth, worsening traffic congestion and the rising price of gasoline seem certain to make the hunt for close-in, upscale housing even more obsessive in the next two decades.

"The location of the Central District is so superior to the suburbs -- it has great views, it's close to downtown and to the University of Washington -- that there's a tremendous incentive to buy, especially for people with no kids or the money to send them to private schools," said Richard Morrill, a demographer and professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

Over the next two decades, Seattle is predicting the creation of 50,000 jobs in the central city, which amounts to nearly a 25 percent increase in a job base that tends to be high-wage and highly skilled. Portland, too, is growing, largely by attracting young, well-educated newcomers from California and the East Coast.

In both Seattle and Portland, which take considerable pride in being green, liberal and tolerant, the fading away of black inner-city communities has occasioned considerable hand-wringing among the overwhelmingly white population. Portland is 75 percent white, and Seattle 68 percent white.

"Many of the white liberals who condemned white flight are just as angry at the white folks who are moving back into the cities," Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle, wrote last month in his blog about movement from Seattle in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.