Re: “Welcome to Portland – No Vacancy” (Nov. 15-20):

We read with great interest your series this week about Portland’s gentrification and the impact on those being squeezed out. It is, of course, exciting to be among the fortunate who bought here before the real estate frenzy erupted.

We own a house in that “gritty” (your reporter’s word) neighborhood of Parkside referred to in the articles, an area your paper rarely misses the opportunity to disparage.

This is my appeal: Please stop offending the residents of Parkside. Please don’t allude to our being the last bastion of hope if you wish to remain on the peninsula, as is mentioned in this series (“Influx of affluence a two-edged sword, but end result is a neighborhood transformed” ).

It’s as if you wrote: “They couldn’t find an apartment anywhere, but finally, dejectedly, they were reduced to renting in Parkside.”

We are a slice of America. We are what all of us liberals say we want for our nation: a melting pot of immigrants (some later to this land than others). Poor, rich, in the middle. Black, brown, red, white, yellow. Happy, sad. Tired, active.

Hurt, helping; hardworking, jobless; law-abiding, criminal; religious, atheist; married, single; heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender; Democratic, Republican.

Our own Portland historian-orator and former district legislator Herb Adams once declared that in Parkside, we are the most “densely populated square mile in Maine.”

He might have added also: the richest in diversity. Please help us celebrate this fact instead of continually singling out Parkside as the worst possible place to live in Portland.

Susan Veligor

Portland

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