At the Congress for the New Urbanism's June confab in Portland, Oregon, the vibe was more like a political convention than an urban-design charrette. CNU's seed may have been planted by a group of revolution-minded architects like Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, and others looking to overthrow 50 years of Ameri-can suburban planning. But as its eighth annual meeting blossomed with 1,500 architects, planners, politicians, developers, policy wonks, and community advocates, it was clear that the congress might easily be renamed the "Gentrification Party."

Portland couldn't have been a better setting. Back in 1972, long before the term "New Urban-ism" was invented, the city drafted a comprehensive plan that reads like CNU's freshly published charter. It created new public spaces, designed pedestrian-friendly streets, and made the central city the hub for every line of the region's mass transportation. It built 33 miles of light rail, drew an urban-growth boundary around its perimeter, and created a regional government to coordinate the 24 municipalities inside. As most other Ameri-can cities watched residential and working populations plummet, Portland's downtown grew more vibrant, luring the middle class back to revitalize the surrounding neighborhoods. "We planned; it worked," as the city's recently adopted motto goes.

Yet as several conference sessions explored the "Oregon story," only one New Urbanist peeked beneath the city's thin veneer of success. With typical aplomb, the CNU's Commandante Maximo, Andres Duany, pointed out that, despite all of its innovations, virtually everything Portland has built outside its lovely pre-World War II neighborhoods has been the same brand of urban sprawl found in every other American city: car-friendly, single-use pods of housing and shopping. Portland's techniques for managing regional growth, he argued, haven't worked and won't work anywhere else unless they are combined with building well-planned, mixed-use neighborhoods. To illustrate, he compared Portland to its polar opposite: Miami. The sprawling Florida city where Duany makes his home has had a growth boundary, regional government, and light rail for as long as Portland has. "The only reason Portland is more pleasant than Miami is about economic class," Duany said. "Both have downtowns filled with people, only Miami is filled with the underprivileged, while Portland is filled with boutiques."

Duany's assessment is correct on every count ex-cept one. What really makes Portland's downtown different from Miami's isn't class. It's race. About 85 percent white and free of the tensions that have plagued so many cities, Portland enjoys a culture of agreement more akin to that of European cities: 97 percent of the city's kids are still in public schools. And during the Nineties, not only did the home-ownership rate rise, it saw one of the highest increases in housing prices in the country.

Yup, we planned and it worked. The signposts of Portland's "success"--and the corresponding racial migrations--are plain to see: As the central city and surrounding neighborhoods have developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for Italian restaurants and Irish bars, rents have driven the growing communities of Asians, Latinos, and African-Americans into the first-generation suburbs, and project-style, low-income housing has been de-veloped along highway corridors. "Preservation" is a word Portland proto-New Urbanists have often applied to buildings but never to existing communities. Yet, as the conference wore on, it became clear that, despite Duany's best-laid attack, Portland-style inner-city gentrification remained not just an acceptable model for the New Urbanists but quite possibly an inevitability.

In a session entitled "Is the New Urbanism a Niche Market or New Paradigm?" for instance, New Jersey-based market analyst Laurie Volk of-fered compelling statistics about the powerful potential market for New Urbanist-style, pedestrian-friendly developments. But the way to reach the those segments expanding most rapidly--the "cultural creatives" and "new Bohemians"--is not through new towns, she said, but through infill developments in existing cities. Her view was echoed by Santa Fe financial analyst Christopher B. Leinberger and California State Treasurer Phil Angelides. On a panel entitled "Financing New Urbanism," Leinberger outlined how higher-density developments near existing mass transit are likely to produce higher long-term profits than "greenfield" developments on outlying farmland. Angelides proudly detailed his state's plans to begin spending its boom-fattened coffers on strengthening the economies of inner cities. In addition, he hopes to start redirecting one of the greatest caches of real-estate investment dollars--teacher and public-employee retirement funds--away from emerging Third World markets and toward new center-city markets at home.

Even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is joining the New Urbanist rush. Elinor Bacon of HUD proudly reported that her agency, under the HOPE VI program, has approved demolition of 103,000 units of mostly Modernist-era high-rise public housing, planning to replace them with 63,600 houses and townhouses designed according to New Urbanist principles--with plenty of gabled roofs and front stoops. The results? In the case of one neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, property values appreciated by 1,000 percent. But for every 100 units demolished, HUD is constructing only 40 new ones, according to Bacon. While many of the older units were already empty, Bacon conceded that some poor people are being displaced. What of their fate? They are being "studied," she said. "We were so busy doing projects, we didn't adequately track them."

Overall, the conference was far more concerned with technique than with questioning New Urbanism's premises. The hubris reached its pinnacle when a concert hall full of New Urbanists erupted in applause as Bacon showed films of high-rise housing projects being imploded. Yet only a handful of attendees heard San Francisco developer Daniel Hernandez's worries about the equally zealous "renewal urbanism" of today. "I challenge the New Urban-ists," he said, "to look at urban reinvestment not as an end goal but as a means to improve the lives of existing residents." During Hernandez's session on stabilizing neighborhoods, architects Steven Suzuki and Ada Chan of Asian Neighborhood Design told of their struggles to build just 26 units of low-income housing in San Francisco's feverishly gentrifying South of Market District. In an area where single-room-occupancy hotels are already illegally packed with families, they sneaked bigger kitchens and bathrooms into their development's units, beneath the noses of building inspectors.

The path from ideology to practice is often potholed with inconsistencies, but the New Urbanists seem to be facing a particularly important fork in the road. The dilemma achieved its tragicomic apotheosis at the conference with two sessions held simultaneously, one entitled "Civitas and Democracy: Placemaking in Our Current Political Culture," the other called "Turning NIMBYs into Advocates." In the first, a group of academics explored how debates about the future physical design of a city can revitalize democracy. In the second, San Francisco-based community relations expert Debra Stein offered a list of "outcome-oriented solutions for minimizing opposition." As Yale University historian Allan J. Plattus compared the contemporary city planner's task to that of the ancient Athenians, who had to overcome clan-based societal structures to establish a democracy, Stein coached New Urbanists on such credibility enhancers as exposing their palms, keeping their hands away from their faces, and always making eye contact (right eye to right eye, as a more wandering gaze communicates sexual attraction). When an agitated woman arrived at the Civitas panel having walked out of the NIMBY session aghast, Plattus offered some fortune-cookie wisdom that the New Urbanists might do well to heed. "It may be possible to dress for success," he said, "but it's much harder to dress for democracy."