Lessons from Portland

Published in High Country News

By Wayne Hare

A few years ago in the aftermath of the violence in Ferguson, a friend of mine, a brilliant surgeon, stated that if Blacks in Ferguson wanted to live better, they could simply move to a better place. I had heard variations of that before, always stated with the unintended air of the privilege that comes with being white...”Those people should just make better decisions...like we do.” I knew it wasn’t that simple, but I didn’t have the words to explain to my friend. Race in America is complicated. Whites assume that the way they see and experience America is the way America is. I understand that. It’s all they know. If Whites want to move, and can afford to, then they simply move. But since ‘a better place’ is always a white place, they don’t consider “Will I feel safe...accepted...lonely? How will my children be treated? Will they have playmates? How will the police treat my family? Can I endure sticking out like a sore thumb? Will I be stopped for Driving While White in my own neighborhood? What’s the racial history of that area?” It is because of considerations such as these – never fathomed by White America - that partially explains why Black families making $100,000 a year typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by White families making $30,000.  If blacks want to move from one area to another, even if they can afford to, it may not be that simple. There’s often an ugly history to be dealt with. Inner city Blacks don’t live where they do because they love crime and poverty and ghettos and projects. Blacks live there because that’s where planned, intentional racism herded them. And that powerful legacy still exists today. It’s hard to climb up a slippery slope.

Raised on a small dairy farm in New Hampshire, I had always lived in ‘a better place’. His statement, and my own grappling with racial politics, pushed me to look for an answer.  My quest led me to a reality that I had never really understood: Home ownership is key to an upwardly mobile, middle class existence that Blacks have historically been excluded from to this very day with long-term, spiraling consequences. Without access to home ownership, acquiring wealth is almost impossible and a whole host of problems, from inaccessibility to decent jobs to poor schools and health care to high rates of crime and incarceration, even lack of access to grocery stores, are inevitable. And it’s a generational spiral. 

But still, why not just move? Why did Black Americans congregate in these places to begin with? So as a part of this series I traveled to Portland, known as one of the most livable, progressive cities in the country. I chose it because I had lived there in the late 80’s and early 90’s. My son was born there. I had enjoyed easy access to white-water rivers, big mountains, and miles of single-track mountain biking. I also chose it because I had heard that, behind the happy façade, Portland had the same history as every other American city.

It starts with Oregon’s statehood in 1859 and a constitution that baldly stated: “No free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside or be within this state or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein...”

Oregon voters didn’t remove this from the constitution until 2001. That may explain why Portland is one of only a few places that I have ever been stopped for “Driving While Black”, and the only place that I have been denied service in a restaurant. But this isn’t a story about me. It’s a story about how Black Americans ended up where they are, and the central role played by active, planned, and intentional, government and private sector sanctioned housing discrimination.

But despite the state constitution and the desire to create a white utopia, Blacks did come to Portland. First with the advent of the railroad in the late 1800’s and later during WWII when a large Kaiser ship building plant was built. 

When the shipyard was built, Kaiser built an entire slapstick, segregated, city north of Portland to house some 100,000 workers, black and white. 

Vanport was totally destroyed when the Columbia River flooded in 1948. Blacks and Whites had to go elsewhere. Whites had choices. Blacks did not. They were allowed to move to the Albina district of NE Portland. It was the only place Black people were allowed to buy or rent homes after the Realty Board of Portland had approved a Code of Ethics in 1919 forbidding realtors and bankers from selling or giving loans to “Negroes or Orientals” for properties located in White neighborhoods. 

In 1934 Congress created the Federal Housing Authority to insure private mortgages. This in turn led to lower interest rates, a drop in the size of the required down payment, and eventually to so-called “Levittowns” - private subdivisions with lower housing prices. The FHA adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods. All-White neighborhoods received an “A”. Neighborhoods with so much as one Black family received the lowest rating, a “D” and were outlined in red. No money was loaned to ‘Redlined” districts. The Federal Government intentionally went about creating the middle class, subdivisions, home ownership, and wealth - programs from which Blacks were explicitly excluded throughout the country. Black people were viewed as a contagion.

Realtors were complicit. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics concluded, “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood...any race or nationality... whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” 

And banks remain complicit to this day. In 2012, Wells Fargo was fined 175 million dollars by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice for predatory racist lending. Ditto for Bank of America. $335 million in 2011. And in 2017 New York State filed suit against Evans Bank for allegedly not making loans within Black neighborhoods. 

In his first appearance before Congress since taking over as chairman of the Federal Reserve in Feb 2018, Jerome Powell faced questions about modern-day redlining. “If people are denied access to credit, then they are going to be less able to attend school, less able to start a family, less able to move to a new job, all kinds of things. Economic outcomes for that individual would be significantly reduced. And if you take that out across a broad population, it would certainly hurt the growth of the country.” 

In 1990, The Oregonian found that all the banks in Portland had made just 10 mortgage loans in Albina, while at the same time making over a hundred loans in similarly sized census tracts in the rest of the city. Time after time this discriminatory practice gave way to predatory lending. In Portland, in the 1990’s, Dominion Capital sold run down homes to desperate and unsuspecting Black buyers while Dominion actually kept ownership of the properties. Loans were structured with a large, near-term balloon payment that allowed Dominion to quickly evict buyers and resell the home in short order. 

Across the country, Whites looking to achieve the American Dream could rely on a legitimate lending system backed by their government, while Blacks were herded towards unscrupulous lenders such as Dominion who took them for money and sport. “It was like people who go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill. The thrill of the chase and the kill.’ a housing attorney told historian Beryl Slater in her 2009 book, Family Properties.”

Urban Black ghettos came about by deliberate actions of municipalities, banks, and realtors. Through its actions and inactions, White America built and maintained the residential structure of the ghetto. But segregation did not stop there. Once having achieved the creation of ghettos, municipalities then deliberately set about to reduce them to slums. 

Richard Nixon and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the term ‘Benign neglect’ to describe the policy of intentional neglect of services to allow communities of color to slowly suffocate. Zoning that allowed liquor stores, bars, and polluting business accelerated the decline. In Portland when homes became valued at less than $40,000.00, banks no longer would loan money either for the purchase or repair of a home thus hastening the downward spiral.

Whites who saw the end result concluded that Blacks created slums, not realizing that government neglect and official discrimination forced slum conditions on Blacks. Poor schools. Dangerous housing. Incarceration. Poverty. That’s not who we are. It’s what we endure. 

As financial investment declined, so did Albina. It didn’t have latte coffee shops, aromatherapy studios, and fancy bike lanes painted green. All of those and more would all come later. But what it did have, according to life long Albina residents Gloria Cash and her friend Florida Blake was heart and soul. Community. A real sense of ‘home’...of neighbors being there for one another.

Yet as Albina declined, its potential increased. Absentee landlords raised rents to a captive audience. And when taxes exceeded the value of the homes, those same landlords abandoned the buildings and walked away.

What the city fathers and business people really seemed to want was to have the Black population just go away. Karen Gibson, in her article Bleeding Albina: “After the WWII influx of Blacks, when the Urban League of Portland hired Bill Berry from Chicago as the organization’s first Executive Director, the president of the First National Bank told Berry, ‘What we need is a good, intelligent Negro to tell these people to go home.’ Berry refused.” But the city fathers found other ways to disperse the Black population. 

At one time Portland had a war memorial listing every Oregon soldier killed in WWII. It was just an extra large, plywood billboard. The city fathers dreamt of a permanent home and several sensible proposals came in. But Portland’s east side businessmen had a dream too. They dreamt of a White corridor from downtown out to the new Lloyd Center mall. So they lobbied to place the very small memorial in a very large coliseum in the heart of Albina. Their lobbying efforts were successful and in 1956 the city condemned 476 Black-occupied homes, all of the district’s businesses and many of its churches and simply told the residents to be gone by the time the bulldozers got there.  

Per Portland historian Tom Robinson, “In 1962 the Portland Development Commission published the Central Albina Study, which found the Black community to be a “worthless slum” and proposed clearance to prevent the spread of slums to adjacent neighborhoods. Emmanuel hospital was a perfect partner to accomplish this. They wanted to add 19 acres to their campus. The commission got a grant from the Model Cities program to make an urban renewal district for Emmanuel Hospital that would clear about 10 blocks of homes and businesses.” 

Homeowners received a flat $15,000 for their homes, far less than the average market value. Renters received a pittance. All were told to be gone in 90 days. Get out! In an ironic twist, just as all the demolition of Black homes and churches was nearing completion, congress failed to appropriate the funding for the expansion of the hospital. All of the destruction of 300 Black residences was for nothing. 

Decades would pass before Emmanuel started construction. As Gloria and Florida led me around, they pointed out lots that are still vacant 45 years later. I snapped a photo of Gloria standing in front of her childhood home. Except now it’s a Ronald McDonald House for the hospital. All in all, over 1,100 Black Albina homes were destroyed by construction projects.

The Underwriting Manual of the Federal Housing Administration stated, “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities” and suggested that highways would be a good way to separate Black American neighborhoods from White ones. They were right. Highways tore through neighborhoods, put up concrete and asphalt barriers, and dead-ended streets. When the interstate spree was over it had displaced over a million mostly Black Americans. Destroying Black communities and stealing wealth from its citizens through intentional highway placements. 

Richard Rothstein, renowned expert on housing discrimination and the author of The Color of Law on NPR quoted a graphic description of the highway policy: “City officials expressed the view that in the mid 1950’s that the urban interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of their local nigger town.” And get rid of it they did. In 1956, the same year that construction began on the coliseum, construction of I-5 and highway 19 rid the city of another 125 Black homes just south of the coliseum and again, right in the heart of Albina.

Albina’s decline continued. Between 1990 and 2013 the Black population declined by 60%, while at the same time rents went through the roof because Blacks still had few alternatives. Finally, under pressure from the Black Community, in the 1990’s the City of Portland started a process of Urban Renewal. White folks, eyeing the gentrification, bought Victorian homes for less than the price of a used car. The same homes today are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ten years later Black residents had been priced out and owned 40% fewer homes while White folks owned 43% more. 

Nikki Williams who had lived her entire life in Portland said in the gentrification documentary ‘Priced Out’, “I guess cleaning up the neighborhood meant getting rid of the brown folk!” Eventually Nikki couldn’t stand the change any longer. She put her home up for sale in anticipation of a move to Texas. Her Habitat For Humanity home sold for $330,000.00!

I was lucky enough to meet Gloria and Florida while I was in Portland. A couple of fun, spunky, elegant women who had grown up in the Albina neighborhood when it was all Black. They reminisced about the jazz scene. About all of the Black owned business. Juke joints and bar-b-que places. Kids playing on the streets. Schools and the churches. For two days we toured Albina as they described what used to be there. They were melancholy, but not painfully sad. They had learned to let the past go.

As Gloria and Florida showed me around the neighborhood, they didn’t seem sad or bitter. They’d moved on a long time ago and now laughed over stories of their childhoods even as they pointed to lots still vacant from the Emmanuel Hospital debacle. They pointed to where former Black businesses had once stood before they too were priced out. The drug store. The print shop. The bowling alley. The Tire Company. The neighborhood tavern. McCorvey’s filling station. The Burger Barn where four white cops had sent a message by tossing a couple of dead possums onto the steps. All had become hipster, White-owned businesses. But when it came time for lunch, Gloria was clear. “I don’t support White businesses. I figure they already have enough support.” 

Albina is now considered a “mixed race” neighborhood. But as I roamed its streets, it sure didn’t feel mixed. It felt like a caricature of all those ads we all see everyday of what White success and happiness is supposed to look like. Beautifully restored Victorian homes. Condos with Avant-garde rooflines. Patios over-looking tree lined streets. Remote control parking garage gates. Faux-aged corrugated tin.  Green-painted bike lanes. Cyclist everywhere. Four dollars a scoop ice cream shops. Whole Foods-like grocery stores. Aromatherapy studios. Slender White women jogging with their yoga pants and mats. Latte shops. A tavern partially powered by patrons pedaling stationary bicycles connected to an electrical gizmo. Cute. But sort of otherworldly. As Walidah Imarisha, author, professor and prominent scholar on Oregon Black American history has so poignantly asked, “Why aren’t there more Black people?” There were historical markers that referred back to events and establishments when Albina was Black. But according to Nikki, the new residents had no idea of what Albina was just a few years ago.

Nikki had lived in Albina her entire life. She had fought to clean up its streets both from trash and from drugs. But Nikki persevered because she loved the only neighborhood she had ever known. But now? “I’m at the point in my life where I need to be around more brown folk. I have begun to feel so isolated and alienated here in Portland that I cannot call this living. This is just existing. There has to be more to life than this.” And then with a flash of anger, “I don’t even walk down Williams Avenue anymore because it’s so damned White!” And with that Nikki got on a bus and left for Texas. 

Good luck in your new life Nikki. And as I hopped back into my motorhome and headed home I sure wished that my friend who got me started on this quest could have been with me in Portland to understand the complex answer to his simple, honest question. “Why don’t Blacks just move somewhere better?”

This story could not have been written without the selfless assistance of many people. I wish to thank Walidah Imarisha, author, professor and Black History scholar - who has to travel with community-based security as she lectures around the state; Florida Baker and Gloria Cash; Historian Thomas Robinson; Cornelius Swart, Producer of ‘Priced Out’; Darrell Millner, Portland State University professor emeritus of Black History; Bob Zybach, historian; and Doctor Walt Boardwine, who got me started.

Image by Thomas Robinson via High Country News