For decades, Portland's Albina neighborhood was the heart of the city's African-American community because racist housing policies kept them out of other parts of the city. Dozens of black-owned shops, restaurants and jazz clubs thrived there, even as banks continued to redline the area.
Then the city declared the area blighted, launching highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced many residents.
Gentrification has come and now a whole different scene has emerged on North Williams and Mississippi avenues. The neighborhood of trendy bars and restaurants, bike shops and yoga studios is increasingly home to white millennials, or "hipsters," as longtime black residents continue to be pushed out by rising rents.
City officials acknowledge that the effects of racist housing policies still linger today. As they seek to address a citywide housing crisis, they are partnering with Portland State University students to uncover historical patterns of housing discrimination so they can take steps to redress them and create more equitable policies.
During the spring term, students from a history course in PSU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will be researching discriminatory housing policies such as restrictive covenants and other planning tools that were used by government, landowners, realtors and neighborhood associations to enforce racial segregation.
"It's important to understand history so we don't repeat it," said Ryan Curren, a project manager in the city's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. "The patterns of racial segregation that we see today and the patterns of displacement aren't natural. Decisions were made that led to these outcomes and that gives me hope that the government and private sector can choose to undo that and we can address these disparities."
The project, a collaboration between PSU’s history department and the city of Portland, coincides with two milestones: the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark federal act that prohibited discrimination in housing, and the 70th anniversary of the Vanport Flood, which displaced many blacks and left them with few options for housing.
Curren first approached PSU history professor Katy Barber with the class project idea last year. It's based on the University of Washington's Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which he says, served as a valuable resource for city officials as part of their planning efforts. He hopes the PSU findings can be just as useful here.
"We would refer to the history of these neighborhoods that were receiving infrastructure and land use planning," said Curren, who worked in Seattle's housing office before coming to Portland. "Having that understanding helped build trust."
Mapping segregation
Greta Smith, a PSU graduate student who has been interning with the city as part of the project, has been tasked with uncovering restrictive covenants, a challenging undertaking given the difficulty of identifying which deeds have them. She's pored over records and maps, but has found the most success with crowdsourcing.
So far, Smith has gathered 20 covenants — both from fellow historians and residents who have sent them to her — but there are likely hundreds, if not thousands, more. Though no longer enforceable, many of them remain in deeds, but people don't even think to look.
Excerpts from covenants that PSU graduate student Greta Smith has uncovered during her researchThe city is building an interactive map that shows the locations and provides links to the covenants. It's sparse now, but Curren and Smith expect patterns to emerge as more are uncovered.
Smith said she's curious to see if there's a correlation between the neighborhoods with covenants and the redlining maps that were drawn up in the 1930s. Surveyors with the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew lines on maps and colored neighborhoods to separate "hazardous" (red) and "declining" (yellow) from "desirable" (blue) and "best" (green). Smith suspects that the green neighborhoods were likely those with covenants because there was a belief cultivated and promoted by real estate agents and developers that the presence of blacks and other minorities would hurt property values.
"Restrictive covenants and other racist tools really acted as an impediment to housing for people of color over the long term and hindered many from accumulating wealth through property ownership," Smith said. "It's important for us to take a look at the way that we've segregated our city and how we've disinvested certain communities of people, particularly black people in our city, because this has direct correlations to our current housing crisis."
Take Vanport and Albina as examples. Portland's black population grew significantly during World War II as shipbuilding jobs drew thousands of people to the area. Restrictions largely confined black families to Vanport, but when the Columbia River flooded in 1948, the residents of Vanport were displaced and many blacks moved to the city's Albina neighborhood because they had few other choices.
Many were displaced again with the construction of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Interstate 5 and Emanuel Hospital.
"On the surface, it looks like people got shoved out of North Portland because they didn't own their own homes or couldn't afford the rents," Barber said. "But really what we're looking at is the city has a series of choices it can make and when it supports some types of development over others, we end up with a Williams Avenue that looks very ritzy now and doesn't reflect its recent past at all in terms of who's living there."
Barber's class will continue to build on the work of Smith, PSU urban planning professors Karen Gibson and Lisa Bates and other historians — with the goal of telling a more comprehensive history of Portland's residential segregation. Possible projects could include creating a website or pamphlet, collecting oral histories and researching stories of resistance.
The class will also be partnering with the Vanport Mosaic Festival, planned for May 25 to 28, to gather more information and publicize their efforts.
The hope is that the project will better inform both the public and the city.
Past shapes the future
Kim McCarty, housing program coordinator in the city's Bureau of Housing, said it's important for the city to understand the historical context as it works to "affirmatively further fair housing." Communities that receive federal housing money are required to complete an Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing to analyze their housing patterns and take actions to overcome segregation, promote fair housing choice and foster inclusive communities.
"We're proactively looking at what the current barriers are to housing choice and access and it's important to understand how those barriers might relate back to a historic discrimination and how that discrimination might be playing out in the present day," McCarty said.
She also said that zoning rules might appear to be race-neutral, but decisions about lot sizes in a certain neighborhood or where single-family homes are built as opposed to apartment buildings could have been influenced by earlier racist policies or have the same impact as intentional racial discrimination.
Curren said the city's goal is to create meaningful and affordable housing choices across the entire city, not just in certain neighborhoods.
"People with lower incomes should have a true choice of where to live, whereas in the past, they didn't and today, they still don't," he said. "That's why the history is helpful to inform new policy and investments."
Anyone with a racial restrictive covenant is encouraged to contact Greta Smith at pdxhst@pdx.edu.