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2007
Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Bleeding Albina: A History of Community
Disinvestment, 1940‐2000 Disinvestment, 1940 2000
Karen J. Gibson
Portland State University
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Gibson, K. J. (2007). Bleeding Albina: A history of community disinvestment, 1940‐2000. Transforming
Anthropology, 15(1), 3-25. https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.2007.15.1.03
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3
Karen J. Gibson
BLEEDING
A
LBINA:A HISTORY OF COMMUNITY
DISINVESTMENT
, 1940–2000
Portland, Oregon, is celebrated in the planning litera-
ture as one of the nation’s most livable cities, yet there
is very little scholarship on its small Black community.
Using census data, oral histories, archival documents,
and newspaper accounts, this study analyzes residential
segregation and neighborhood disinvestment over a
60-year period. Without access to capital, housing con-
ditions worsened to the point that abandonment became
a major problem. By 1980, many of the conditions typi-
cally associated with large cities were present: high
unemployment, poor schooling, and an underground
economy that evolved into crack cocaine, gangs, and
crime. Yet some neighborhood activists argued that the
redlining, predatory lending, and housing speculation
were worse threats to community viability. In the early
1990s, the combination of low property values, renewed
access to capital, and neighborhood reinvestment
resulted in gentrification, displacement, and racial
transition. Portland is an exemplar of an urban real
estate phenomenon impacting Black communities
across the nation.
KEYWORDS: community, segregation, disinvest-
ment, gentrification, inequality
This was really part of much, much larger forces
that are at work, and they may or may not be con-
sciously malicious . . . This is the result of city pol-
icy, of other kinds of large-scale things that
systematically cripple or dismember a community.
Some neighborhoods are “fed.” Others are bled.
—Paul Bothwell, Boston Dudley Street
neighborhood activist
1
The preponderance of scholarship on Portland, Oregon,
analyzes the city’s achievements in various fields of
urban and regional planning: land use, environment,
transportation, central city revitalization, and civic
involvement (Ozawa 2004; Abbott et al. 1994). Others
debate the impact of the urban growth boundary,
designed to limit sprawling development, on housing
prices (Downs 2002; Fischel 2002; Howe 2004).
However, very little scholarship analyzes the experience
of Portland’s Black community in this relatively remote
Northwest city. Although the population is very small
(never comprising more than 7 percent of the city and
1 percent of the state), Portland provides an interesting
case study of a Black community that found itself sud-
denly in the path of urban redevelopment for “higher
and better use” after years of disinvestment. The occu-
pation of prime central city land in a region with an
urban growth boundary and in a city aggressively seek-
ing to capture population growth, coupled with an eco-
nomic boom, resulted in very rapid gentrification and
racial transition in the 1990s. As cities across the coun-
try increasingly seek to improve land values and woo the
middle and upper classes back to the central cities as an
economic development strategy, the fate of urban Black
communities is uncertain. Local policy makers are grap-
pling with ways to reduce the negative effects of sprawl-
ing development patterns, and the conversion of central
city land into residential use offers a solution, especially
as baby boomers and their children leave suburbia for
compact inner-city living. It is critical to understand the
links between the historical processes of urban develop-
ment and contemporary forces that impinge on Black
communities, so that central city residents might proac-
tively engage with these forces. This work contributes to
that effort by shedding light on the link between disin-
vestment and gentrification in Portland.
This is a case study analysis of the historical process
of segregation and neighborhood disinvestment that pre-
ceded gentrification in Portland’s Black community,
Albina. Drawing upon various sources such as census
data from 1940 to 2000, oral histories, archival docu-
ments, and news articles, it investigates the mechanisms
that facilitated residential segregation and housing disin-
vestment. It also traces some of the Black resistance
strategies to these mechanisms. Only after pressure from
Karen J. Gibson is an associate professor of urban stud-
ies and planning at Portland State University. Her
research interests concern racial economic inequality in
the urban context, housing and urban policy, and the
theory and practice of community development. She is
interested in interdisciplinary approaches to under-
standing urban life, and applied research. She holds an
M.S. in public management and policy from Carnegie
Mellon University and a Ph.D. in city and regional plan-
ning from the University of California at Berkeley.
4TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
activists and the media did politicians, seeking votes,
respond to the needs of Albina. The real estate industry
(government housing officials, Realtors, bankers,
appraisers, and landlords), by denying access to conven-
tional mortgage loans, played a pivotal role in perpetu-
ating the absentee ownership and predatory lending
practices that fueled the decline in housing conditions.
Many Black residents were denied the opportunity to
own homes when they were affordable. Even after White
flight from Albina in the 1950s and 1960s, Black home
ownership continued to be restricted by discriminatory
mortgage lending policies in the 1970s and 1980s, caus-
ing some to search elsewhere for ownership opportuni-
ties. During the 1990s, residential segregation between
Blacks and Whites in Portland decreased so sharply that
it ranked tenth nationally among metropolitan areas with
the greatest declines (Frey and Meyers 2005). Ironically,
although desegregation partly reflects the gradual open-
ing up of the housing market, it also reflects the dis-
placement of Black renters to suburban locations because
of gentrification. In 2000, the African American home
ownership rate in the city of Portland was just 38 percent,
well below the national average of 46 percent. Recently
the city, which has done a fairly good job of producing
low-income housing, began trying to remedy the racial
disparity in home ownership. While there are positive
aspects to the revitalization of Albina neighborhoods,
many Black residents wonder why it did not happen ear-
lier, when it was their community. Portland is lauded for
its livability—but livability for whom?
RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION AND HOUSING
DISINVESTMENT PROCESSES
The emergence of the black ghetto did not happen
as a chance by-product of other socioeconomic
processes. Rather, white Americans made a series
of deliberate decisions to deny blacks access to
urban housing markets and to reinforce spatial seg-
regation. Through its actions and inactions, white
America built and maintained the residential struc-
ture of the ghetto.
2
Economic disinvestment—the sustained and
systemic withdrawal of capital investment from the
built environment—is central to any explanation of
neighborhood decline.
3
This study traces the simultaneous processes of racial
residential segregation and disinvestment in Portland,
Oregon. While the scale of segregation has been very
small relative to large cities in the Midwest and
Northeast, the consequences for residents are similar.
Segregation is a tool of social and economic control that
operates by confining Black citizens to a designated
section of the city. Early sociologists labeled such areas
the “Black Belt” or the “ghetto.” Sociologist St. Clair
Drake and anthropologist Horace Cayton were prescient
in their analysis of the White rationale for segregation
in their classic study of Chicago’s South Side, Black
Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City:
Midwest Metropolis seems to say: “Negroes have a
right to live in the city, to compete for certain types of
jobs, to vote, to use public accommodations—but
they should have a community of their own. Perhaps
they should not be segregated by law, but the city
should make sure that most of them remain within a
Black Belt.” As it becomes increasingly crowded—
and “blighted”—Black Metropolis’s reputation
becomes ever more unsavory. The city assumes that
any Negroes who move anywhere will become a focal
point for another little Black Belt with a similar repu-
tation. To allow the Black Belt to disintegrate would
scatter the Negro population. To allow it to expand
will tread on the toes of vested interests, large and
small, in contiguous areas. To let it remain the same
size means the continuous worsening of slum condi-
tions there. To renovate it requires capital, but this is a
poor investment. It is better business to hold the land
for future business structures, or for the long-talked-
of rebuilding of the Black Belt as a White office-
workers’ neighborhood. The real-estate interests
consistently oppose public housing within the Black
Belt, which would drive rents down and interfere with
the ultimate plan to make the Black Belt middle-class
and White. [Drake and Cayton 1945:198, 211]
The mechanisms or “compulsions” by which cities
across the United States ensured that Black people
stayed in their place were articulated by housing scholar
and advocate Charles Abrams (1955), in Fo rbidden
Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing:
1. Physical compulsion through bombs, arson, threats,
mobs
2. Structural controls such as walls, fences, dead-end
streets
3. Social controls such as segregation in clubs, schools,
and public facilities
4. Economic compulsions such as refusal to make
mortgage loans, Realtors’ codes of ethics, and
restrictive covenants
5. Legalized compulsions that use the powers of gov-
ernment to control the movements of minorities such
as condemnation powers, urban renewal, and slum
clearance.
Various forms of these compulsions, including the physi-
cal threats such as cross-burnings, were used to restrict
Black housing choice in Portland. Rose Helper, in her
original book, Racial Policies and Practices of Real
KAREN J. GIBSON 5
Estate Brokers (1969), details how Realtors used their
“code of ethics” to put into practice the “racial real estate
ideology” that property values decline when Black people
live in White neighborhoods. This was the official word of
the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, which
maintained that “the clash of nationalities with dissimilar
cultures” contributed to the “destruction of value” (Helper
1969:201). Realtors, lenders, and government guarantors
widely promoted the use of restrictive covenants (mutu-
ally agreed upon by builders, Realtors, bankers, apprais-
ers, insurers, and residents) that forbade non-Whites to
own property in specific areas. Residential segregation
holds the power to mold, stigmatize, and harm the living
environment of a people. This does not imply that
“ghetto” residents are passive victims, or that they are
pathological, as some strands of urban theory suggest.
Neighborhood disinvestment involves the system-
atic withdrawal of capital (the lifeblood of the housing
market) and the neglect of public services such as
schools; building, street, and park maintenance;
garbage collection; and transportation. The classical
ecology theories of Chicago School sociology
explained neighborhood growth and decline as a natu-
ral life cycle that unfolded in stages: rural, residential
development, full occupancy, downgrading, thinning
out, and then either crash or renewal (Park et al. 1984).
Downgrading is associated with the outflow of original
residents and inflow of lower-income residents and
often corresponds with racial segregation. The housing
ages, rents fall, and often there is overcrowding that
also hastens dilapidation of the stock. Residents move
out (if they can), and the neighborhood becomes a
slum. While this interpretation is helpful for under-
standing the stages of neighborhood change, it does not
adequately explain why such changes occur, as it lacks
a discussion of capital, space, race, class, and power.
Scholars with a more critical approach analyze
neighborhood decline by emphasizing the profit-taking
of Realtors, bankers, and speculators, which systemati-
cally reduces the worth or value of housing in a process
called devalorization (N. Smith 1996). The devaloriza-
tion cycle has five stages: new housing construction and
first cycle of use, transition to landlord control, block-
busting, redlining, and abandonment. After new housing
ages, owners move elsewhere, sometimes to avoid the
cost of repair, and the neighborhood has more renters
than owners. During the second stage, absentee land-
lords may choose to profit off of the rent and decide not
to make repairs. Depending on the market, it may be
economically rational to under-maintain the property.
The transition to landlord control may or may not
include the third stage, blockbusting, but often involves
a process of racial succession, or rapid population
turnover. Blockbusting is the process by which Realtors
use the fear of racial turnover and property value decline
to induce homeowners to sell at below-market prices.
Then the Realtor sells the property at inflated prices to
Black (or other) home buyers. The fourth stage is when
banks redline the neighborhood; this reduces owner
occupancy and often prevents absentee landlords from
selling a property they no longer want to keep. At this
point, home ownership rates decline, and the downward
trajectory of dilapidation continues until the final stage:
abandonment. This is often accompanied by arson as
property owners seek to cash out through fire insurance.
Gentrification is the recycling of a neighborhood up to
the point at which property values are comparable to
those in other neighborhoods. If a developer can pur-
chase a structure in an area, rehabilitate it, make mort-
gage and interest payments, and still make a return on
the sale of the renovated building, then that area is ripe
for gentrification. The cost of mortgage money is an
important economic factor affecting the feasibility of
reinvestment. This process occurs at the level of the
neighborhood, not individual structures, and requires the
involvement of housing market actors at the institutional
scale. It also involves redlining motivated by appraisals
that devalue African American neighborhoods. When
the public and private sectors make a decision to disin-
vest, it is essentially proclaiming an area unworthy and
ensuring its decline. In this view, gentrification is not
just a matter of individual preferences for older centrally
located neighborhoods; it is a matter of financial and
governmental decisions. When capital is withheld from
certain areas, predatory lenders move in to fill the void.
Historian Kenneth Jackson (1985) described the
federal role in urban disinvestment on a mass scale
through housing and transportation policies that sup-
ported massive suburbanization after World War II.
Inner-city neighborhoods were systematically deemed
unworthy of federally insured home loans by real estate
appraisers, because they were destined for decline by
their heterogeneous populations and mixed land-use pat-
terns (residential, commercial, and industrial). When the
federal government took the lead in proclaiming older
central-city neighborhoods ineligible for investment,
local government and private sector actors followed.
Jane Jacobs (1961), a fierce critic of urban redevelop-
ment schemes, argued that the policy of denying loans to
urban neighborhoods because they were declining was a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Housing dilapidation and aban-
donment are key indicators of poverty concentration in
“underclass” neighborhoods (Jargowsky and Bane
1991). Abandonment almost always occurs simultane-
ously with tax delinquency: defraying the tax burden is
one way to milk a property (Sternlieb and Burchell
1973). Perhaps the absolute final method of cashing in
on property is through purposeful arson for insurance
6TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
payoffs. Arson was an almost nightly occurrence in the
Dudley Street neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston,
Massachusetts (Medoff and Sklar 1994).
In Portland, there is evidence supporting the notion
that housing market actors helped sections of the Albina
District reach an advanced stage of decay, making the area
ripe for reinvestment. Critical to the process was the sys-
tematic denial of mortgage capital, which was justified by
appraisals that devalued African American neighbor-
hoods. In addition, predatory lenders, speculators, and
slumlords played a strong role in keeping Albina residents
from accumulating wealth through home ownership and,
in some cases, cheated residents out of their equity invest-
ments and earnings. Since home ownership is the most
common form of wealth, this helped to perpetuate eco-
nomic inequality in Portland (Oliver and Shapiro 1997).
As the Portland economy rebounded from a reces-
sion during the early 1990s, Albina became ripe for
gentrification. Gentrification involves reinvestment in
housing and commercial buildings, as well as infra-
structural amenities such as transportation, street trees,
signage, and lighting. It includes the movement of
higher-income residents into a neighborhood and often
involves racial transition. It requires financial investment
in the built environment until property values are compa-
rable to those of other neighborhoods, and it is an insti-
tutional, rather than individual-scale, process (N. Smith
1996). In other words, it is not just a cultural or social
phenomenon reflecting a lifestyle trend—it reflects sys-
tematic reinvestment by financial institutions and the
public sector. In Portland, the Black community was
destabilized by a systematic process of private sector
disinvestment and public sector neglect. After the press
publicized the discriminatory lending practices of
Oregon bankers, the city put pressure on them to reverse
their policy. Financing became available at the same
time that the economy was improving. In addition, by
the mid-1990s, several nonprofit housing organizations
had helped to improve Albina neighborhoods by devel-
oping new housing and rehabilitating tax-foreclosed
properties. Combined with more aggressive building
code enforcement and the creation of a huge urban
renewal district and light-rail project on Interstate
Avenue, the area was primed for reinvestment. The gap
between the value of properties and what they could
potentially earn was large enough for speculators to line
up to buy tax-foreclosed properties in Albina.
THE ALBINA DISTRICT
Oregon was a Klan state—it was as prejudiced as
South Carolina, so there was very little difference
other than geographic difference.
—Otto Rutherford, community leader, 1978
We were discussing at the [Portland] Realty Board
recently the advisability of setting up certain dis-
tricts for Negroes and orientals.
—Real Estate Training Manual, 1939
4
Albina was a company town controlled by the Union
Pacific Railroad before its 1891 annexation to Portland
(MacColl 1979). This area is located within walking dis-
tance of Union Station, on the east side of the Willamette
River. Since the vast majority of Blacks, prior to World
War II, worked for the railroad as Pullman porters, those
who stayed settled near the station. Before the Great
Depression, there was a small Black community in north-
west Portland, with Black-owned businesses such as cafés,
barbershops, and the Golden West Hotel, but most did not
survive the Depression. Around 1910, they were pushed
out of that community to the east side, according to Eddie
Watson, who said, “As the town began to grow they
switched us out” (Watson 1976). Black Portlanders had
built the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Albina at the turn of
the century. Because they were such a tiny fraction of the
city’s population (less than 1 percent) and many lived scat-
tered about, Black Portlanders often spent time together at
church, one of the few social functions available. This
small community was well educated and primarily middle
class, and about half were homeowners. But by 1940, half
of Black Portland was confined to the Williams Avenue
area in Albina as a result of severe housing discrimination
(Pearson 1996; McElderry 2001). Residential segregation
reflected the prejudice and discrimination Black people in
Oregon had faced for more than a century, both by custom
and by law. The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850
promised free land to White settlers only. Many of the set-
tlers preferred this territory because slavery was not per-
mitted by law, and therefore they would not face
economic competition from slaveholders. In 1857, by
popular vote, Oregon inserted an exclusion clause in the
state constitution that made it illegal for Black people to
remain in the state. This clause was not removed until
1926. Oregon was one of only six states that refused to
ratify the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
which gave Black people the rights of American citizen-
ship and Black men the right to vote (McLagan 1980).
The hostile racial attitude of White Oregonians man-
ifested in Portland’s built environment through real estate
practices. In 1919, the Portland Realty Board adopted a
rule declaring it unethical for an agent to sell property to
either Negro or Chinese people in a White neighborhood.
The Realtors felt that it was best to declare a section of
the city for them so that the projected decrease in prop-
erty values could be contained within limited spatial
boundaries. Historian Stuart McElderry (2001) peri-
odizes the process of “ghetto-building,” finalized by
1960, in three phases: 1910 to 1940, the 1940s, and the
KAREN J. GIBSON 7
1950s. First, between 1910 and 1940, more than half the
Black population of 1,900 was squeezed into Albina by
the real estate industry, local government, and private
landlords, who restricted housing choice to an area two
miles long and one mile wide in the Eliot neighborhood.
The second phase occurred in the 1940s, when roughly
23,000 Black workers who migrated to Portland for work
in the shipyards were restricted to segregated sections of
defense housing developments in Vanport and Guild’s
Lake and to the Eliot and Boise neighborhoods in the
Albina District. During the third phase, in the 1950s,
when defense housing was demolished by flood and
bulldozer, Blacks were funneled into the Albina District.
(Vanport, the largest wartime development in the nation,
was flooded when the dike holding back the Columbia
River broke.) As Blacks moved in, Whites moved out.
Between 1940 and 1960, the Black population in Albina
grew dramatically, while the White population shrank
significantly as more than 21,000 left for the suburbs or
other Portland neighborhoods.
This study focuses on the neighborhoods in the
Albina District that were at least 35 percent Black in
1970 (see Figure 1). The Albina District includes all or
part of eight neighborhoods (ten census tracts) that form
Figure 1. Albina District neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon.
Lower and Upper Albina, which are distinguished both
by their location (south or north of Fremont Street) and
by the point in time that each was the center of the Black
community.
5
During the 1940s and 1950s, the Black
community was centered in Lower Albina, which con-
sists of three neighborhoods: Eliot, Irvington, and Lloyd.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, urban renewal and
freeway construction forced residents to relocate north-
ward, above Fremont Street, into Upper Albina. Upper
Albina consists of five neighborhoods: Boise, Humboldt,
King, Sabin, and Woodlawn. In the first period, the Eliot
neighborhood was the focal point; in the 1970s it was
succeeded by the King (formerly Highland) neighbor-
hood, which remains the center to this day. Table 1 shows
the point at which the Black population in each neigh-
borhood peaked, as indicated by bold print. Note that
Eliot was the largest neighborhood, both in population
and geographic area, and it therefore consists of three
census tracts. While Black residents comprised at least
43 percent of these neighborhoods at some point in the
postwar period, Portland’s Black population has never
been greater than 7 percent, and Oregon’s Black popula-
tion has never been greater than 2 percent.
Although it is helpful to distinguish Lower and
Upper Albina in order to understand the patterns of
settlement and resettlement and the changing shape of
the community, the name Albina is synonymous with the
Black community in Portland. By 1960, four of five
Black Portlanders lived in this 4.3-square-mile area, and
by 1980, despite the opening up of housing markets, one
of two still did. By 2000, slightly fewer than one of three
Black Portlanders lived there, and while many Black
Portlanders appreciate the physical improvements asso-
ciated with the recent neighborhood revitalization, they
also lament the loss of community that has come with it.
Of course it’s nice and fixed up now, and the crime
rate is down. We wouldn’t want to have it the other
way. But everyone wants home. Where is our place
then? People know where they want to live if their
culture is represented there. If a certain kind of per-
son looks at Hawthorne, they know that’s where they
can be to feel comfortable. But our culture is scat-
tered everywhere. It used to be that living “far out”
was 15th and Fremont. Now it’s 185th and Fremont.
A lot of people leave the neighborhood because they
feel they’re leaving something that’s not theirs any-
more anyway. It will never be that way again. There’s
a lot of sadness. For a lot of us, it’s just too hard to
stay and watch your history erased progressively
over time. There are just too many ghosts.
—Lisa Manning, Albina resident
6
ALBINA COMMUNITY FORMATION, 1940–1960
At that time it was almost impossible to buy property
anywhere other than around Williams Avenue . . .
Portland was really a very prejudiced city.
—Maude Young, 1976
The formation of the Black community in the Albina
District was shaped by two major events: the labor
migration during World War II and the 1948 flooding of
Vanport City, the largest single wartime development in
8T
RANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
Table 1. Black population trends in Albina District neighborhoods, 1960–2000.
Percent Black
Census Tracts 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Lower Albina
Eliot 22.01 69 50 35 38 58
22.02 72 54 43 41 25
23.01 65 77 62 58 41
Irvington 24.01 14 43 38 33 23
Lloyd 23.02 54 45 28 25 20
Upper Albina
Boise 34.02 67 84 73 70 50
Humboldt 34.01 40 65 69 69 52
King 33.01 21 61 63 63 54
King-Sabin 33.02 31 62 64 58 43
Woodlawn 36.01 12 36 49 62 51
Note: Bold figures indicate when the Black percentage peaked. Irvington refers to western half of the neighborhood. Only a
small part of Sabin is within the eastern census boundary at NE 15th Avenue, and a tiny portion of the Vernon neighborhood is
in the study area, so it is not included.
Source: Author’s calculations from United States Census Bureau Decennial Census, Summary File 3.
KAREN J. GIBSON 9
Table 2. Black population growth in west coast cities, 1940–1950.
San San
Year Los Angeles Oakland Francisco Diego Seattle Portland
1940 63,774 8,462 4,846 4,143 3,789 1,931
1950 171,209 47,562 43,502 14,904 15,666 9,529
Percent Increase 169% 462% 798% 260% 314% 394%
Source: In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. Quintard Taylor, New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998.
the United States and Oregon’s second-largest city
(Pancoast 1978). The migration, which temporarily
created a tenfold increase in the Black population dur-
ing the war years, meant that Portland had to face the
question of housing. Although city leaders stubbornly
resisted the development of any publicly subsidized
housing, defense or otherwise, the attack on Pearl
Harbor in December 1941 made it a patriotic duty to
house defense workers, at least temporarily. Within a
few months, “Magic Carpet Specials” brought the first
trainloads of roughly 23 thousand African Americans
and 100 thousand Whites, mostly from the South, to
help with the Pacific war effort. Shipyards in Portland
boomed with activity, as did five other major West
Coast cities: Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Los
Angeles, and San Diego. Black migrants came for the
opportunity to work, and many chose to remain after
war. The fact that more chose to leave Portland than
any other West Coast city reflected its “national repu-
tation among blacks of being the worst city on the West
Coast, as bad as any place in the South” and dismal post-
war employment prospects (Pancoast 1978:48; Taylor
1998). In Portland, after the war, there was little work, a
housing shortage, and open hostility to the newcomers
(both Black and White). The peak Black population in
1945, estimated at 23 thousand to 25 thousand, fell by
more than half by 1950. Table 2 shows that Portland’s
Black population was the smallest of the six coastal
cities, both before and after the war. Meanwhile, Los
Angeles and Seattle continued to attract migrants, and
San Diego and San Francisco saw their populations
increase modestly (Taylor 1998). A field report issued by
the National Urban League, “The West Coast and the
Negro,” predicted that after the war, the region would
have “a stranded population on its hands” because of
employment and housing discrimination, as well as resi-
dency restrictions on relief assistance (Johnson 1944:22).
Black workers faced various forms of racial dis-
crimination in both ship building (all cities except San
Diego) and aircraft production (San Diego, Los
Angeles, Seattle). In 1942, workers from New York City
protested unequal working conditions at the Kaiser
Company in Portland, claiming to have been recruited
under the “false pretense” of equal rights to jobs and
training (Pancoast 1978:41). The struggle for equal
employment opportunity in West Coast shipyards lasted
throughout the war. Black workers who refused to join
the Boilermakers’ segregated union auxiliaries were fired
by the hundreds in Portland and Los Angeles. Forming
groups such as the Shipyard Negro Organization for
Victory (with 600 members in 1943), and organizing
along with the NAACP, churches, Black newspapers, and
other local leaders, those workers pressured the Federal
Employment Practices Commission to rectify this indig-
nity. Despite their efforts, the AFL Boilermakers Union,
which covered two-thirds of all shipyard workers in the
nation (6,600 in Portland and 7,200 in Los Angeles),
never complied with the federal ruling to integrate the
union locals (A. Smith and Taylor 1980).
Vanport is now housing many of the colored peo-
ple. They will undoubtedly want to cling to those
residences until they can get something better. No
section of the city has yet been designated as a col-
ored area which might attract them from Vanport.
—W. D. B. Dodson, Chamber of Commerce, 1945
7
Housing was also a critical arena of racial conflict
all along the West Coast, and defense housing, built
with federal dollars, was little different. Black migrants
were more likely to depend on public housing than
were Whites, and “shipyard ghettos” were created in
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Portland
(Johnson 1944; Taylor 1998:268). During the 1940s, the
Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) built and/or man-
aged more defense housing than did any other city in
the nation (18,000 units). Unlike Seattle’s housing
authority, which integrated defense housing, HAP
restricted Black families to certain developments: the vast
majority was housed in segregated sections of Vanport
(6,000 residents) and Guild’s Lake (5,000 residents), both
of which were located outside of the city’s residential
areas. Vanport was hurriedly built in 1942–43 on marsh-
land, and Guild’s Lake was built on industrial land. After
the Kaiser shipyards closed in 1945, many Black families
who could not crowd into Albina, either due to lack of
10 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
resources or the inability to find housing, remained in
Vanport and Guild’s Lake. Comprising more than one-
third of Vanport’s population, Black residents organized
the Vanport Tenants League to demand integrated housing
and fair treatment from HAP and the police (McElderry
1998). HAP and city officials were eager to dismantle the
town, calling it “troublesome” and “blighted” because of
the racially mixed population and “crackerbox” housing
construction (MacColl 1979:595). On Memorial Day
1948, a dike at the Columbia River broke and flooded
Vanport. It killed 15 people and displaced more than
5,300 families, roughly 1,000 of them Black (McElderry
1998). Yet the flood that washed away Vanport did not
solve the housing problem—it swept in the final phase of
“ghetto building” in the central city.
After this disaster, thousands of residents lived in
temporary trailers and barracks on the industrial land of
Swan Island and Guild’s Lake, some for as long as four
years. Hundreds of Black and White families were
stranded without employment or decent housing during
this time. While there was some tension between the
older Black residents and the newcomers, housing dis-
crimination affected them both. During this decade, the
pattern of racial transition in Albina neighborhoods that
would last 50 years was first established: almost in
checkerboard fashion, when Black residents settled in,
White residents would move out. This pattern repeated
itself within the eight neighborhoods of the Albina
District until the early 1990s. Between 1940 and 1950,
the entire Black population of Portland increased by
7,500 residents; about half of these crowded into the
established Black community along Williams Avenue in
Lower Albina. Whites migrated out, causing Blacks to
increase proportionately to roughly one-third of the
population. At this time, the Urban League of Portland,
an interracial social agency, became active in improving
employment and housing opportunities in Portland. In
1945, Dr. DeNorval Unthank, a physician and commu-
nity leader, provided office space for Portland’s new
Urban League branch. Bill Berry, the first executive
director, had been recruited from Chicago for a specific
purpose, according to Shelly Hill, the League’s first
employment specialist: “The president of First National
Bank, who was an Urban League member, told this new
hire, ‘We need a good intelligent Negro to tell these
people to go home.’” But Berry responded that he had
“the wrong person,” because Berry’s job was “to make
Portland a place people can stay in” (Hill 1976).
MAKING ALBINA HOME
The flood washed out segregation in housing in
Vanport. That is when the real estate board decided
that it would sell housing to Negroes only between
Oregon Street which is the Steel Bridge and
Russell from Union to the river. Later they
expanded it to Fremont so they had no choice in
buying a home; these were the only ones available.
—Shelly Hill, 1976
During the 1950s, Albina lost one-third of its popula-
tion and experienced significant racial turnover as
White residents left en masse for the suburbs and Black
residents moved into Albina from temporary war hous-
ing. By decade’s end, there were 23,000 fewer White
and 7,300 more Black residents (total population was
31,510). Lower Albina grew from one-fifth to one-half
Black, and Upper Albina increased from less than one-
20th to nearly one-third Black. As soon as it was polit-
ically feasible in the early 1950s, HAP closed the
remaining Guild’s Lake and Swan Island housing
developments, where former shipyard workers still
remained and Vanport residents had found shelter after
the flood. HAP refused to provide any public housing
alternatives, so Black residents were channeled and
compressed into Albina. Despite the protests of con-
cerned citizens, both Black and White, Portland, like
other northern cities, responded to its growing Black
population by confining them to “crowded, ancient,
unhealthy and wholly inadequate” housing (City Club
of Portland 1957:358). The City Club (a research-
based civic organization established in 1916), in its
role as a watchdog over civic issues, reflects the pro-
gressive, reformist tradition of Portland’s citizenry.
The 1957 report “The Negro in Portland: A Progress
Report, 1945–1957” documented what was generally
understood: 90 percent of Realtors would not sell a
home to a Negro in a White neighborhood. The report
drew attention to the contradiction between the Oregon
Apartment House Association’s claim that 1,000 hous-
ing vacancies existed and the “known scarcity of apart-
ment space for Negroes” (City Club of Portland
1957:361). Dr. Unthank, the only Black member of the
City Club, who 20 years earlier had protested the lack
of public housing alternatives which forced residents to
live in substandard housing, criticized the reticence of
HAP to build public housing in the face of a severe
housing shortage. But HAP and Portland Realtors, like
their national counterparts, had two major reasons for
refusing to integrate neighborhoods. First, they main-
tained that because “Negroes depress property values,”
it was unethical to sell to them in a White neighbor-
hood; and second, if they “sell to Negroes in White
areas, their business will be hurt” (City Club of
Portland 1957:359). In addition, citizens actively
sought out restrictive covenants to prevent any non-
Whites from buying homes in their neighborhoods.
City planners tended to locate urban redevelopment
KAREN J. GIBSON 11
projects in the neighborhood niches Blacks had estab-
lished for themselves, causing residents great disruption
and often relocating the same families more than once.
While racial discrimination was deeply institution-
alized in a variety of arenas, Black Portlanders had a
long history of fighting against it. After decades of
struggle, the 1950s brought success in three areas: pub-
lic accommodations, housing, and employment. Of
West Coast cities, Portland was noted for its segregated
restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, and amusement
parks. Within three blocks of the Union Station, there
were 13 signs that read “We cater to white trade only.”
Shelly Hill said, “The only way we got them down was
by threatening them” (Hill 1976). Veterans returning
from World War II broke out windows that displayed
these signs, and the Negro Taxpayers’ League organized
to boycott those who would not serve them and frequent
the places that would. The Portland branch of the
NAACP, the oldest branch on the West Coast, had
drafted the first public accommodations bill in 1919;
the bill finally passed the legislature in 1953. Otto
Rutherford, then president of the NAACP, said that
there had to be “some funerals” before the bill could
pass, meaning that members of the opposition literally
had to grow old and die before they could get the
needed votes (Tuttle 1990). Rutherford’s parents had
owned a café and barbershop in northwest Portland. He
described one of the ways Blacks got around barriers to
home ownership: since a 1926 state law said that “no
Negro or Oriental could buy property,” his “dad and
uncle had a white attorney who would buy the property
and sell it to them” (Rutherford 1978). In 1959, a Fair
Housing Law that forbade discrimination in the sale,
rental, or lease of housing passed the state legislature.
In 1961, the League of Women Voters conducted a sur-
vey in integrated neighborhoods to evaluate the appli-
cation of the Fair Housing Law. Black residents tended
to be more educated than did their White neighbors.
Four out of five said they had experienced housing dis-
crimination. One Black family claimed that the inabil-
ity to buy homes was compounded by employment
discrimination: “There is a problem of fair and adequate
employment . . . if there was adequate employment, a
Negro could purchase the kind of house he wants”
(League of Women Voters 1962).
In 1949, Oregon passed the Fair Employment
Practices Act in response to pressure from a coalition of
veterans, churches, and labor unions (Hill 1976). This
act was an improvement over a previous version of the
bill, which contained no enforcement provisions.
During the 1950s, Shelly Hill, representing the Urban
League, was instrumental in helping Blacks gain their
first employment opportunities in state and local gov-
ernment, local newspapers, private companies, “the
professions,” and local colleges. The Urban League suc-
ceeded in getting more than 180 employers to hire
Black workers. Portland’s waterfront remained segre-
gated until 1964, when the Longshoremen’s and
Warehousemen’s Union accepted Black workers
(Bosco-Milligan Foundation 1995).
Yet it was difficult for residents, regardless of race,
to save their neighborhoods from the steady march of
progress embodied in the urban renewal bulldozer. In
cities across the nation, urban power brokers, with the
help of the federal government, eagerly engaged in
central-city revitalization after World War II. Luxury
apartments, convention centers, sports arenas, hospi-
tals, universities, and freeways were the land uses that
reclaimed space occupied by relatively powerless resi-
dents in central cities, whether in immigrant White eth-
nic, Black, or skid row neighborhoods. In 1956, voters
approved the construction of the Memorial Coliseum
in the Eliot neighborhood, which destroyed commercial
establishments and 476 homes, roughly half of them
inhabited by African Americans. The Federal Aid
Highway Act of 1956 made funds available to cities
across the nation to whisk suburban residents to and
fro. As a result, several hundred housing units were
demolished in the Eliot neighborhood to make way for
Interstate 5 and Highway 99, both running north/south
through Albina. Displaced residents relocated in a
northeasterly direction, above Fremont Street and
toward Northeast 15th Avenue. Many crowded into
older housing in the Boise and Humboldt neighbor-
hoods, becoming more racially isolated from Whites.
The Housing Act of 1957 gave cities the tools they
needed to achieve the national goal of clearing slums,
and local officials used them by systematically deem-
ing Black neighborhoods “blighted” and in need of
revitalization. Thus, not long after Black Portlanders
got settled in Lower Albina, city leaders were making
plans to convert the land, which was the heart of their
community, into commercial, industrial, and institu-
tional uses. The following statement, from Portland’s
application for federal urban renewal funds, is typical
of the justifications for renewal employed by cities
across the country:
There is little doubt that the greatest concentration
of Portland’s urban blight can be found in the
Albina area encompassing the Emanuel Hospital.
This area contains the highest concentration of
low-income families and experiences the highest
incidence rate of crime in the City of Portland.
Approximately 75% to 80% of Portland’s Negro
population live within the area. The area contains
a high percentage of substandard housing and a
high rate of unemployment. Conditions will not
Figure 2. Russell and Williams Avenues, 1962. This intersection was the heart of Albina’s Black community until the city declared the area blighted
and tore it down. The block where the drug store, shops, and housing once stood now contains a patch of grass. Oregon Historical Society.
12 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
KAREN J. GIBSON 13
improve without a concerted effort by urban
renewal action. The municipal goals as established
by the Community Renewal Program for the City of
Portland further stress the urgent need to arrest the
advanced stages of blight. (Portland Development
Commission 1966:17)
Albina residents organized, seeking to remedy the
problem of aging and declining housing conditions
through rehabilitation, not clearance. While they
would have some success north of Fremont Street
through the Albina Neighborhood Improvement
Program (1961–73), Black residents would lose their
own “Main Street” at the junction of Russell and
Williams Avenues (see Figure 2).
RESHAPING THE COMMUNITY, 1960–80
When you get to feeling locked in—that’s when the
frustrations start.
—Frank Fair, Youth Worker, Church Community
Action Program, 1967 (Bosco-Milligan
Foundation 1995:95)
[Albina] could be not only one of the most accessi-
bly convenient areas of the city, but one of the most
progressive and innovative neighborhoods as well.
(City of Portland Model Cities 1969:2)
During the 1960s, Portland’s African American popula-
tion, although small relative to those in larger cities,
was experiencing the same problems associated with
racial discrimination and spatial segregation found else-
where: high unemployment and occupational segrega-
tion, poverty, overcrowded and low-quality housing,
segregated schools, and tension with police. It seems
that the relationship between the Albina community and
city agencies could be characterized by extremes of
absolute neglect and active destruction. At times when
residents resisted, they got some cooperation and support
from the city, but ultimately they could not trust that it
had their best interests at heart. Redevelopment policies
were a source of deep conflict during the 1960s and
1970s. Albina’s total population shrank by about 5,000,
and neighborhoods experienced more racial transition,
but this time most significantly in Upper Albina. Albina’s
White population dropped by nearly 8,000 residents,
three-quarters from Upper Albina, as Black residents
displaced from Lower Albina moved there. Some fled
the area because of the increased anger of Black resi-
dents, which exploded into riots in 1967 and 1969. The
Emanuel Hospital project, a classic top-down planning
effort, destroyed the heart of the Black community in
Lower Albina during the late 1960s, shifting and
expanding it toward the northeast.
More than 11 hundred housing units were lost in
Lower Albina, and the Black population in Eliot shrank
by two-thirds. Businesses along Williams Avenue such
as the Blessed Martin Day Nursery, the Chat and Chew
Restaurant, and Charlene’s Tot and Teen Shop (already
relocated from the Coliseum area) were decimated to
make way for the hospital (Bosco-Milligan Foundation
1995). By the end of the decade, the center of the Black
community was relocated to a contiguous set of neigh-
borhoods (King, Boise, and Humboldt) in an area of no
more than two and a half square miles, bounded by
Fremont and Killingsworth Avenues on the south and
north and by Mississippi and Northeast 15th Avenues
on the east and west. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
(formerly Union Avenue) ran straight up the middle, and
the largest neighborhood, King, became the center. The
Black presence had tripled in the Irvington, King, and
Woodlawn neighborhoods, making Blacks the majority
group in Albina. The Boise neighborhood was the most
segregated: Black residents comprised 84 percent of its
population, but just 6 percent of the city’s total popula-
tion. Among the six West Coast cities, segregation
between Blacks and Whites in Portland was second only
to that in Los Angeles (Sorensen and Taeuber 1975).
Black leaders, after their experience with urban
renewal in the 1950s, devised strategies to protect, pre-
serve, and enhance their neighborhoods. In 1960,
Mayfield Webb, NAACP president and attorney, along
with clergy and other activists, resisted the Central
Albina Plan, a proposal to clear the entire area below
Fremont Street from the interstate to Martin Luther
King Jr. Boulevard (Bosco-Milligan Foundation 1995).
They secured a commitment from the city to invest in
housing and neighborhood improvements in the area
above Fremont Street, where the Black home ownership
rate was roughly 60 percent. The Albina Neighborhood
Improvement Program (ANIP) brought neighbors
together in a 35-block area, where they rehabilitated
more than 300 homes and built a park named after
Dr. Unthank (see Figure 3). Meanwhile, citizens peti-
tioned the city to extend ANIP activities below Fremont
Street and to change the city’s plan to renew the area,
but city commissioners refused. The Emanuel Hospital
project was in motion and could not be stopped. The
city expected to site a federally supported veterans’ hos-
pital there, and this justified clearance of a massive land
area (76 acres). After the heart of the Black community
was demolished, the federal project fell through, and
large swaths of land lay vacant decades after the renova-
tion of Emanuel Hospital. This was a particularly bitter
pill to swallow for those who had seen the heart of their
neighborhood destroyed. Jobs promised by the hospital
never materialized (see Figure 4). During this decade,
Eliot residents were also relocated for construction of
the school district’s central office and the city’s water
bureau. Nearly four decades later, a Black resident of
gentrified Boise claimed that “a generation of black peo-
ple” had grown up hearing the tale from their parents
and grandparents of the “wicked White people who took
away their neighborhoods” (Sanders 2005).
Urban renewal brutally disrupted various aspects
of residents’ lives: economic, social, psychological,
spiritual. It disrupted their attachment to place and
community. It forced them to start over, often without
adequate compensation for their loss. By 1969, while
middle- and working-class Blacks significantly increased
the number of homes owned in Irvington, King, Sabin,
and Woodlawn, the overall Albina home ownership rate
declined from 57 percent to 46 percent. Urban renewal
and unemployment (12 percent for males and 8 percent
for females) were key factors in the declining home
ownership rate, but the systematic refusal of banks to
14 T
RANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
Figure 3. Neighborhood clean-up by the Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project, 1961–1973 pp.
Oregon Historical Society.
16 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
provide mortgage capital was a pivotal factor. It meant
that prospective buyers could not buy and sellers could
not sell, except if they lent the money themselves. Many
in Albina, Black and White, purchased their homes “on
contract” from the sellers. A 1969 housing survey con-
cluded that “Blacks get bad terms in purchasing. They
usually buy on contract paying 10% interest. It is diffi-
cult for them to get conventional financing. Selling
prices are frequently inflated to black buyers” (Booth
1969:84). The inability to get capital to exchange
homes or invest in improvements quickened the deteri-
oration of the old, often overcrowded, housing stock. In
recognition of the problem, a Black-administered bank,
the Freedom Bank of Finance, opened in 1970.
Venerable F. Booker, the bank president, was fully
aware that the White bankers involved expected it to fail
(Laquedem 2005). At that time, the median value of
homes ($9,350) in Albina was just two-thirds the
median value in the city of Portland.
The affluence of our nation during the 1960s, the
civil rights movement, and civil unrest in urban areas
led the federal government to sponsor a variety of com-
munity development initiatives such as the War on
Poverty and Model Cities. Community action programs
during the War on Poverty were designed to give money
directly to neighborhoods that had been neglected by
local governments. In 1964, Mayfield Webb directed a
neighborhood services center funded by the War on
Poverty, and a number of community action programs
were developed in Albina at this time (Bosco-Milligan
Foundation 1995). Of course, mayors across the nation
were furious at the Johnson administration for circum-
venting their offices and empowering grassroots organ-
izations. Model Cities was the federal response to the
mayors’ complaints. It still required citizen involvement
in the form of “citizen planning boards,” but mayors
fought to retain authority over finance and projects.
While the Portland Development Commission (PDC)
had worked with Albina residents on the ANIP, it did
not involve them in its initial 1967 application and plan-
ning for $15 million in Model Cities money from the
Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD). HUD required public participation in Model
Cities, and Portland’s plan was criticized for merely
“informing” rather than “involving” residents. In a
revised plan that reached the city council in 1968, the
PDC was “shocked” at resident perceptions of the prob-
lems in their neighborhoods, especially because they
“spoke directly about racial discrimination.” By 1969,
the PDC had taken an official position opposing the
plan, in fear that the Citizens’ Planning Board would
assume the primary role in setting housing and devel-
opment policy in northeast Portland. In fact, the PDC
had kept plans for Emanuel Hospital “carefully
reserved” from the Model Cities process “despite bitter
opposition” (Abbott 1983:194–196). Charles Jordan
became the fourth director of the Model Cities program.
He later became the first Black city commissioner in
Portland. While these two federal programs “did not
solve the complex problems of Albina,” they helped
new Black leadership to emerge, and they focused
attention on the problems of Albina (Bosco-Milligan
Foundation 1995:93). However, a shortage of decent
affordable housing, residential segregation, and unem-
ployment remained vexing problems. While a variety of
community-based initiatives began during this period,
including the Albina Corporation (a job-training and
manufacturing firm), the Albina Art Center, the Albina
Yo uth Opportunity School, and the Black Educational
Center, despite these efforts, some residents lost
patience with the status quo.
Black youth in Albina, frustrated with being
“locked in” and occupied by the police, exploded in
riots in 1967 and 1969, accelerating White residential
and business flight (City of Portland Planning Bureau
1991). Riots broke out in cities across the nation in the
summer of 1967. A national commission was formed,
the Kerner Commission, which studied the reasons for
these violent explosions. The City Club of Portland
(1968) issued a report entitled “Problems of Racial
Justice in Portland” as a parallel to the national study. It
concluded the following:
The range of deficiencies and grievances in
Portland is similar to that found by the Kerner
Commission to exist in large cities in general. It
includes discrimination or inadequacies in many
areas: in police attitudes and practices; in adminis-
tration of justice; in unemployment and underem-
ployment; in consumer treatment; in education and
training; in recreation facilities and programs; in
welfare and health; in housing and community
facilities; in municipal services; in federal pro-
grams, and in the underlying attitudes and behavior
of the White community. Thus Portland shares the
common pressing problems and perils. To the
extent that its problems differ from those of Watts,
Newark, or Detroit, the differences are of degree,
not of cause and effect, or urgency. [City Club of
Portland 1968:9]
The report noted that racial residential patterns had
resulted in racially isolated schools; specifically, four
elementary schools were more than 90 percent Black
(Boise, Eliot, Humboldt, and Highland [now named
King]). Nearly half the Black children in Portland
attended these schools. The report drew on analyses of
housing conditions from Model Cities and mentioned
two key elements usually associated with a systematic
KAREN J. GIBSON 17
disinvestment process: absentee landlordism and mort-
gage redlining. These two operate in concert, as redlin-
ing prevents households from owning, and therefore
they have little choice but to rent from absentee land-
lords who often neglect the property and charge high
rent. The report also noted that substandard housing and
negative environmental health conditions were perva-
sive in Albina and that these conditions and their allevi-
ation were made more difficult by absentee ownership.
Black homeowners with equity who wanted to move out
of Albina faced discrimination in their attempts to buy
in other neighborhoods or the suburbs, and those who
stayed in the area had “more than normal difficulty in
obtaining improvement or building loans” (City Club of
Portland 1968). Speculation was noted as a problem as
well in another Model Cities study, which found that
housing investment in Albina was discouraged by the
“speculative attitude of property owners,” residents’
“poor credit,” and “builders’ fear of militant actions” as
a result of the civil unrest a few years earlier (City of
Portland Model Cities 1971:4).
The City Club’s Racial Justice Report urged the
city to “overcome deficiencies in numbers of units and
quality of available housing” and “review and reform
building and sanitary codes, and their administration
and enforcement, on an equitable, nondiscriminatory
basis” (City Club of Portland 1968:52). It noted that
Portland lagged behind other western cities with com-
parably sized Black populations in the development of
public housing. Black residents, it argued, complained
about the “scarcity” of brokers handling rental proper-
ties for African Americans. In some ways, the real estate
industry had not changed its policies from the 1940s—
many brokers continued to discriminate for fear of los-
ing “future business by dealing or listing with Negroes”
(City Club of Portland 1968: 33–36). Despite commu-
nity efforts, Albina was left to predatory lenders, spec-
ulators, and absentee landlords. The spiral of decline
began to manifest itself in the form of dilapidated and
abandoned housing, as Black residents began to relo-
cate in better housing near Albina.
During the 1970s, African Americans across the
nation saw improvements in their economic status as a
result of the civil rights movement and affirmative
action policies in education and employment. For the
first time since the post–World War II period, the trend
of Black population growth in Albina stopped as the
housing market began to open up. Economic gains were
manifested in the number of homeowners in Upper
Albina, which by 1979 exceeded the number of White
homeowners for the first time. Black residents had
taken the opportunity to buy new homes in Woodlawn,
where their home ownership rate was 56 percent, sec-
ond only to Irvington at 81 percent. Their increased
presence in Woodlawn caused many Whites to leave,
making it the last Albina neighborhood to transition to
majority Black. In Lower Albina, the reclamation of
land for commercial and industrial use meant that the
Black population in Eliot declined by 70 percent for the
second decade in a row. The only significant Black pres-
ence was on the east side of Eliot and in Irvington.
Home values in Albina remained just two-thirds of the
city’s median value, and while residents were able to
achieve the rehabilitation of several hundreds of units as
planned through the Model Cities process, this still fell
short of the need (City of Portland Planning Bureau
1977). Although a late 1970s report by the PDC stated
that the “problem of abandoned housing is a new area of
concern for the City,” the PDC would not seriously inter-
vene until the problem hit crisis proportions in the late
1980s (Portland Development Commission 1978:18).
THE ROAD TO ROCK BOTTOM, 1980–90
You’ve got to be a real strong person to live here. If
you have children, I’d advise against it.
—King resident, 1988
7
One mortgage broker, Dominion Capital, Inc., has
set up hundreds of home buyers in risky loans. The
company’s own principals said that they can make
loans because they have little competition from
conventional lenders.
8
During the 1980s, disinvestment in the Albina area con-
tinued until problems became so severe that they finally
became an issue for politicians in 1988. Economic stag-
nation, population loss, housing abandonment, crack
cocaine, gang warfare, redlining, and speculation were
all part of the scene. Neighborhood activists such as
Edna Robertson, who worked in the Model Cities pro-
gram and was the coordinator of the Northeast
Coalition of Neighborhoods, had “raised warning flags
about prostitution, drug dealing, abandoned housing
and gang activity before they became public issues”
(Oliver 1988). Gang members from the Los Angeles
area had maintained a quiet presence in Albina since the
early 1980s, but that changed during the summer of
1987, when competition intensified between the Crips
and the Bloods over crack cocaine. Dozens of dealers
from the Los Angeles area had begun streaming into
Portland in search of new markets. It helped that they
could sell crack for two to three times the price it
fetched in southern California, and that the local police
were unprepared for them (Ellis 1987).
Although 20 years earlier the City Club had criti-
cized the city for its neglect of this area, an Oregonian
journalist called Albina a “forgotten stepchild of city
18 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
planning and economic development efforts” (Durbin
1988b). Black residents who could afford to move left
the area, while those who could not stayed behind
and lived with the consequences. During the 1980s,
Irvington, King-Sabin, Humboldt, and Boise experienced
significant declines in the Black population (see Figure 5).
By the end of the decade, the proportion of Black
Portlanders in Albina had shrunk by a more than a fifth,
from 49 percent to 38 percent. The racial succession
process that began in the 1940s finally came to an end,
except in the Woodlawn neighborhood, where the Black
population increased. Woodlawn borders the northern-
most edge of the city, at the “dead end barrier” of the
Columbia floodplain (Abbott 1985:6). The long process
of moving the Black community northward, which
began around 1910, as Eddie Watson said, when they
were first “switched out” of northwest Portland, now
culminated with residents at a physical dead end.
In terms of housing and neighborhood conditions,
Albina hit rock bottom in the 1980s. The Albina popu-
lation had thinned by nearly 27 thousand people since
1950. The value of homes dropped to 58 percent of the
city’s median. In fact, the decline was so sharp that nine
neighborhoods received a special reassessment of prop-
erty; some homes sold for half their assessed value.
Absentee landlordism reached its height by 1989, when
only 44 percent of homes in Albina were owner occu-
pied. The vast majority of the change in housing occu-
pancy among Blacks in Upper Albina (96 percent) and
Lower Albina (63 percent) represented Black owners
selling homes. Some of this was due to generational
change: many of the war migrants who came in the 1940s
were now at the end of their lives, and their children had
moved on. White homeowners also left in large num-
bers, especially in Upper Albina. The decline in popula-
tion and owner occupancy can be explained by a
number of factors. Certainly the economic stagnation
that affected Albina beginning in the 1970s, and hit the
entire state hard during the 1980s, explains part of it.
The crack epidemic that devastated many communities
nationwide also hit Portland in the mid-1980s. A recov-
ering crack addict, Harrison Danley, compared the epi-
demic to the 1960s civil rights era: “We’re not burning
down houses now. We’re burning down the fabric of our
society” (Durbin 1988c). Gang shootings became more
and more frequent from the middle to late 1980s. Drug
dealing became a way for those out of work to make
quick money, and the abandoned houses provided a
place to both use and abuse. Houses would be stripped
of any valuable materials by addicts or transients in
need of money—doorknobs, light fixtures, wiring.
But the raiding of abandoned houses was only one
type of plundering going on in Albina; other forces had
been invisibly preying on the neighborhood for decades.
Back in 1968, Black homeowners had complained
about access to capital for home purchase and rehabili-
tation. In 1988, evidence of their complaints would
come to light. The King and Boise neighborhoods,
which comprised 1 percent of the city’s land, contained
26 percent of the city’s abandoned housing units. The
banking industry had left a vacuum in the community
when it decided not to lend money on properties below
$40,000. The rationale that the bank does not make
money on small loans is a poor excuse for a policy of
Figure 5. Number of people transitioning in and out of neighborhoods that
experienced higher than normal population changes.
Racial Transition in Impacted Neighborhoods, 1980s and 1990s
-1000 -750 -500 -250 0 250 500 750 1000
Eliot E
Irvington
King-Sabin
Humboldt
Boise
Woodlawn
Neighborhoods
Black 80s Black 90s
White 90s
KAREN J. GIBSON 19
blatant discrimination against Black communities
where property values are relatively low (Squires 1994).
The only kinds of sales that occurred for years in Albina
were through privately financed deals, often with terms
considered predatory. As a Boston neighborhood
activist articulated in this article’s opening quotation,
some neighborhoods are “fed,” while others are “bled”
(Medoff and Sklar 1994:33). Conventional bankers had
effectively redlined Albina—bled the life out of it. This
led to housing abandonment at a major scale. The worst
neighborhoods were Boise, Eliot, and King, with more
than 10 percent of the single-family homes vacant.
Edna Robertson said that “absentee landlords were buy-
ing up houses as tax write-offs and putting no money
into them” (Durbin 1988a). In 1988, she spent more
than three months surveying 11 neighborhoods and
counted a total of 900 abandoned buildings. This was
the final stage of the devalorization cycle.
Activists such as Ron Herndon of the Black United
Front had long urged the city to do something about ris-
ing crime and housing disinvestment, but their voices
were not heard until the 1988 mayoral campaign of Bud
Clark (Austin and Gilbert 1988). That same year, the
Portland Organizing Project, an interracial faith-based
alliance, began legal challenges against the lending
practices of local banks, using the newly fortified
Community Reinvestment Act. Eventually this issue
caught the attention of the local newspaper. In
September 1990, as a result of a three-month investiga-
tion into bank mortgage lending practices in northeast
Portland, the Oregonian published a series of articles
called “Blueprint for a Slum” (Lane and Mayes 1990).
The series documented the lack of conventional mort-
gage loans and predatory lending practices in the
Albina community. In 1987, all the banks and thrifts in
Portland made just ten mortgage loans to a four-census
tract area constituting the heart of the Albina commu-
nity. The following year, they made nine loans. This
was one-tenth the average number of loans per tract in
the metropolitan area (Lane 1990b). This explained
the flight of many Black middle-class households
from the area. It also explained why predatory lenders
and slumlords had come to fill the void left by conven-
tional lenders. Lincoln Loan and Dominion Capital
were two of the biggest companies “selling” homes to
unaware consumers, using land sales contracts that kept
real ownership in their hands. Lincoln Loan rented most
of the 200 houses it owned in Albina but sold the ones that
needed the most work to unsuspecting buyers (Mayes
1994). Lincoln Loan not only lent money to buy homes
but also lent homeowners money to fix up the homes.
When the owners wanted to cash out and move on, they
would find out that they didn’t really own the house after
all. Dominion Capital owned more than 350 houses in
inner northeast Portland and “sold” them to buyers,
sometimes even when previous investors still had title.
The scam worked as follows: Dominion would buy
property at low prices, get phony appraisals that over-
valued the property, and entice buyers into sales con-
tracts with high-interest mortgage loans containing a
balloon payment clause, which required that the mort-
gage be paid in full after a short period. Unsuspecting
buyers who were unable to meet the balloon payment
would be evicted. Dominion would then find another
family to swindle. Shortly after “Blueprint for a Slum”
ran in the paper, the state attorney general investigated
Dominion, and the owners (one was named Cyril Worm)
were sentenced to prison on 32 counts of fraud and rack-
eteering. Albina had become a host for predators
because of the void in conventional mortgage lending.
Many neighborhood activists felt that these people had
done more to hasten the deterioration of Albina than the
crack dealers and gangbangers. Herndon, lamenting the
decline in neighborhood stability that resulted from the
departure of the Black middle class, pointed to the
bankers: “Had they insisted that fairness be exercised—
almost single-handedly they could have stabilized that
community a long time ago” (Lane 1990b). Yet the state
had also failed to protect its consumers.
RECLAMATION AND TRANSFORMATION,
1990–2000
I can guarantee you they are paying more in rent
than they would to buy a house in this neighborhood.
—Ora Hart, Realtor
9
We fought like mad people to keep crime out of
here. Had we not fought, I don’t know what this area
would’ve eventually been. But the newcomers
haven’t given us credit for it. I envisioned cleaning
up the neighborhood, making the neighborhood liv-
able for all of us. . . . We never envisioned that the
government would move in and mainly assist
Whites. They came in to the area, younger Whites.
[The Portland Development Commission] gave
them business and home loans and grants, and made
it comfortable and easy for them to come. I didn’t
envision that those young people would come in
with what I perceive as an attitude. They didn’t come
in “We want to be a part of you.” They came in with
the idea, “We’re here and we’re in charge.” . . . In the
past, Blacks and Whites worked very strongly
together. We were one. This thing that happened in
the last ten years has been most disappointing, most
uncomfortable. It’s like the revitalization of racism.
—Charles Ford, Boise resident since 1951
10
20 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
In the 1990s, for the first time in 50 years, the popula-
tion of Albina grew. The pattern of racial transition was
reversed, as Whites reclaimed the housing they had left
decades earlier, enticed by the Victorian housing stock,
affordable prices, and reinvestment efforts the city had
been making. The same four areas Blacks left in signif-
icant numbers in the 1980s (Irvington, King-Sabin,
Humboldt, and Boise) continued to experience a major
decline in population. For the first time, too, Blacks left
Woodlawn. Whites moved into these neighborhoods in
greater-than-average numbers—and they finally stopped
leaving Woodlawn (see Figure 5). And for the first time
since 1960, Blacks were no longer a clear majority in
any Albina neighborhood except on the northwest side
of Eliot (an area that had lost 86 percent of its housing
units since 1960 and had a tiny population of 200).
Realtors used the art galleries popping up on Alberta
Street, a Black business corridor, to aggressively market
the King-Sabin area as the “Alberta Arts District,” and
it saw a rapid influx of White residents. Joe’s Place, at
18th and Alberta, known in part for its great jukebox,
was the last Black-owned bar on Alberta and one of the
few remaining in Portland. Other clubs such as Marty’s
Place, Stax, The Silk Hat, and Theme closed down dur-
ing the late 1980s and early 1990s. Other ethnic groups,
largely Hispanics, increased their presence in Albina,
and these changes meant that the overall racial and eth-
nic composition of Albina was transformed from Black
majority to a three-way mixture, with no majority.
These population trends explain the large decreases in
segregation indices that ranked Portland in the top ten
nationally. For the first time in 60 years, since the
color line was hardened in 1940, segregation fell
below a level considered high. At the turn of the
century, less than one-third of Black Portlanders called
Albina home.
During the 1990s, the City of Portland put con-
certed effort into the revitalization of Albina. In
response to complaints of neighborhood activists and
the recommendations of a citywide task force report on
abandoned housing, the City began using building code
enforcement to confront the extreme level of housing
abandonment (City of Portland 1988). It gave more than
100 foreclosed homes to the Northeast Community
Development Corporation for rehabilitation through the
federal Nehemiah grant program. It stepped up
Community Development Block Grant and other
spending to support nonprofit housing development. It
shamed the bankers, who had been redlining the com-
munity, into supporting the establishment of the
Portland Housing Center to help boost home ownership
among low-income households. It even set up a non-
profit community development corporation to take over
Dominion’s portfolio of 354 single-family homes.
Gretchen Kafoury, former state legislator and
county commissioner, ran for city council on a housing
platform and began work in 1991 at these activities.
One of the White progressives who in the 1960s made
her home in integrated Irvington, she never thought she
would see an end to vacant and abandoned buildings in
inner Northeast and North Portland “in her lifetime”
(Kafoury 1998). But she has. Grassroots activists forced
local government to stop the bleeding, but this turned
the redlining to greenlining. Of course, the flood of
White homebuyers would not have occurred without the
1990s economic boom that raised home prices in all
Figure 6. Home values tripled and sometimes quadrupled during the 1990s.
Trend in Median Home Values in Gentrified Neighborhoods
$0
$50,000
$100,000
$150,000
$200,000
$250,000
Eliot E Irvington King-Sabin Humboldt Boise Woodlawn
1990 2000
KAREN J. GIBSON 21
other quarters of the central city. A booming economy,
cheap mortgage money, bargain-basement property, and
pent-up demand coincided to transform pockets of
Albina in three or four years from very affordable to out
of reach. At the beginning of the decade, the worry was
abandonment; at the end, it was the preservation of
affordable housing.
By 1999, Blacks owned 36 percent fewer homes,
while Whites had 43 percent more than a decade earlier.
The decline was largely because Blacks sold their
homes in Irvington, the most affluent neighborhood in
Albina. Although overall the Black home ownership
rate increased from 45 percent to 49 percent, it was
because the proportion of Black renters declined.
Whites bought homes, displacing many low-income
folks to relatively far-flung areas where they could
afford the rent. The White home ownership rate esca-
lated from its rock bottom of 44 percent to 61 percent in
just ten years. Housing values, as a percentage of the city
median, rose significantly, from 58 percent to 71 percent
(see Figure 6). This sharp rebound in Albina property
values, which corresponds with the increase in White
home ownership, reveals the continuing correlation
between property valuation and race.
This was made starkly clear to Susan Hartnett, a
White Chicago transplant who purchased a home in
Eliot during the 1980s. Banks refused to lend to her
because the mortgage amount was below their mini-
mum, so she and her husband bought the $15,000 home
with savings. After using credit cards and pension funds
to rehabilitate it, they tried again to get a mortgage, this
time for $43,000. When the loan officer and appraiser
came out to inspect the home, the appraiser said it was
a “nice place” that would appraise at a “much higher
value in another neighborhood,” but that he would have
a hard time finding comparable sales. When Ms.
Hartnett suggested other neighborhoods, the appraiser
said “No, no, that would not work.” Then the loan offi-
cer said, “It’s because there are a lot more Blacks here
than in those other neighborhoods.” Ms. Hartnett was so
surprised by the remark that she “nearly fell off the
porch” (Lane 1990a).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The larger community doesn’t see a lot of value in
this community—but before this crack epidemic
you could walk into any part of inner-North and
Northeast Portland anytime, anywhere.
—James Mason, King resident
11
I am hurt, to the core. But I’m not mad. My hurt
made me recognize the problems we had 40 years
ago still exist. We thought that we had achieved.
We thought we’d bridged that. Little did we
know—look at us today. We have to go back and
start all over again.
—Charles Ford, Boise resident
12
In the late 1980s, when Portland’s Bureau of Buildings
began to execute its charge from the council to
“research and develop a range of proactive housing
code enforcement programs,” it met with neighborhood
associations; city, state, and federal agencies; housing
industry groups; and individuals (City of Portland
Department of Public Safety 1989). The city faced
strong opposition from industry groups such as the
Oregon Apartment Association, Multifamily Housing
Council, Board of Realtors, Institute for Real Estate
Management, Oregon Mortgage Bankers Association,
and the Association of Home Inspectors, which were
concerned about the business impacts of the regulations
and fees associated with code enforcement. After all,
these entities had been operating virtually unrestricted
for many years in a market they had captured for profit
taking. Only investors could purchase homes for cash,
since there was no conventional financing. One resident
could borrow $25,000 for a car but could not get
$16,000 for a house (Lane 1990b). Investors gobbled up
properties at bargain rates, earning their money back
with a few years of rental payments from low-income
residents with few choices. Speculation and slum-
lordism flourished in this unregulated environment. One
of the worst slumlords owned more than 100 houses and
made a living renting to the poor and vulnerable
(Kafoury 2005). Houses changed hands often, fre-
quently with land-sales contracts that went unrecorded,
making it difficult for the Bureau of Buildings to iden-
tify owners to make needed repairs. Houses would be
milked for profits until they were abandoned.
According to Margaret Mahoney, Bureau of Buildings
director, most owners of abandoned houses were people
she called “close absentee owners—people who live
somewhere in the metropolitan area and own between
15 and 40 run-down houses that they bought cheap in
the 1970s.” Also according to Mahoney, some were
“responsible property owners” who were just “exhausted”
by the problems associated with gang and drug activity
in the 1980s (Durbin 1988a).
Yet the degree of fraud and deception perpetrated
on the people in Albina was remarkable: hundreds
rented substandard housing, while others paid high
rates and were swindled out of ownership through
deceptive contracts. One couple took both mortgage
and rehabilitation loans from Lincoln Loan, only to find
out, when they tried to sell the home, that they did not
own it. The City of Portland, when it finally got
22 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 VOL. 15(1)
involved, implemented policies that transferred much of
the housing into the hands of nonprofit housing agen-
cies. It also targeted the top 12 offenders when it finally
intervened on the issue of vacant housing (Kafoury
2005). The International City/County Management
Association (ICMA) wrote a case study of Portland’s
policies for revitalizing vacant housing, declaring it a
national model. Yet the case study does not discuss the
racial transition, housing segregation, discrimination,
redlining, property speculation, and government neglect
that contributed to abandonment. It glosses over the
tumultuous history of Albina, only referencing race as a
“problem” for the community: “Racial tensions, which
began in the 1960s and continued in the 1970s, further
weakened the area, encouraging the flight of many
remaining businesses” (ICMA 2002:27).
This investigation into Albina’s past has revealed a
much more complicated story behind its decline. It is
important for the new homeowners of Albina to under-
stand that some people paid a price to keep property
values low. It is also important for policy makers to
realize that home ownership, prior to the mid-1990s,
was affordable to African American families; it just was
not permitted or promoted. In the late 1990s, there was
a flurry of government activity to help renters, most of
them Black, being displaced from Albina. Ironically,
this analysis reveals that an earlier intervention might
have prevented homeowners from being displaced in
the 1980s, when many were virtually forced to leave to
find mortgage capital and to escape gang warfare. But
as James Mason said, the “larger community” did not
“see a lot of value” in Albina neighborhoods. Albina
residents did see value and fought to preserve their
community. This is evident in the continuous thread of
resistance dating from the 1930s, when Dr. DeNorval
Unthank challenged city housing policies, to the late
1980s, when Edna Robertson counted the number of
abandoned houses in several neighborhoods. Today,
resistance against the impact of gentrification contin-
ues. Mr. Charles Ford is hurt, not angry, at what he calls
“revitalized racism,” yet he appears willing to “start all
over again” to build interracial relationships. What this
will portend for community viability and stable integra-
tion is a question for future analysis.
NOTES
1. Medoff and Sklar 1994:33.
2. Massey and Denton 1993:19.
3. N. Smith et al. 2001:498.
4. MacColl 1979:539–540.
5. The map in Figure 1 shows the neighborhood
boundaries; these population and housing data are from
the census tract boundaries, which are slightly narrower,
with Mississippi and Albina Avenues on the west, and
Northeast 15th Avenue on the east. Only a tiny portion
of Vernon is in the study area, and, therefore, it is not
mentioned in the article.
6. Chuang et al. 2005.
7. MacColl 1979:596.
8. Durbin 1988c.
9. Lane 1990b.
10. Lane 1990c.
11. Barnett 2005.
12. Durbin 1988c.
13. Barnett 2005.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Leanne Serbulo, Bill Gibson, Karla
Slocum, Lee D. Baker, Elvin Wyly, Peter Drier, Roman
Cybriwsky, and the anonymous reviewers for their help-
ful comments. I also thank Jenny Bajwa and Irina
Sharkova for their assistance with the historical census
data. This research was partially supported by the
Diversity Action Council and the Office of Research
and Sponsored Projects at Portland State University.
