.18_The Gentrification of Albina
Factors leading to the contemporary gentrification of inner North and Northeast Portland's historically Black neighborhoods
Factors leading to the contemporary gentrification of inner North and Northeast Portland's historically Black neighborhoods
History is not static. Social trends increase, decrease, and change over time. It is important in geography to track current trends within the context of historical patterns. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow for new quantitative research options, such as spatial analysis. This new technology allows for quantifiable methods to be applied to demographic research quickly and efficiently, while also integrating the data into maps and rendering large amounts of data into a medium that is visual understandable to a general audience. Using new 2020 US Census data, this project will explore and elaborate the demographic shifts seen in the gentrification of Albina neighborhoods in North and Northeast Portland. This storymap will build on the urban studies work of Dr. Gibson, while incorporating context from local historians and discourse from the field of race-relations. In doing so it will help to fill the gap in academic literature regarding the experiences of marginalized ethnic communities in the Portland area, in this case the historic Black neighborhoods of Upper and Lower Albina. By the conclusion of the project, this paper will discuss if the trends first observed in Bleeding Albina are still being reproduced in the contemporary urban space.
Map showing "Redlining" of Albina neighborhoods
Early settlement of Oregon territory was often done in line with the strong political ideologies of the mid-19th century. Many of Portland’s founding fathers were pro-segregationists from the southern slave states who spoke publically about making Oregon into a white-only region. Three Black exclusion Laws were passed to restrict the emigration of Black people into the territory in 1844. Despite Oregon joining the Union in 1857 as a free state, voters simultaneuously approved a clause in the state constitution that prohibited Black people from owning property, making contracts, or even living in the state of Oregon. Although enforcement was inconsistent, the Black Exclusion Laws set a precedence and Portland maintained a tiny Black population prior to the turn of the century. During this time, Portland’s small Black population was mostly made up of men who worked as porters on the Pullman railroad cars. These Black citizens tended to live close to the Union Station on the westside, between the Broadway Bridge and the Steel Bridge.
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" (Gibson, 2007).
By the 1910’s, Portland’s Black community had been pushed across the river from Old Town to what would become known as Lower Albina. This neighborhood was just east of where the Willamette river veers northwest from its previously North-South direction. The Lower Albina area at the time included the Elliot and Llyod District census blocks. During this time period Black residents faces strong discrimination including the passage in 1919 of rules by the Portland Realty Board that forbidding real estate agents from selling Black and Asian American people houses in “white” neighborhoods. This ruling gave rise to three periods of “ghetto-building” between 1910-1940, during the 1940s, and in the 1950s.
The Albina Neighborhood census blocks shown in Figure 1.
During the 1910-1940 “ghetto-building” period, Portland’s Black residents, a population numbering approximately 1,900 souls, were segregated into a two-mile-long by one-mile-wide area of Lower Albina now in the Elliot census block. In the second phase of “ghetto-building” the Boise and Elliot neighborhoods, as well as the temporary boom-town of Vanport were used as segregated housing for workers at local industries related to World War II. When flooding destroyed Vanport in 1948, the Black residents there were forced to relocate to Albina, swelling the population of Upper Albina, north of Fremont Street.
By 1960, 80% of Black residents of Portland lived in the 4.2 square mile region of Albina. During the late 1960’s the Portland chapter of the Black Panthers formed in the Albina neighborhood. One of the major conflicts between the city of Portland and the black residents that participated in Black Panther organizing was the redevelopment policies, often referred to as removal of “urban blight”. Large swathes of the Eliot neighborhood were condemned, these areas included much in-use residential housing, thriving business districts, and even the community hospital and dental clinic set up by Portland Black Panther chapter. Despite strong, organized resistance from the black community throughout the second half of the 1960's, the Portland Development Commission used bureaucratic chicanery to condemn and demolish 76 acres of land around the Emanuel Hospital for a planned expansion that never materialized. Much of the residential and commercial properties cleared in this period would remain empty lots until the gentrification of the 2000s. It was also during this time that the city cleared residential neighborhoods in the Eliot area for the Portland Public School District office and well as a city water bureau building. Despite promises of relocation funding and reimbursements from the PDC, the city of Portland “undercompensated or simply denied benefits to save city and federal funds, which further inflamed tensions between the city governments and the northeast [Albina] neighborhoods” (Burke, 2016).
By the 1980s, despite decades of nominal desegregation efforts, most notably the official ending of redlining of Albina and other economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, roughly half of all Black residents in Portland still lived within the Albina neighborhoods. Long-running issues like dilapidated rentals, the acres of empty lots in Eliot neighborhood, and housing abandonment, were combined in the 1980’s with developing issues of the time such as the War on Drugs and economic stagnation. King and Boise neighborhoods alone, only about 1% of the total geographic area of Portland, contained roughly one-in-four of the abandoned housing units in the city. As gangs from L.A. expanded their trafficking operations north to Portland, Albina became known as a nexus of gang-related crimes including drug sales, prostitution, and shootings. Those who could afford to move away often did. By 1990, Irvington, King-Sabin, Humboldt, and Boise neighborhoods all experienced severe decline in the Black population, from 49% to 38%.
During the 1990s, the city of Portland began reinvesting in the Albina neighborhood. One form this revitalization took was through enforcement of city building codes to crack down on dilapidated and abandoned housing. The city also made use of federal opportunities such as Community Development Block Grants and Community Development Corporations. Such infrastructure investments coincided with a national-wide economic boom that helped raise the home values in the Albina neighborhood to that more akin to the rest of the city. This rise in property values, perhaps not coincidentally, occurred at the same time that white residency in Albina went from its lowest point of 44% up to 67% by the end of the decade, predominantly with white home-owners replacing Black renters. The loss of renters in the 90’s led to a superficially deceptive statistic, that of a rise in Black home-ownership in Albina from 45% to 49%. As property values increased, renters moved neighborhoods to more distant from the urban core. In less than a decade property concerns in the Albina neighborhoods shifted from abandoned buildings to affordable housing.
By the year 2000, Black Portlanders made up less than one-third of the residents of the Albina neighborhoods. It was during this time that several of the commercial districts in the Albina area began to grow again. Now, however, they catering to a new demographic. Most notably on Mississippi Avenue, Williams Avenue and Alberta Street, where nightclubs, punk venues, and locally-owned grocery stores once sate between rows of empty shopfronts, by the late 2000's, art galleries, yoga studios, boutique gift shops and trendy restaurants began to push out the older businesses. Not only did the storefronts change, but up and down Williams Avenue, where in the 1990’s only convenience stores and outreach churches broke up the acreage of empty lots left over from the Emmanuel Hospital expansion project, by the late 2000's luxury mid-rise condimuniums were transmuting formerly blighted Eliot neighborhood into a well-heeled hipster paradise.
While many residents feel that Albina is a safer neighborhood than it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, none can deny that the cost of such demographic changes was paid predominately by long-term residents and the economically disadvantaged. Despite promises that social improvements would be felt by all, many of the former Black resident of Albina now live east of 82nd Avenue, in former white-flight suburbs built around the same time as Albina’s “ghetto-building” period. These neighborhoods often have had even less public investment in infrastructure than Albina did pre-gentrification, most notable the lack of sidewalks, traffic control, & public transportation. This means that the gentrification of Albina neighborhoods has not materially benefited or improve living conditions for Portland’s Black residents in a demonstrable way. Rather than social equity, it seems a new “separate but equal” system may be replacing former racial segregation in Portland with a new inequality, economic segregation.
This map shows the North Portland neighborhoods of Albina and surrounding census tracts as of the 2010 census. The Legend shows Black population as a percentage of total population.
This map shows the North Portland neighborhoods of Albina and surrounding census tracts as of the 2010 census. Legend shows Black population clustering within the Albina neighborhoods using the Moran I method.
The map to the left shows Black population as a percentage of total population. The map on the right shows statistical clustering of the Black population using the Moran I method.
This map shows the North Portland neighborhoods of Albina and surrounding census tracts. Legend shows Black population density as Hot Spots and Cold Spots using the Getis-Ord method
The map to the left shows Black population as a percentage of total population as of the 2010 census. The map on the right shows statistical clustering of the Black population density as Hot Spots and Cold Spots using the Getis-Ord method.
References
Burke, L. N. N., & Jeffries, J. L. (2016). The Portland Black Panthers: empowering Albina and remaking a city .
Gibson, K. J. (2007). Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940-2000. Transforming Anthropology , 15 (1), 3–25.
Goodling, Erin, Green, Jamaal, & McClintock, Nathan. (2015). Uneven development of the sustainable city: Shifting capital in Portland, Oregon. Urban Geography, 36(4), 504-527.
Nokes, G. (2020, July 06). Black exclusion laws in Oregon. Retrieved March 17, 2021, from https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#.YE6V7NxlBhE