Knight investment follows history of disinvestment in Portland’s Albina neighborhood

Phil Knight, the billionaire co-founder of Nike, recently announced a new $400 million investment fund to support Black residents of Portland. The gift is meant to fund education services, art programs and other projects for Black Portlanders in the inner North and Northeast neighborhoods once known as Albina. Albina was the center of Black society and business in the 1950s, but by the 1980s it had been decimated after city-backed urban renewal projects leveled homes and community hubs. Karen Gibson, an emeritus professor at Portland State University, joins us with a history of the Albina neighborhood.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, Nike co-founder Phil Knight announced a new $400 million investment fund to support Black residents of Portland. The gift is meant to fund education services, art programs and other projects for Black Portlanders. But this effort is not just about people, it’s about place: the inner North and Northeast neighborhoods, once known as Albina, that were the hub of Black life and commerce and culture in Portland in the middle of the last century. We wanted to use this opportunity to revisit the history of Albina, so we have invited Karen Gibson to join us. She is an emeritus professor at Portland State University who wrote a seminal account of the area. It’s called, “Bleeding Albina: A History of Disinvestment, 1940-2000″. She traced the city’s policies as they wavered between, as she put it, extremes of absolute neglect and active destruction. Karen Gibson, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Karen Gibson: Thank you. Hello.

Miller: Why did you want to write this particular history?

Gibson: Well, I wanted to write it because I found, when I moved to Portland, it to be a fascinating case because I had been studying Black poverty and the perpetuation of Black poverty and racial inequality in neighborhoods, how spatial mechanisms work to perpetuate poverty. And I had studied the Detroit and Pittsburgh metropolitan areas that have much larger Black populations. And when I got invited to join the Faculty in Urban Studies –

Miller: At PSU.

Gibson: At PSU. I said, ‘OK, I’m coming to Portland. I’m gonna, I wanna see what’s going on here.’ And there was such a tiny Black population of 33,000, highly segregated in Northeast Portland. And yet there were the same characteristics and conditions that you found in large metro areas. High unemployment, high dropout rates, crack cocaine, underground economy, high levels of segregation. And so I thought, this is a fascinating miniature case study to look at the mechanisms by which power, economic power relations exist through space, to concentrate, segregate, and keep Black people poor.

Miller: Let’s go back in history, as your paper did. When did Albina start to become the epicenter of Black Portland?

Gibson: I would say that it was really as early as 1910. Black people that were here, the very small population, was being pushed out of Northwest Portland into the Albina District, across the steel bridge.

Miller: How did that pushing work? What were the mechanisms of being forced at that point from Northwest Portland, north and east, to cross [the] river up into Albina?

Gibson: Well, I didn’t study those mechanisms as carefully as I did on the east side. But, I have a quote in the paper by a gentleman who talked about being pushed out of Northwest Portland. I think Black business was discouraged. And so, probably oppression through police, I would imagine. And rental discrimination, or ownership discrimination. At that time, actually, most African-Americans lived all around the city. But especially with the Great Depression, the economics were such that people were really pushed across the river, the decline in Northeast. But earlier, I think in the early 1900s, Mount Olivet [Baptist Church] was built by the Black community over there on 1st and Skyler, I believe NE 1st. So that was the early beginning.

But during the war when there was a huge influx of Black people here along with white people, right? There’s a quote in there from the Urban League gentleman, I’m forgetting his name right now, that said that the real estate community which has always been in control in Portland, had designated an area between the Steel and Broadway Bridges where Black people could live. So they landed over there in Northeast, which is Elliott, where now the Memorial Coliseum is. And then that was targeted for urban renewal.

Miller: Which we’ll get to in just a minute or so. You mentioned the war effort, in shipbuilding especially, at Vanport, which was a huge magnet for Black and white workers. Then came the flood, a couple years after the war. What did the end of Vanport mean for Albina?

Gibson: So you got two processes going on. Albina was designated – again, you have to know that this is a relationship of social control, social and economic control. So the Black leadership, the Black institutions which we refer to now as, this is institutional racism, right? It’s organized. Planned. Vanport is Vanport because the city of Portland’s housing leaders and officials did not want any public housing in the city, especially if Blacks occupied it. So they were not allowed into the city. They were put in Guild’s Lake. 5,000 Black people lived in Guild’s Lake, too, over there in Northwest Industrial District when the flood [happened]. So the housing in Vanport was segregated, but the schools were not. So you did get some mixing there. And that’s still reflected, I think, culturally in North Portland between Blacks and whites, that experience. When the flood happened, many were given train tickets out of town. Blacks were discouraged from staying here, and actually Black people left Portland in greater numbers than they left any other, or [in a] greater proportion, than any other West Coast city.

Miller: In other words, in Seattle or San Francisco or in L.A. people who’d come, Black people who’d come from Texas, or the South, they were much more likely to stay in those cities than they were to stay in Portland.

Gibson: Yes. It was because this city, I have a quote in the paper, was considered just a Klan state, just like any place in the South. So, with the flood, people, those that did not leave town, were channeled into the Albina district. That was prior to, just about the time that urban renewal is kicking up for Memorial Coliseum.

Miller: What are the ways in which federal policies led to, or encouraged, racist housing policies?

Gibson: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question. I mean, the real estate and building industries have … they’re today still some of the biggest lobbyists to, to the Feds. And so they actually designed policy. Bankers told the Federal Housing Agencies, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, the FHA, how to segregate, why to redline. It was their information that was passed to the Feds, and the Feds would then implement. This happens on the state and local level as well. This occurred in the 20s with the Great Migration in northern cities as well. But World War II brought Black populations into northern cities all across the country. And so, here after the war, we needed housing, there was a big housing crisis. Suburban housing was gonna be built. So the notion that Blacks and whites must be separate so in order to retain neighborhood property values, that was implemented across the country, right?

Miller: So the white real estate establishments, their argument was if neighborhoods become racially mixed, meaning if Black people move into white neighborhoods, then property values will go down. And that’s bad for everyone, slash us. That was their argument? But which turned into official policy.

Gibson: Yes, that’s right. And that was challenged here locally, you had some spunky people here. Blacks and whites who would challenge these notions. The Urban League joined with the National League, the local League of Women Voters. They did surveys in Albina and found that no, the property values had not declined. Blacks were actually more educated in the neighborhoods that whites lived in, here in Portland. That was the philosophy of racial separation at this time. You figure, this is the 40s and 50s, and Oregon, you must understand, is very much a Southern policy influenced state, right? Blacks were completely excluded from this state. But still, the notion that neighborhoods should be integrated was totally off the table. To have a good neighborhood, it should be 100% white to retain property values.

One thing I learned recently - I don’t do research anymore - but one thing I found out is that the 1919 declaration of the Portland Realty Board that it would not sell homes to Blacks or Asians, Chinese and Japanese, was actually based on a fear of infiltration in Irvington of Chinese people. So partly that’s why it’s always been Negroes and Asian-Americans that promoted this. So it’s whiteness that helps retain property values. And this is true today, right? We have cases where appraisals of Black homes are less than white homes. People take their Black decorations down and pretend whites live there and they’ll get a higher appraisal. So this is institutionalized racism, and it persists. And it’s the kind of thing that many people don’t want us to learn about anymore.

Miller: We’ve been focusing so far on the history of housing segregation codified in federal, and state, and local laws and practices. But at the same time this was happening, and Black Portlanders were essentially forced to live in a very circumscribed part of Portland. That part was being targeted to be torn up by city planners to make way for all kinds of things. This is known as urban renewal, a phrase that means almost nothing in terms of its actual words. Can you give us a sense for the scale of the destruction that we’re talking about, to make way for Memorial Coliseum, that you mentioned, or I-5, or an Emanuel hospital expansion that basically never materialized, and the Portland Public Schools headquarters, and on and on. I mean, how many homes and lives are we talking about?

Gibson: Well, I forget the actual number of homes. I think there was something like 476 homes in Lower Albina that were torn down. The Emanuel Hospital project was 76 acres cleared. Black people called it Negro Removal. And this happened across the country, in cities across the country. It was federal policy. Feds gave a good chunk of money on the dollar to have these areas torn down. Where Blacks had been allowed to live in central cities, the housing was already dilapidated, it was allowed to decline. And there was a competition with suburbs by cities. So the cities had to reinvigorate places in order to keep a middle-class population, to keep suburbanites coming downtown. So they built convention centers, luxury housing, basketball stadiums, and theaters, and those kinds of things in central cities in order to retain the economy of those cities. Poor people cost money, whatever color. And cities don’t like the fiscal drain of poor people living within their communities. So they wanted to push the poor people out, and bring in people with more money to spend. And they did this across the country.

I’ll tell you another motive that doesn’t get talked about as much. It’s not just housing that was destroyed, it was Black business. Blacks had accumulated a lot of wealth during World War II. There wasn’t much to spend it on, there was rationing. So all that wealth that was accumulated was reinvigorating their own business communities. There were communities with business, self-sufficient communities, with people educated and doing OK. But this was a threat politically. So you had wonderful communities, that sure there’s some poverty, that whites from the outside considered valueless entirely. But that were destroyed by freeway building and bulldozers, urban renewal, to take them over for central city revitalization. But part of the motive, my point is economics, the economics of the Black community. Black business was destroyed, and Black political leadership was made into a diaspora, was dispersed. It’s also a power move. It’s an economic and power move to reinforce racial subjugation.

Miller: And then to sort of encapsulate decades of a very complicated history, probably unfairly, certainly unfairly. The rock bottom, as you note in the article, came after the crack epidemic of the 80s. And then, after that came what you call reclamation and transformation, and gentrification. And white people, after sort of reversing what they’d done, instead of fleeing, coming back to these central neighborhoods and pushing, in various ways, Black people out.

I want to fast forward back to today and the reason that we wanted to have you on, in addition to getting this history again, was because obviously of this big announcement last week. $400 million fund for this area and for Black Portlanders. You’re a historian, you’re not an urban planner yourself, or an investment fund advisor, but I’m curious if history provides any guidance you think for the best ways to leverage this amount of money for placemaking or for people-helping.

Gibson: That’s a good question. So I’m not sure that it’s instructive to talk about specific policies right now. But the idea that wealth has been de-actively de-accumulated, that there is a relationship between poverty and wealth. Some of the things that might, say, be physical redevelopment, yes, to bring back a vibrant community. But I think, some of the investments I’ve always argued, I’m not sure how you get to this, should be in people. And people’s ability to develop wealth. So I believe in things like baby bonds that William Darity talks about, the economist from Duke. They talk about wealth building, and starting from children. I think that you know, education. This is the structures of exploitation to bleed people of their wealth, and to usurp wealth, and extract it from the poor to others. Right?

Then the housing gets taken over. All of a sudden, the properties in Albina are higher than anywhere in the city. They were two-thirds of the city median and within 10 or 15 years, they were 200% of the city median. Investment poured in there. When the realtors got word that there was gonna be investments in there, they lined up down at the city to get properties, abandoned properties. So, this is a business. And it’s a business that occurs across the country. And as far as I’m concerned, the lessons learned from exploitation of Black communities, of these places across the country. Those lessons were learned and as far as I’m concerned, now they’re expanded across the entire country. After the 2008 crisis, who’s taking over housing now? What happened in the 2008 crisis? Mortgages were scams. Black communities again were targeted. After 2008, Black and Latino wealth declined by two-thirds. So this is still current. And now a lot of us are on the streets, aren’t we?

Miller: Karen Gibson, thanks very much.

Gibson: You’re welcome.

Miller: Karen Gibson is an emeritus professor at Portland State University.

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