A Brief History of Albina, Part Two
Albina became a slum not because its residents were poor, but because they were systematically deprived of wealth.
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Before I get into disinvestment, redlining, and gentrification, I want to take a moment to recognize that Albina wasn’t all gloom-and-doom. It did, in fact, have a vibrant culture of its own, and if you hung out around N Russel and Williams in the middle twentieth century, you’d have found an array of shops, clubs, bars, churches, and community hubs where people lived their lives and enjoyed themselves on a daily basis. I think it’s easy for a white writer like me to dwell too much on misery and suffering when observing historical injustices, and it’s all too easy to forget about Black community life and Black resistance.
I also think it’s worth noting that in the midst of everything like the Vanport flood, the Memorial Coliseum expansion, the Emanuel expansion, and the home-destroying power of I-5, plenty of Albina residents protested, resisted, and made their voices heard. After the Vanport flood, for instance, displaced Black workers lived like refugees on Swan Island, and it was only after over a year of protest and agitation that everyone eventually got housed. Likewise, the investigative work by the Oregonian I’ll mention later only came to be because of a push by Albina community leaders.
Active good work and resistance were all very real, alongside all of the negativity and despair that someone like me spends so much time on.
That said, let’s get back to the thumping drum of negativity and despair.
Albina didn’t become known as a Black neighborhood or as a slum by accident. During the twentieth century, powerful forces worked together to keep Black Portlanders in Albina, and money out of it. If you were a Black homebuyer in Portland, it was much harder to get the liquidity necessary to buy a home. You were much more likely to rent your residence from an absentee landlord who soaked up rent from Albina while doing the absolute minimum necessary to keep rental structures standing.
Restrictive covenants in Portland were fairly common. New homeowners often signed agreements that they wouldn’t sell or rent their homes to Black residents or other groups like Jews, foreigners, or immigrants. I don’t know how often these covenants were actually enforced in the courts (nothing I’ve read has mentioned anything like that) but even without hard legal enforcement these covenants acted as a strong disincentive for homeowners or property companies to sell houses to Black families.
Albina, for much of the twentieth century, was a district defined by absentee ownership. It was a neighborhood full of Black homes, but very few Black homeowners. Landlords bought property because it was cheap, and then rented to a population that often didn’t have the option to get housing elsewhere. Renters had very little bargaining power, and when landlords had control the quality of housing suffered and decayed.
There was some home lending, but it was predatory and unfair, and financial institutions worked effectively to keep Portland’s African-American population mostly confined to a single neighborhood where, even though property was cheaper, it was much more difficult to get a good deal on a home if you were Black.
In 1990 the Oregonian (after some prodding from local activists) did a series on Albina disinvestment called Blueprint for a Slum which verified what a lot of Albina residents had known in their guts for years: That financial institutions treated Black homeowners and other residents poorly to the point of abuse. This included failing to disclose debt associated with a property, failure to keep rental properties livable, and failure to deal with properties that were abandoned or unsafe.
From the Oregonian in 1990:
Portland banks and thrifts made loans in North and inner Northeast at one-fourth the rate of loans made to residents of other parts of the city. In predominantly black neighborhoods, the record was worse. The banks made loans at only one-sixth the rate…
Ability to pay didn’t appear to matter. One Portlander couldn’t get a loan for a $16,000 house even though he could buy a $25,000 car. A Portland couple couldn’t get a loan for $15,000 house in Northeast Portland, even though they would have qualified for a loan of up to $100,000 elsewhere.
And, when Black homebuyers could get a loan, they didn’t often get a fair deal. One employee of Dominion Capital, Cyril Worm, told the Oregonian:
“[Debt] was not disclosed in writing to them, but it wasn’t like there was some kind of conspiracy. They didn’t ask and we didn’t tell or something. I’ve bought many properties with encumbrances. Granted, I’m more sophisticated.”
What a dick. It’s amazing that this guy was both named “Cyril Worm,” which sounds like a name for a third-rate Star Wars villain, and was dumb enough to talk to reporters about this kind of thing. It’s worth noting that after opening his idiot mouth to the press about doing a racism, Worm was later sentenced to 32 years in prison for fraud and racketeering. That’s nice, but it didn’t undo the unfair deals he led countless residents into.
At this point a bunch of you are probably thinking about Albina in the last couple of decades and the term “gentrification” is probably on your lips. Karen Gibson, an associate professor emeritus at Portland State University, has studied the Albina extensively, and she has a useful definition of the phenomena in her paper Bleeding Albina:
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 purchase a structure in an area, rehabilitate it, make mortgage 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.
Gibson also adds a very important bit of perspective a bit later on:
it is not just a cultural or social phenomenon reflecting a lifestyle trend—it reflects systematic reinvestment by financial institutions and the public sector.
The process of gentrification doesn’t start when local properties are recycled up to market value. It starts with disinvestment that drives down the value of property and denies residents access to the perks that usually accompany home ownership. That was Albina’s history throughout the last century. It wasn’t just a neighborhood where people happened to be poor, it was a neighborhood that was deliberately and systematically deprived of wealth.
I think it’s worth noting that the residents of Albina who didn’t have access to liquidity, opportunity, or capital, were the same workers who were formative to industries like rail and shipbuilding in Portland. This city rose because of their labor, and yet, even with their considerable contributions to those historic industries, they were still denied the quality of lifethat other Portlanders enjoyed throughout the city.
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