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The inside story of how Portland, Oregon, tried to address decades of racist transit policies

A task force sought to not only make improvements to the transportation system, but also make significant investments in Black and Indigenous communities.

The inside story of how Portland, Oregon, tried to address decades of racist transit policies

[Photo: Cavan Images/Getty Images]

BY Aimee Rawlins10 minute read

Black residents in Oregon’s largest county, Multnomah County, are almost twice as likely as their white counterparts to die as a result of a traffic accident, according to a 2021 report. The report goes on to explicitly link these results to both the discriminatory policies and the history of systemic racism in the city of Portland and the state of Oregon. The exclusion of Black people was written into the state constitution when Oregon was founded in 1859. It was not repealed until 1926, and racist language stayed in the constitution until 2002.

And, like most major metropolitan regions in the United States, Portland was subject to major segregationist tactics as it developed, including highway expansion and redlining. This racist legacy continues to affect Black and Brown communities in how the city is organized and who can travel through it easily and safely.

“We must remember that because of our history, [even a simple question]—like whether to repair or rebuild infrastructure at the end of its useful life—becomes a discussion about racial equity,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. Transportation planners and engineers need to understand and acknowledge the legacy of racism and address the harms that continue to be caused when we don’t lead with a racial equity framework.

Acknowledging the Portland region’s history of racism—both the overt segregation tactics and the less obvious ways communities of color are overlooked in planning a city—was at the heart of a $5 billion transportation ballot measure put to voters in 2020. The measure, called Get Moving 2020, had the lofty goal of not only making important improvements to the transportation system but also making significant transportation investments in Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities throughout the Portland metropolitan region.

This expansive transportation measure was designed to address past harms by focusing on safety, accessibility, affordability, and health for people of color in the region. While the ballot measure failed, it’s not the end of this work. The diverse coalition we built was one of the greatest successes of the initiative, and the process was a way for us as a government agency to strengthen and deepen relationships with everyone involved in the project.

The Oregon Metro Council (of which I am currently president) created a Transportation Funding Task Force composed of 34 representatives—from community-based organizations, labor groups, advocacy groups, the business community, and local and regional governments. They worked together to advise Metro on the transportation corridors to prioritize, the types of projects to include, and the funding mechanisms to employ.

This task force model was a new approach for us. Typically, transportation decisions are made by the Joint Policy Advisory Committee, which is primarily made up of elected officials and department heads. It’s not representative of many of the communities that it serves. Get Moving 2020 sought to change that structure so that community leaders could bring in people who were not at the table—namely, people of color—and challenge the White-dominant norms that are common when government agencies are involved.

“Many want to have this discussion without referring to our original sin because we weren’t around for it,” Beth Osborne said. “But continuing to maintain highways that divide communities, particularly communities of color, is not a benign discussion. It is not a simple repair project.”

The past “sins,” as Osborne calls them, are what we sought to address in Portland. They came from either overtly or unintentionally leaving out the people who would experience the most negative impact from the projects. Government agencies are still set up under white-dominant standards, whether we know it or not. This top-down, hierarchical way of doing our work reinforces the racism already inherent in the system. So, by changing the feedback structure for Get Moving 2020 to a more inclusive one, we were able to challenge the way we’ve always done things and gain much better information to solve problems the community is actually experiencing.

Racist Zoning and Regulatory Practices

To help stimulate a recovery in the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which was designed to support borrowers who couldn’t afford to make payments on interest-only mortgages. The HOLC helped many middle- and working-class people secure one of the most important financial assets to help build generational wealth: homes. But this benefit was largely extended only to White people.

In partnership with local real estate agents, the HOLC drew up maps for major metropolitan areas that color-coded levels of mortgage lending risk from green (“best”) and blue (“still desirable”) to yellow (“definitely declining”) and red (“hazardous”). The yellow and red zones were deemed too high risk for mortgage lending in most cities.

In Portland, the Lower Albina neighborhood, where the majority of the city’s Black population lived, was redlined. The “clarifying remarks” in the original map noted: “This area constitutes Portland’s ‘Melting Pot’ and is the nearest approach to a ‘slum district’ in the city. Three-quarters of the negro population of the city reside here and in addition there are some 300 Orientals, 1,000 Southern Europeans and Russians.”

This determination as a “slum” was entirely subjective on the part of the White assessors. The Albina neighborhood was a thriving community. By rejecting mortgage loans for Black and Brown people, the federal government—in partnership with local and regional governments and mortgage companies—helped to create the enormous wealth gap between White households and Black and Brown households that we see today. 

Urban Renewal and Highway Planning

In the middle of the 20th century, the U.S. government pushed to connect the states by the Interstate Highway System. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act resulted in 64,000 miles of interstate and other freeway expansion.

In many cities, “blighted” areas were razed to make way for the new infrastructure. The government created “a new language of urban decline: a discourse of blight,” wrote Wendell E. Pritchett in a 2003 Yale Law & Policy Review article. “A vague, amorphous term, blight was a rhetorical device that enabled renewal advocates to reorganize property ownership by declaring certain real estate dangerous to the future of the city,” he continued. To make their case, “advocates contrasted the existing, deteriorated state of urban areas with the modern, efficient city that would replace them.”

This allowed cities to purchase the land from private owners for pennies on the dollar or use eminent domain to evict residents, who were largely Black and Brown, from their property in the name of renewal.

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The Albina neighborhood in Portland, where by 1958, 73% of Portland’s Black population lived, was destroyed between the late 1950s and the 1970s to make way for the Memorial Coliseum, the Portland Public Schools Administrative Building, a professional basketball stadium, a hospital, a mall, and a convention center, as well as Interstate 5, which now runs down the entire West Coast. 450 homes were destroyed for the coliseum and another 1,100 for Interstate 5. Emanuel Hospital received federal funding to expand even though it would destroy nearly 300 homes. Residents of those homes were given only 90 days to move and a fraction of what was fair for moving costs.

Gentrification and Dislocation

The displacement didn’t end there. In the 1990s, small businesses—mostly white owned—started to pop up on Alberta Street in Northeast Portland. This historically Black neighborhood had been impacted by the urban renewal process of highway expansion, which caused an economic decline similar to that in Lower Albina. In the 1990s, after years of disinvestment, the Black population of Alberta Street had declined significantly and was being replaced by young white people of the “creative class” who were flocking to Portland.

This was a part of the trend that Richard Florida detailed in his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which showcased how so many local economic policies during the 1990s and beyond were focused on attracting people in creative industries who would then drive economic growth. A 2005 Willamette Week article noted, “Portland is kicking butt, attracting hordes of college-educated 24- to 35-year-olds at a time when that group is shrinking nationally.” And these “hordes” moving to Portland were specifically whiter, wealthier people driving up housing prices and development demand, which displaced some residents in places such as the historically Black community of Alberta.

For decades, so many of the investments that earned Portland its reputation as a “green” city (e.g., light rail and bike paths) have been concentrated in the whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. One recent example is Portland’s Neighborhood Greenway program, which is designed to create safe bikeable and walkable boulevards throughout the city that include signage and traffic-calming elements such as roundabouts. While the whiter, wealthier neighborhoods were becoming safer as a result of these improvements, the Black and Brown outer-Portland neighborhoods continued to experience some of the highest traffic accident rates in the city. 

Because many residents in these communities had reason to distrust the government, we had to do a lot of work to show that we were trustworthy. For each of the corridors in which projects were proposed for Get Moving 2020, a racial equity analysis was conducted that looked at indicators in demographics, mobility, housing, and displacement risk.

The demographics were an important starting point to prioritize corridors with greater concentrations of people of color. We knew from the data that traffic safety is much lower in Black and Brown neighborhoods, which is why all the corridors that the Transportation Funding Task Force recommended were known to be areas with large populations of people of color and places that experienced higher-than-average numbers of traffic accidents. 

By looking at mobility, we can understand whether community members predominantly use public transport or personal vehicles and to what degree, and this helps us know what types of projects to prioritize. For the 82nd Avenue corridor in Northeast Portland (one of the most diverse areas of the city), residents had slightly higher access to transit, but lower-than-average car ownership rates. Additionally, commute times to work were quite high, with 40% taking over 30 minutes. The reliance on transit shows that improvements to public transit should be central to the improvements. 

In addition to transit reliance, the Walk Score measurement of the neighborhood was quite low—meaning that getting around on foot and accessing resources by walking was extremely difficult and unsafe. So the planning team recognized the need to add new sidewalks, more safe marked crossings, better bikeways, and hundreds of new streetlights. All of this would help improve pedestrian safety.

One of the major concerns we hear about any transportation project is the potential for gentrification and an increase in housing costs. Community-based organizations told us that while improved housing is great, residents were most concerned that development would push out the shops and services that residents utilized. This indicated a need to invest in partnerships with community-based organizations that could help ensure local and historical businesses were able to stay and serve the community.

And last, understanding displacement indicators—such as the change in home prices and changes in percentages of people of color in the area—helped us understand whether displacement had occurred and, at the very least, to mitigate future displacement that might be caused by corridor improvements.

Because the 82nd Avenue corridor is such a high-priority area, even without funding from the ballot measure, some of the major safety improvements are moving ahead. Even though the measure didn’t pass, the need to lead with racial equity still exists. And Metro and our partners continue to push these priorities generated through the inclusive community engagement process from the ballot measure.

[Cover Image: Island Press]

There’s considerable momentum to see these important projects through, and we are closer than we have been in three decades to being able to pursue state and federal funding with well-vetted projects that not only will help our people move safely around the region but also will provide better access to opportunities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.


From Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering by Lynn Peterson with Elizabeth Doer. Copyright © 2022 Island Press. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Lynn Peterson is the Oregon Metro Council president, leading the nation’s only elected regional government, which oversees regional affordable housing, parks, tourism and cultural venues, garbage and recycling, and, of course, transportation and land-use planning.

Elizabeth Doerr is a writer and founder and principal at Doerr & Co., a social impact and thought leadership communications company in Portland, Oregon.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aimee Rawlins is a senior editor at Fast Company, overseeing the Impact section. You can connect with her on X/Twitter at @aimeerawlins and on LinkedIn. More


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