$450 Million Awarded to Lower Albina Neighborhood

A new federal grant program awarded $450 million last week to reconnect the lower Albina neighborhood shattered by the I-5 expansion decades ago.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program was created recently to mitigate some of the damage done in cities where roads and other transportation projects fractured marginalized communities. Lower Albina is a prime example of the harm done: When the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) broke ground on the stretch of Interstate 5 that runs through Portland, it demolished more than 300 homes in what was then the state’s largest Black community.

Now, federal money will fund the Albina Vision Trust’s (AVT) plan for bridging the divide: Buildable freeway covers that will reconnect lower Albina over I-5.

“The Biden administration is putting more money into fixing the Albina community than any place in the United States,” Oregon U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer told The Skanner. “Being able to see this come together in a way that will help rescue Portland, help solve a decades-long injustice – the program, in terms of reconnecting communities, this is tailor-made for it.”

Blumenauer said that putting such funding together has been one of his top priorities in his position on the Joint Committee on Ways and Means. 

“The vision that Joe Biden has had, which I am just grateful for, is he wants to have a low-carbon, equitable transportation future,” Blumenauer said. “And they’re willing to spend money on it.”

Working Smarter

Meanwhile, the Albina Vision Trust – the driving force behind the I-5 covers project and instrumental in winning the grant – secured a work agreement deal with ODOT that was approved last week by the Oregon Transportation Commission. The agreement formalizes the collaboration between the two organizations to “explore highway cover governance and future ownership of surplus lands associated with the project,” Rose Quarter Project director with the Urban Mobility Office Meghan Channell said during the March 14 meeting.

“As our shared work continues to move forward, we seek to formalize a partnership that will enable our state to actualize the vision that has rightly captivated leaders across this nation,” AVT strategic communications director JT Flowers told the commission. “That cannot happen without fundamentally addressing the chasm, the trench, that has been dug through the community, and we all know that is Interstate 5. This highway cover and the governance agreements that shape what is atop it will collectively constitute the gateway to that neighborhood.”

He called the work agreement “a critical step towards making sure that that gateway is built, stewarded and driven by the community it’s meant to serve. Together, we can redefine what government-community partnership looks like and set a new national precedent, one that uses development to heal rather than harm.”

Redressing Historic Wrongs

Looking ahead to optimistic developments for community healing, Blumenauer jokes that he’s been chasing the ghost of Robert Moses throughout his own career in public service.

Moses was a highly influential urban planner who popularized the practice of running road expansion projects through low-income neighborhoods that were largely populated by people of color. His car-centric planning philosophy, paired with his penchant for decimating neighborhoods where residents had the least amount of political power, actually made Moses in demand as a consultant in WWII-era Portland. In 1943 he was paid $100,000 to create a planning proposal for the city.

“It guided transportation decisions in our region for 30, 40 years,” Blumenauer told The Skanner. “And it’s one of the reasons why we had that huge ditch through North Portland, why we had the almost criminal relocation of the people of Albina. It was also the vision of putting a ditch throughout Southeast Portland for the Mount Hood Freeway, which died hard, but which would have been devastating.”

Moses’ damaging influence has been underscored by contemporaneous descriptions of what appeared to be the deep-seated racism that informed his design decisions in roadways and public works projects alike. A Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses detailed his attempts to exclude the poor and communities of color by building low bridges across parkways in order to prevent buses -- but not cars -- from passing through.

“Robert Moses didn’t just inflict damage on New York and Portland,” Blumenauer said. “He was representative of a train of thought where people put these massive freeway projects in areas that were the path of least resistance, and that path led through Black and Brown communities, from coast to coast. So we have healing that needs to happen in metropolitan areas like Detroit, for instance, that really fell victim to this auto mindset. But it’s in cities across the country, where urban renewal and freeway construction were imposed on communities that were politically powerless and where they thought they could build it fastest and cheapest. And so you will see people around the country looking for these resources to be able to heal these visible scars from the landscape.”

Restoring Connectivity

AVT had another reason to celebrate: a $38 million grant from the Portland Bureau of Transportation to make improvements to the Broadway corridor.

The funding, Flowers said, will make the area “more pedestrian-friendly, more residential-friendly.

“We are going to have thousands of families living in an area that was originally built to house thousands of families, that was then decimated,” he said.

In January, the Portland Public School Board agreed to sell the district’s 10-acre headquarters campus to AVT. The organization plans to develop the property into more than 1,000 residential units that will be eligible for the North/Northeast Preference Policy, which prioritizes moving in residents who were previously placed from lower Albina.

“What we’re really doing is transforming a transit corridor back into a neighborhood,” Flowers said.