Restorative Justice

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: Will ODOT’s $800 million freeway widening restore Albina, or just repeat past injustices?

WORDS BY | JOE CORTRIGHT

What destroyed the Albina community? What will it take to restore it?

For decades, Portland’s segregation forced nearly all its AfricanAmerican residents to live in or near the lower Albina neighborhood. In the late fifties and early sixties, the construction of Memorial Coliseum, urban renewal and finally, the I-5 freeway, all triggered the neighborhood’s decline. Everyone now acknowledges that the construction of the I-5 Freeway through Albina was a classic example of institutional racism. Today, we’re being told by ODOT, the same agency that built the freeway through the neighborhood in the first place, that its $800 million Rose Quarter widening project will somehow make amends for that injustice. But will it? The big question going forward is how to right that wrong. If we’re seeking restorative justice, what will it take to make a viable neighborhood?

It was the cars, not just the freeway that destroyed Albina

It wasn’t so much the freeway that undermined the health of the neighborhood, it was all the cars the freeway attracted. In 1962, the Oregon State Highway Department carved Interstate 5 through the heart of this neighborhood, directly demolishing more than 300 homes which it did not replace. The indirect effects of the freeway, and its attendant traffic were equally, if not more, devastating. By injecting a flood of cars into the area, the freeway led to the collapse of the local neighborhood. In the aftermath of freeway construction, I-5 turned the bustling Albina neighborhood from houses and shops, to a collection

“Most of the decline in population in Albina happened years after the freeway was built.”

of car dealers, gas stations and parking lots. Even then, we knew freeways killed neighborhoods: James Marston Fitch wrote in The New York Times in 1960: “The automobile’s appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.”

Most of the decline in population in Albina happened years after the freeway was built. The flood of cars undercut neighborhood livability, and the population steadily declined in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. As people moved away, many African-American-owned neighborhood businesses that served local residents closed up shop. ODOT claims its proposal to spend as much as $800 million is supposed to revitalize the neighborhood. However, the flaw is that it widens the freeway--pushing it even closer to other uses like the Harriet Tubman Middle School

and funnels even more cars not just onto the freeway, but onto local streets, like Vancouver, Williams, Broadway and Weidler. In addition, ODOT would cut back the corners of major intersections to enable cars to drive even faster on these streets, and would put in a confusing, diverging diamond interchange that has cars driving on the left-hand side of a two-way street.

Capping a small segment of the freeway does not create a neighborhood.

ODOT claims that by building “caps” over the freeway—really just extrawide overpasses for Broadway and Weidler—will somehow magically heal the neighborhood. But again, the problem is not just with one or two blocks, but about giving over the whole neighborhood to transient uses (like the Moda Center and Convention Center) and the demolition of housing and neighborhood- sized streets. The construction of I-5, combined with the Memorial Coliseum, obliterated the dense street grid that underpinned Albina. Creating two blocks of buildable land, sitting directly over the noise and pollution of the widened I-5 freeway and surrounded by fastmoving traffic on arterials and freeway-on-ramps, is a pedestrianhostile environment that no one will want to linger in and a place where no business will thrive. The one example that freeway advocates point to, is a cap over I-80 in Reno, which houses a Walgreens drugstore and its parking lot; a transient, car-oriented use, not the hub of a revitalized neighborhood. A freeway cap is no place for parks, sidewalk cafes, restaurants or grocery stores. It’s just another desolate off-ramp, designed for the needs of outsiders and travelers, not local residents.

A neighborhood for the people who live there, or people driving through?

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police, and weeks of demonstrations in Portland and across the country, the nation is now involved in deep introspection about the embedded roots of institutional racism. It has taken four decades to begin to reverse Albina’s population decline, and now ODOT is planning to deliver a fresh dose of cars. Public relations messaging to the contrary notwithstanding. the Rose Quarter “Improvement” Plan plainly prioritizes cars, but it disadvantages people walking, biking, taking transit, or just hanging out on the streets of this neighborhood.

People and investors are hardly blind to the pecking order in these places. Widening I-5 privileges the interests of peak hour car commuters from Clark County (75 percent white and with average incomes of $82,500) over the kids who attend Tubman School (twothirds kids of color; half on free and reduced price lunches), and others who live in the neighborhood (fewer than half of workers drive alone to work: most walk, bike or take transit, according to census data). If we want to want to make amends to those whose neighborhood was devastated by the I-5 freeway and its car-dependent development pattern, the last thing we want to do is widen the freeway that caused this problem. And freeway covers, no matter how elaborate or expensive, won’t replace the housing lost or the damage done to the fabric of the entire Lower Albina area.

Towards real restorative justice

Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished and paying to clean up Tubman’s air?

Despite the high-minded rhetoric, widening the freeway repeats the same errors made a half-century ago and makes the neighborhood’s livability worse. If we are serious about redressing the historical wrongs done here, we could do much better. Before they do anything to the roads,ODOT should be fixing the past damage it has already done, but never lifted a finger to correct: Replacing housing and cleaning the air at Tubman. If it really wants to make amends f o r t h e e x t e n s i v e d a m a g e freeway building did to North and Northeast Portland, and fulfill its pledge of “restoring” the neighborhood, a good place to start would be by replacing the housing demolished to build the Minnesota Freeway in the 1960s. The average price of single family homes adjacent to the freeway (which is no doubt negatively affected by noise and air pollution) is about $424,000. If ODOT were to build 330 or so homes to replace those lost in the 60s, the total cost would be approximately $140 million. If it looked, ODOT could find plenty of local partners for the projects like the Williams Russell PWG or PCRI’s Pathway 1000 Initiative; both committed to putting Black Portlanders back into the neighborhood through affordable housing and homeownership.

The other lingering racist legacy of I-5—one that this project would worsen—is the poor air quality at Tubman Middle School. Portland State scientists warned that it was “unhealthy” for Tubman students to have recess outside. Portland Public Schools spent more than $12 million to install air filters on the school building to make the air safe for students to breathe. It is monumentally unfair that cash-strapped Portland Public Schools have had to spend millions that could have been used to pay for schooling, while ODOT and motorists paid nothing. Tubman parents and Portland Public Schools have raised serious concerns about the freeway widening, which would move the road and traffic even closer to the school building. Like thousands of other Portlanders, the school board has asked ODOT to prepare a fullscale environmental impact statement, one which would fully disclose the project’s health and environmental impacts and fully consider alternatives. ODOT has refused to do so.

If it wants to genuinely show that it acknowledges the devastating impacts of its decades of freeway building, ODOT could start by demonstrating its good faith by having a meaningful conversation with the community about what is needed to achieve a lasting revival of the neighborhood. They should be looking at the entire neighborhood (not just the freeway right of way and overpasses) and start working with a wide array of community groups who are currently working on restorative justice programming in the area. The time is right.