SYMHC Classics: Vanport Flood

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Episode: SYMHC Classics: Vanport Flood
Hosts: Holly Fry & Tracy B. Wilson
Original Air Date: February 3, 2016 (Rebroadcast May 30, 2026)

Episode Overview

This episode explores the dramatic rise and catastrophic destruction of Vanport, Oregon—a city built to house wartime shipbuilders during World War II—focusing on its historical context, racially charged origins, the catastrophic 1948 flood, and its lasting impact on Portland’s Black community. The hosts delve into Oregon’s fraught racial history, the rapid construction and eventual demise of Vanport, and how decisions made before, during, and after the flood resonate in issues of housing discrimination and urban segregation to this day.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Oregon’s Racial Exclusion History

(03:00–10:02)

• Early Oregon laws were shaped by ongoing debates over slavery and the desire to exclude Black people, even as Oregon entered the Union as a "free" state.
  • “Oregon ultimately did not want to be a slave state, but it also did not want African Americans living there.” – Tracy, 06:06
• Laws barred Black people from living in or even entering Oregon; these exclusionary articles remained in the state constitution until the 1920s and were only removed completely in 2002.
  • “Even though the 14th and 15th amendments invalidated them, those two exclusionary articles weren’t actually repealed in Oregon until 1926 and 1927, respectively. … Even then, [removal] only got 71% of the vote.” – Holly, 07:58

2. Population Dynamics and Urban Racism

(09:06–10:02)

• Oregon’s post-Civil War migration remained overwhelmingly white, with the Ku Klux Klan growing to 14,000 members statewide by the 1900s.
• By 1940, only about 2,565 African Americans lived in Oregon (less than 0.25% of the population), mostly restricted to a single Portland neighborhood.

3. Wartime Need and the Creation of Vanport

(13:45–19:55)

• WWII shipbuilding needs created a massive demand for labor, bringing a flood of new residents (including many Black workers) to Portland.
• The Kaiser Company built Vanport quickly in 1942 as temporary housing for shipyard workers, outside Portland’s city limits and in a vulnerable floodplain.
  • “The homes were built quickly and cheaply, and they were intended as temporary wartime housing, not as permanent structures.” – Holly, 15:55
• Vanport became the second largest city in Oregon, with over 10,000 apartment units and a 1944 population near 42,000.
• City amenities eventually included schools (notably integrated), 24-hour childcare, and what became Portland State University’s forerunner.

4. Segregation and Community Dynamics in Vanport

(18:53–19:55)

• Vanport’s growth marked Oregon’s first major Black migration, boosting the Black population in the state but concentrating it in one segregated area.
  • “The relocation of Black workers…into Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into Oregon in the state's history.” – Holly, 18:53
• Facilities within Vanport were strictly segregated, except for the schools which did hire Black teachers.
• Portland residents and institutions (like the Art Museum) tried to present the city as tolerant, even as segregation and racism persisted.

5. Decline and Prejudice Post-War

(21:06–22:03)

• As wartime jobs disappeared, white residents had the means to leave Vanport; Black residents were largely unable to move—both by finances and racist housing policies.
• The city gained an undeserved notorious reputation for crime and shoddy construction, with officials noting that crime rates were not higher than in Portland proper.

6. The 1948 Flood: Events and Immediate Aftermath

(22:50–26:05)

• A snowy, rainy winter swelled the Columbia River in May 1948. Dikes were breached on May 30, 1948, and a safety bulletin that morning falsely reassured residents.
  • “Remember, dikes are safe at present. You will be warned. If necessary, you will have time to leave. Don’t get excited.”—Safety Bulletin, relayed by Tracy, 24:02
• Fortunately—since many residents were out for Memorial Day—loss of life was smaller than it might have been, but devastation was near-total.
  • “People described the scene as looking like cork floating in a current.” – Holly, 25:17
• Officially, 15 deaths were recorded, but rumors and conspiracy theories about higher loss of life persisted.
• Roughly one-third of displaced families (6,300 people) were Black.

7. Post-Flood Housing and Racial Displacement

(29:44–32:24)

• Emergency shelter for Black families was especially inadequate; they were often placed in abandoned, dangerous barracks on Swan Island.
  • “According to local historians, there were white families who welcomed Black refugees from the flood, but according to the oral histories of Black survivors, this was pretty rare.” – Holly, 30:05
• Activism arose quickly (Vanport Tenants League), but efforts were stymied and frequently dismissed as “Communist.”
• Both legal action and public relief for survivors failed due to sovereign immunity and flood liability laws—“the eventual response was basically to do nothing.” – Tracy, 33:23

8. Lasting Impact on Portland’s Black Community

(32:24–34:26)

• Portland’s Black population became almost entirely confined to the Albina neighborhood, which grew increasingly overcrowded in the following decades.

• Later urban renewal projects further displaced Black residents.

• Ongoing discriminatory practices like redlining and, more recently, the problems of gentrification are direct legacies of the Vanport experience.

  • “Even today, the majority of Black residents of Portland live in its northeast quadrant.” – Holly, 34:09

9. Reflecting on Location and Race in US History

(34:26–end)

• The hosts highlight that histories of racist policy and community devastation are not unique to the South and call for broader recognition of their national scope.

  • “…we need a ‘not just in the South’ tag on our website for the times that people ask us how come these things only happen in the South. That is not true.” – Tracy, 36:00

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Oregon ultimately did not want to be a slave state, but it also did not want African Americans living there.” – Tracy, 06:06
• “The relocation of Black workers…into Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into Oregon in the state's history.” – Holly, 18:53
• “Remember, dikes are safe at present. You will be warned. If necessary, you will have time to leave. Don’t get excited.” – Tracy (quoting safety bulletin), 24:02
• “People described the scene as looking like cork floating in a current.” – Holly, 25:17
• “Even today, the majority of Black residents of Portland live in its northeast quadrant.” – Holly, 34:09
• “We need a ‘not just in the South’ tag on our website…” – Tracy, 36:00

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Vanport and Racial Exclusion in Oregon: 03:00–10:02
• Vanport’s Construction & Demographics: 13:45–19:55
• Segregation and Urban Policies: 18:53–21:06
• Decline of Vanport Post-War: 21:06–22:03
• The 1948 Flood and Its Immediate Impact: 22:50–26:05
• Housing Crisis and Legal Struggles: 29:44–33:23
• Legacy, Albina, and Modern Gentrification: 32:24–34:26
• Closing Reflections on US Racial History: 34:26–End

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Episode Tone and Style

The episode is thoughtful and direct, blending factual recounting with empathetic commentary on the lived experiences of Vanport’s residents. The hosts are careful to contextualize the history of Vanport and Oregon within the broader spectrum of US racial and urban policy history. Their delivery is accessible, clear-eyed, and occasionally wry when confronting the failures and ironies of “liberal” regions’ records on race.

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This summary distills the major topics, key insights, and lasting relevance of the Vanport flood—as well as its wider implications for American social and urban history.

Transcript

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[Holly Fry]

Happy Saturday. The Vanport flood took place on May 30, 1948, or 78 years ago today,

[Podcast Host (Untold Life)]

so we have chosen our episode on

[Holly Fry]

it as Today's Saturday Classic.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

This episode originally came out February 3, 2016.

[Holly Fry]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Today's podcast is yet another listener request, but it's one that was already on my to do list, so I haven't made note of who all asked FOR IT On May 30th of 1948, a flood destroyed Vanport, Oregon. Fifteen people were killed, which, in light of some of the other disasters we've been talking about on the show lately, probably seems like a relatively small number. But the property damage involved was colossal. And what really makes the story more than a historical footnote is how it is tied into the racial makeup of both Portland and Oregon as a whole, and a lot of the stresses and difficulties that went on with racism and race relations both before and after the flood.

[Holly Fry]

The historical context for the Vanport Flood goes back to before Oregon became a State in 1859. The issue of slavery within Oregon wasn't a totally simple one. While it ultimately joined the Union as a free state, there were people living there who were in favor of slavery. This is one of several reasons why the people of Oregon voted against holding a Constitutional convention three separate times before a vote finally succeeded. Among other things, putting off a constitutional convention meant putting off a final decision on slavery.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Oregon did actually outlaw slavery while it was still a territory. In 1843, its residents voted to incorporate language from the Northwest Ordinance into its own laws. That language was quote, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have shall have been duly convicted.

[Holly Fry]

However, a little less than a year later, the provisional government's Legislative council changed that 1843 law with an amendment that had the rather odd effect of simultaneously outlawing slavery and allowing it for a short period of time. Slaveholders were given a deadline to remove their slaves from Oregon, and if they refused, the slaves would be freed.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The amendment went on to specify that those previously enslaved persons also needed to leave Oregon. Free black males had two years to do so, and free black females had three years. The punishment for refusing to leave after being freed was lashing. This law was nicknamed Peter Burnett's Lash Law after the head of the Legislative council that passed it a little later in the year.

[Holly Fry]

The punishment was shifted from Being lashing to forced labor. And the law itself was repealed in 1845 before its punishment clause went into effect after Jesse Applegate replaced Peter Burnett on the council.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Then, on September 21, 1849, the Territorial Legislature enacted another racial exclusion law in Oregon, which remained on the books until 1854. This law stated that in oregon, quote, it shall not be lawful for any negro or mulatto to enter into or reside.

[Holly Fry]

When Oregon finally did assemble a constitutional convention on the road to becoming a state in 1857, two proposals were placed before its delegates. One would have legalized slavery. The other was an exclusion clause similar to the one enacted in 1849. Both of these passed by a wide margin. Oregon ultimately did not want to be a slave state, but it also did not want African Americans living there.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

As a result, Article 1, Section 35 of the Constitution of the state of Oregon read, queen, quote, no free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall come reside or be within the state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein. And the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattos for their effectual exclusion from the state and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them.

[Holly Fry]

These articles made Oregon's constitution unique among the free states. It was the only one whose constitution was written to try to exclude black people. The legislature did not, in the end, provide penal laws for the removal of African Americans from the state, though the

[Tracy B. Wilson]

14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on July 9, 1868, nullified Oregon's exclusion clause. As a refresher. The 14th Amendment was one of the reconstruction amendments that followed the end of the civil war. It's the one that gives all citizens of the United States the right to due process and equal protection under the laws. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, also invalidated a different article in the Oregon constitution that denied, quote, negroes, chinamen and mulattos the right to vote.

[Holly Fry]

However, Even though the 14th and 15th amendments invalidated them, those two exclusionary articles weren't actually repealed in Oregon until 1926 and 1927, respectively. And their obsolete text, along with other language that alluded to race, like specifying the white population needed to increase the number of state supreme court justices, was actually still present in the Oregon constitution until a measure to remove it passed in 2002. And even then, it only got 71% of the vote Now.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

People cited as their reasons for voting no things like unwillingness to tamper with a historical document. So it's not clear exactly what the motivation of everyone was, but it is definitely clear what the motivation of some of them was. Although the state had never passed enforcement measures to go along with these racial exclusion laws, and the 14th and 15th amendments had then invalidated those laws after the Civil War, the fact that they were written into the state's foundational documents and had been passed at all had a big effect on who did or didn't move to Oregon.

[Holly Fry]

In the migration that followed the Civil War, the people who moved into Oregon were overwhelmingly white, and some of those who did did so because they found that constitutional language appealing. By the 1900s, the Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the most notorious white supremacy organization in the United States, had more than 14,000 members in Oregon, 9,000 of them in Portland.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

By comparison, very few black people moved into Oregon after the Civil War. According to the United States Census Bureau, by 1940, just a few years before the Vanport Flood, more than a million people lived in Oregon. Only 2,565 were African American, or less than a quarter of a percent of the population. Nearly all of them lived in one small segregated district in Portland, which, thanks to racist laws, housing policies and real estate practices, was the only place in Oregon most black people could find housing.

[Holly Fry]

The racial demographics of the area around Portland changed dramatically before and during World War II. And the circumstances are tied directly to the Vanport Flood. And we're going to talk about that. But first we are going to have a word from one of our fabulous sponsors.

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

To get back to our story. We're going to talk about this. The beginnings of the city of Vanport. During World War II, the shipbuilding industry in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington grew really tremendously in response to military needs. Most of this growth came via shipyards that were owned by the Kaiser Company, later Kaiser Shipbuilding Corporation, which began working with the British Navy to build ships in 1940. The industry as a whole grew from a few thousand people to more than 140,000 employees by late 1943. The Kaiser company, which was named for its founder, employed nearly all of them.

[Holly Fry]

This huge influx of workers really put a strain on the housing supply in and around Portland, thanks in part to a long standing resistance to public housing. Many residents were afraid that affordable housing would lower their property values and bring in a quote, undesirable class of people.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

When it came to the Kaiser Company's wartime employees, another issue on the minds of the Portland majority was that many of them were black. Particularly in the earlier years of World War II, black men were not seen as fit for military duty. We've talked about this in other episodes before. So as white men were drafted into the military, black men, along with women of all races, were the ones to very often fill those jobs. The same was also true for newly created wartime work, in part because so many of the people were moving into Portland to get these jobs were black. Meetings in the city about how to address the housing shortage were met with pickets and protests.

[Holly Fry]

So in the summer of 1942, the Kaiser company worked out a deal with the U.S. maritime Commission to build a town to house its workers. Situated outside the city limits of Portland in the Columbia river floodplain, the town was originally called Kaiserville because it was

[Tracy B. Wilson]

being built in bottomland in a floodplain. 30 foot tall dikes were built on two sides of the town to keep the water out. On a third side, a railroad embankment fulfilled the same function, but it had not been constructed as a dike. It was built by filling dirt in and around a wooden railroad trestle going through.

[Holly Fry]

The U.S. maritime Commission let the Kaiser company do an end run around the Housing Authority of Portland. Neither the Housing Authority nor the people of Portland got much of a say in what was being built or who would live there. The homes were built quickly and cheaply, and they were intended as temporary wartime housing, not as permanent structures. They were apartment buildings made of wood on wooden foundations. And in the end, There were nearly 10,000 of these units.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

This housing was really pretty incredibly basic. The units had a small bedroom, a kitchenette with a Hot plate and only one window that could open. That was in case of a fire. Units were furnished with tenants expected to supply only personal items like linens and dishes and silverware. But because the buildings were so cheaply made, they were also quite noisy. There was very little to dampen the sound between the units. And since the shipbuilding industry during wartime ran literally around the clock, Vanport was also really noisy around the clock. Fires were a problem, although fortunately these were mostly small and none of them swept through the nearly all wooden city, which would have been a definite possibility.

[Holly Fry]

This temporary housing became the largest wartime housing development in the United States and the second largest city in Oregon, although since the government owned it, it wasn't technically a real city. It was renamed Vanport by combining the names of Vancouver and Portland in November, and its first residents moved in on December 12. Headlines hailed it as a masterpiece of

[Tracy B. Wilson]

urban planning, and all of that happened in 1942. So you can tell how quickly all of this was put together, since the Kaiser Corporation only started working on it in the summer. As those first families moved in, Vanport mostly offered housing and nothing else. Although the city was roughly equidistant from Kaiser's three shipbuilding facilities, which meant that if there were shortages of rubber and gasoline, people could walk to work. It was not really convenient to getting into Portland or to any kind of transit. The first residents had trouble getting basic supplies. Often it was pressure from the Kaiser company, who was afraid that they would lose their workers if they couldn't get the basic staples that they needed that got things done.

[Holly Fry]

But eventually Vanport did get a lot of amenities that you would expect in a city, including a hospital, a movie theater and some shopping centers. Since it was built as worker housing, it also had 24 hour childcare services in addition to schools. The Vanport Extension center, which would eventually grow into Portland State University, taught classes there during the war. Vanport eventually got its own ration board.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The Housing Authority of Portland wound up essentially acting as a landlord and in some ways, as the city government. The housing authority oversaw, among other things, the creation of a fire department in a school district. Law enforcement came from the county sheriff department.

[Holly Fry]

The relocation of black workers from all over the United States, but especially from the deep south and the southwest, into Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into Oregon in the state's history. Between 1940 and 1950, the percentage of Oregon's population that was African American grew from 0.2 to 0.8%.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

That's a still tiny percentage, but a massive increase in all going into the same place. In the face of this influx of African Americans to the area around previously overwhelmingly white Portland, whites only signs that are more often associated with the south became a lot more common, especially in the parts of Portland that were closest to the railroad station, which would have been how most people were getting there. Vanport itself was also informally but fairly strictly segregated, with housing, medical facilities and recreational facilities all separated along racial lines. The schools, however, were integrated, including hiring black teachers.

[Holly Fry]

Overall, white residents of Portland were so distressed by the influx of black Americans that the Portland Art Museum arranged a series of special exhibitions to try to calm their fears. They were titled Wartime Housing, Ships for Victory and Migration of the Negro. And they framed Portland as a tolerant, welcoming, diverse place full of patriotic duty. Wartime housing was an adapted Museum of Modern Art exhibition that had been used in other cities that for various reasons objected to the building of mass housing for wartime workers. Migration of the Negro was a Museum of Modern Art exhibition as well, and was chosen because of a huge amount of anti southern bias being shown in Portland's white and black residents alike.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Ships for Victory, on the other hand, was funded in part by Kaiser Corporation and in the words of an article on the matter in Pacific Northwest Coast Quarterly quote, by the time the final object list was completed, Ships for Victory violated nearly every curatorial convention and would by no means have been considered a worthy exhibition for a museum of art, but for the exigencies of war. Basically, it was propaganda.

[Holly Fry]

By December of 1944, the City of Vanport was filled nearly to capacity. Its population was about 42,000 people. But as the war neared its end and wartime manufacturing slowed down, its population started to drop. Most of the people who moved out were white. They had the means and the opportunity to find housing elsewhere. Vanport's black residents, though, were effectively stuck. There wasn't enough room for them in Portland's tiny, segregated black neighborhood, and they weren't welcome anywhere else. And because many of them were laid off from their wartime shipbuilding jobs, they also didn't have the financial means to just relocate to a completely different state.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

As the war drew to a close, authorities started talking about what to do with Vanport. On June 17, 1945, the Oregonian reported that city officials hoped that the black residents of Vanport would leave to prevent any racial problems after the war.

[Holly Fry]

Vanport quickly developed a bad reputation. Even though its crime rate wasn't statistically very different from the city of Portland and there was no disproportionate crime among its black residents, people perceived Vanport as being crime ridden and shoddily built. The latter criticism was valid, but as to the former, Captain J. Earl Stanley, head of the county sheriff's office in Vanport, was quoted in a 1947 article on the city as saying, quote, I have been stationed at Vanport for only a year, but I am constantly surprised that we have as little major crime as we do, considering the conditions under which people are forced to live. The walls between the apartments are certainly far short of being soundproofed. This makes for trouble, particularly when two families have children.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The decades that have passed since that time, there's been a lot of research on what the psychological effect is of just being constantly immersed in noise. This is a real issue in Vanport, like that was. It was constantly noisy, and it was noisy around the clock because there were people working literally every shift. So what he's remarking on here was later proved by science that it was probably a little surprising that given the fact that people were immersed in a noisy, chaotic environment they couldn't escape, things were actually running along the same lines as they were in Portland in terms of things like crime. All of the powers involved in this were still debating what to do about Vanport in The spring of 1948, when the Columbia river started to rise due to a combination of heavy rains and melting snow from the mountains. Flood stage for the Columbia river was considered to be 15ft, which the which the river reached and passed early in May. By May 25, the river had reached 23ft. That was the day that patrols started inspecting the dikes that surrounded Vanport.

[Holly Fry]

On May 28, the river reached 28.3ft and the tracks along the railroad embankment started to sink by a couple of inches.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

On the morning of May 30, 1948, a bulletin from the Housing Authority of Portland was placed on every door in van, which ended in the words, quote, remember, dikes are safe at present. You will be warned. If necessary, you will have time to leave. Don't get excited. The bulletin also contained information on what to do if the Army Corps of Engineers ordered an evacuation. I've read these instructions and I found them a little patronizing. They said things like, don't get panicky, exclamation point.

[Holly Fry]

Well, it probably maybe wasn't intended as patronizing. It's hard to know the intended tone of the writer on those. I always wonder. But that same day, a crew detected seepage in the railroad embankment and started reinforcing it with sandbags. But at 4:17pm a hole formed in the embankment and water started rushing toward

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Vanport, both fortunately and unfortunately, because it certainly saved lives, but it also kept people from being able to save any of their possessions. It was Memorial Day and the weather was good. A lot of Vanport stay At that point, 18,000 residents were away from the city having picnics or hiking or just visiting people who lived elsewhere. So they weren't home when the flood happened.

[Holly Fry]

A series of muddy, swampy areas called sloughs slowed the water down as it approached Vanport, giving the people who were home about half an hour to escape. And once it reached the town, the water knocked the wooden houses completely off their wooden foundations. People described the scene as looking like cork floating in a current.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Vanport was virtually completely destroyed. Fifteen people died, although rumors persisted that it was really a lot more. And numerous conspiracy theories swirled around the event long after supposing that there was a giant cover up of a lot more deaths that wasn't made public. More than a thousand of the displaced families, or about 6,300 people total, were black. That was about a third of Vanport's population.

[Holly Fry]

And we're going to talk about the aftermath of the flood and what happened after that in Vanport, right after we pause for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors.

[Commercial Voiceover Artist]

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[Pharmaceutical Representative]

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[Podcast Host (Untold Life)]

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

The City of Portland knew ahead of time that it did not have adequate emergency housing in the event that something like this occurred. The Housing Authority had said that it could house about 1500 people and the Red Cross said that it could house 7,500. This was roughly half the population of Vanport at the time.

[Holly Fry]

Overall, white families had an easier Time of finding shelter than black families. Residents resisted the idea of using churches and schools in white neighborhoods as shelter for black people. And churches in the black neighborhood were quickly beyond their capacity. According to local historians, there were white families who welcomed black refugees from the flood, but according to the oral histories of black survivors, this was pretty rare. Many black families displaced by the flood wound up being housed in abandoned shipyard barracks on Swan Island.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The feeling of a lot of people who were displaced to Swan island was that it was dangerous. Like a lot of the housing was right next to the water and there was no buffer between the housing and the water. And so a lot of these were families with children. And people were very concerned, concerned about the fact that their children could drown just being outside of the house, or not even the house outside of the barracks. Five days after the flood, refugees asked the housing authority of Portland for non discrimination policies to be part of any plans for repairs or new housing. A Vanport Tenants league was formed to try to address former tenants issues with the housing authority, which as you remember, had been basically acting as the government of Vanport. In response, city officials branded the tenants league, which had a significant black membership, as communist.

[Holly Fry]

Survivors of the Vanport flood also tried to get some relief in court, but they hit numerous dead ends. Several suits were filed against the housing authority, but were dismissed under an Oregon sovereign immunity law which protected the government from being sued.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

More than 700 claims were then filed against the United States under the federal tort claims act. But the United States was protected under a law that the federal government couldn't be liable for flood damage. The fact the federal government, the railroad, the state of Oregon and a private enterprise were all involved in Vanport's very existence made the whole thing an astoundingly complex legal tangle.

[Holly Fry]

President Harry S. Truman visited Vanport after the flood and cleanup was assisted by the American Red Cross. However, Portland's white community strenuously resisted additional public housing, and voters repeatedly rejected attempts to build public housing after the flood.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Consequently, Portland's one segregated black neighborhood, which became known as Albina, became even more overcrowded than it had been before the war. This effect became even more pronounced in the 1950s when a stadium was built in Albina's lower tip which displays displaced the people had living there who had been living there into the farther north, but into an area that wasn't really any bigger.

[Holly Fry]

Arguments began in a class action lawsuit against the government on August 6 of 1951. The court issued its opinion more than a year later, on September 23 of 1952, the court found that the Army Corps of Engineers work at the dikes and railroad embankment was, quote, honest and competent. It also found no agency involved, not the Army Corps of Engineers, not the Housing Authority, not anyone to be negligent in the matter of the flood, the failure of the railroad embankment, or the fact that people had been told that morning that they were safe.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The plaintiffs appealed, and in December 1954, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the lower court's ruling on the matter. I read the original ruling and in a lot of ways it was infuriating because it had language in it about like, it's not proven that the fact that this railroad trestle wasn't really a dike was responsible for why it failed. But the legal scholar who wrote the paper on it was of the opinion that all of these rulings made sense from a legal standpoint. Like the Oregon really did have a sovereign immunity law, and the federal government really did have laws protecting it against being liable for flood damage. Like all of these things really legally added up. But none of that really erases the fact that the eventual response was basically to do nothing.

[Holly Fry]

The Urban League and the Portland NAACP tried to combat racist housing policies, but even so, by the 60s, four out of five black people in Portland lived in Albina. And even today, the majority of black residents of Portland live in its northeast quadrant.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

In 1990, the Oregonian published a series called Blueprint for a Slum in detailing redlining and other discriminatory housing practices, as well as corruption in the mortgage lending industry that made these same neighborhoods ineligible for home loans. It was a lot of the same kind of stuff we talked about in our two part episode on redlining last year. By 2014, the focus had shifted to the concept of gentrification. At this point, housing policies have changed. People can get mortgages in those neighborhoods, but the result has been the erasure of a lot of previously affordable housing. So now the conversation is about how to improve neighborhoods without pricing the people who live, who live there out of the neighborhood, with no other place to go. That's the Vanport flood. It's the thing. I've thought about doing this before, but it is another thing that has made me feel like we need a not just in the south tag on our website for the times that people ask us how come these things only happen in the South. That is not true. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcastradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Podcast Host (Untold Life)]

Living with a rare autoimmune condition brings uncertainty, but it can also create community. In season six of Untold Life with a severe autoimmune condition, they go beyond MG and cidp as host Martine Hackett welcomes stories from other conditions like myositis and IgAN into the conversation. Untold Stories is produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenics. Listen to Untold life with a severe autoimmune condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wouldn't it be great to never buy gas again? EVs are as easy to charge as your phone, and they are a perfect addition to your everyday life. Most people are only driving about 40 miles a day, and most EVs can handle 200 to 400 miles of range on a charge. And there are hundreds of EV models available today, so there's something perfect for every lifestyle and Bud budget. I drive an ev. I've had it for a couple of years. It's my favorite car I've ever owned. It is so fun to drive. The pickup is incredible. It's super agile and it is easy to maintain. The way forward is electric. Learn [e-mail] Life's better with American Family

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[Holly Fry]

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[Pharmaceutical Representative]

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