SYMHC Classics: Vanport Flood

This 2016 episode covers the May 30, 1948 flood that destroyed Vanport, Oregon. What really makes the story more than a historical footnote is how it ties into the racial makeup of both Portland and Oregon at the time. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:09Holly Frey?

  Happy Saturday. The Vanport Flood took place on May 30th, 1948, or 78 years ago today. So we have chosen our episode on it as today's Saturday classic.

• 2:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  This episode originally came out February 3rd, 2016.

• 2:28Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:37Tracy V. Wilson?

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

• 2:41Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:43Tracy V. 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 I'll ask 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 this 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.

• 3:27Holly Frey?

  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.

• 3:59Tracy V. 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 been duly convicted."

• 4:23Holly Frey?

  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.

• 4:47Tracy V. 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.

• 5:10Holly Frey?

  A little later in the year, 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.

• 5:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Then on September 21st, 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."

• 5:44Holly Frey?

  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.

• 6:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a result, Article 1, Section 35 of the Constitution of the State of Oregon read, 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 mulattoes 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."

• 6:51Holly Frey?

  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.

• 7:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  The 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 mulattoes the right to vote."

• 7:40Holly Frey?

  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.

• 8:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, people cite it 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.

• 8:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 8:49Holly Frey?

  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.

• 9:12Tracy V. 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.

• 9:45Holly Frey?

  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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• 10:06Holly Frey?

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• 10:34Holly Frey?

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• 10:58Holly Frey?

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• 11:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 11:46Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:10Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 12:52Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,

• 13:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  To get back to our story, we're going to talk about the beginnings of the city of Banport. 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.

• 14:55Holly Frey?

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

• 15:13Tracy V. 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.

• 15:52Holly Frey?

  So in the summer of 1942, the Kaiser Company worked out a deal with the US 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.

• 16:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Because it was being built in bottom land 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.

• 16:28Holly Frey?

  Going through the US 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.

• 16:56Tracy V. 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, fanport 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.

• 17:38Holly Frey?

  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 12th. Headlines hailed it as a "masterpiece of urban planning."

• 18:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  No, 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.

• 18:43Holly Frey?

  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.

• 19:09Tracy V. 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 and a school district. Law enforcement came from the county sheriff department.

• 19:25Holly Frey?

  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 .2% to .8%.

• 19:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's a still tiny percentage, but a massive increase, and 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.

• 20:28Holly Frey?

  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.

• 21:13Tracy V. 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 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.

• 21:39Holly Frey?

  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.

• 22:19Tracy V. Wilson?

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

• 22:36Holly Frey?

  After the war, 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.

• 23:18Holly Frey?

  This makes for trouble, particularly when two families have children."

• 23:23Tracy V. 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, 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.

• 23:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 15 feet, which the river reached and passed early in May. By May 25th, the river had reached 23 feet. That was the day that patrols started inspecting the dikes that surrounded Vanport.

• 24:27Holly Frey?

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

• 24:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  On the morning of May 30th, 1948, a bulletin from the Housing Authority of Portland was placed on every door in Vanport, which ended in the words, quote, "Remember, dykes 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."

• 25:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  They said things like, "Don't get panicky!" exclamation point.

• 25:07Holly Frey?

  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 4:17 PM, a hole formed in the embankment and water started rushing toward Vanport.

• 25:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Vanports, 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.

• 25:51Holly Frey?

  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.

• 26:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Vanport was virtually completely destroyed. 15 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 1,000 of the displaced families, or about 6,300 people total, were black. That was about a third of Vanport's population.

• 26:39Holly Frey?

  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.

• 26:52Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 27:34Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 28:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:54Speaker 07

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• 29:49Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 30:25Tracy V. 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 1,500 people, and the Red Cross said that it could house 7,500. This was roughly half the population of Vanport at the time.

• 30:45Holly Frey?

  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.

• 31:18Tracy V. 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 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.

• 32:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  In response, city officials branded the Tenants League, which had a significant black membership, as communist.

• 32:09Holly Frey?

  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.

• 32:24Tracy V. 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 that 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 astounding complex legal tangle.

• 32:48Holly Frey?

  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.

• 33:05Tracy V. 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 displaced the people who had been living there into the farther north, but into an area that wasn't really any bigger.

• 33:28Holly Frey?

  Arguments began in a class-action lawsuit against the government on August 6th of 1951. The court issued its opinion more than a year later, on September 23rd of 1952. The court found that the Army Corps of Engineers' work at the dykes 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.

• 34:03Tracy V. 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

• 34:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  fact that the eventual response was basically to do nothing.

• 34:50Holly Frey?

  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.

• 35:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1990, The Oregonian published a series called Blueprint for a Slum, 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 there

• 35:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 36:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 36:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 37:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit UAGC.edu today.

• 37:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 38:17Speaker 06

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• 38:46Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.