THE HOUSES are gone. The theater, the recreation center, and the churches have all been destroyed. Walking through Delta Park, you'd never guess that the second largest city in Oregon once stood there.
Most accounts of Vanport emphasize the flood of 1948—and in fairness, an entire city wiped out by a flood in a single day does cry out for its own disaster movie. Houses getting destroyed, people drowning, and general destruction is way more exciting than, say, informal discrimination on the part of a municipal housing authority, or migratory industrial labor during World War II. However, that non-action-movie-type stuff is arguably more important to Portland history than the flood. Vanport, and the issues surrounding it, changed Portland. Its story is one of politics, NIMBYism, and more than a little racism and xenophobia.
The Birth of Vanport
WWII had an immense effect on the demographics and economics of the United States, including Portland. The Kaiser company wanted to turn the Rose City into a shipbuilding center, churning out a constant supply of support vessels for the Pacific fleet.
"The reason why the Portland region was getting the demand for the 24/7 workforce was that we had the cheapest electricity in the country," says Tanya March, a researcher with a Ph.D. in urban studies who's focused on wartime housing projects. "That's why we could outcompete the East Coast. We could run these factories off the Bonneville Dam. We had cheaper power than everybody."
Assembling ships for the war effort meant a huge influx of new laborers to Oregon from around the country—and Kaiser's old advertisements sound almost desperate to the modern reader. "Previous experience is not necessary," says one ad from 1942. "Training will be given on the job. Willingness to work and a desire to do that work are what will do the maximum good." Kaiser's solicitations appealed to workers'"patriotic viewpoint," and advertised a base pay of $0.88 an hour, just over $12.76 in 2014 dollars.
Workers from around the country answered Kaiser's call. According to the late Manly Maben, author of Vanport, the only states not eventually represented in Vanport were Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware. Portland, a muddy Western river town, suddenly became host to Americans from across the continent. That large migratory population included a fair number of African Americans—a group heretofore underrepresented in Stumptown. The African Americans who followed up on Kaiser's offer of employment were going into unknown territory. The 1940 census recorded that less than one percent of Oregon's population was black.
"A lot of established Portlanders didn't like poor white people or poor black people coming here to work," says Portland State University professor Carl Abbott, author of Portland in Three Centuries. "There was race, there was class, there was regional prejudice."
An Oregonian headline in 1942 read "New Negro Migrants Worry City," and Portland's dominant daily wrung its hands over how the new black workers were "taxing the housing facilities of the Albina District... and confronting authorities with a new housing problem."