Portland and Oregon:
Portland: Politics and Policy System
Now to Portland. A large part of the reason Portland fell behind Seattle during the twenty years after the end of World War II was its politics and policy system. Portland did as well, arguably a bit better, during the war years when an odd alliance between the local neo-Progressive private sector, war production entrepreneurs (and the chamber) and New Deal Washington-based war production and housing agencies. That nexus was sufficient to overcome a conservative, ethnic-based political leadership and thrust them into housing and eventually a public works urban renewal based on the Moses Portland Improvement plan.
The New Deal program, however, lost considerable steam in the last years of the war—and when Congress became Republican in 1946, it was pushed back. Unlike Seattle which was able to preserve the dominant western business reformer-government partnership, Portland’s politics drifted toward fragmentation and internal division. Voter, after initially approving bonds and tax increases at the time of Portland Improvement’s 1944 launch, rejected subsequent funding, tax increases, and bond referenda in the postwar years.
I argue that the huge number of predominately young, ethnic/Appalachian wartime population emigrants resided uncomfortably with older Yankee-English-German traditional population. Rapid unionization associated with wartime shipyards and manufacturing also, I believe, polarized local political attitudes and political processes. Neighborhoods and housing were ethnically and class-segregated affecting a district-based electoral system. Suburbanization was also a factor as the total population of Multnomah and Clackamas counties surpassed that of the City by 1962. Suburban malls and middle class diffusion to the suburbs undoubtedly played out in the texture of City of Portland politics (and Portland’s downtown). Portland’s population declined slightly in the 1960 census; metropolitan population grew 16%–which was half that of Seattle during the fifties. In essence, the long-standing political culture of Portland was in considerable transition in the postwar years.[1]
With the retirement of the long-standing Mayor, Earl Riley, who had presided over the private-public partnership during the war, an aggressive, conservatively reformist Mayor, a woman, was elected in 1948. Unable to forge a working relationship with the all-male city council (1948-1952). Her attempt at charter reform to install a city manager form of government failed, and the opposition of prominent department heads (including Bowes the Robert Moses clone/public works/economic development commissioner) was a critical factor. “Asserting that the city’s rapid growth required the more efficient organization of municipal administration, she appointed a group of businessmen and civic leaders to a Committee on Municipal Reorganization in 1949. Unfortunately for reformers, the city council balked at placing the committee’s city manager charter on the ballot.”[2]
A perceived dominance by private unions over the Democratic Party which was in power through the entire period injected scandal and persistent episodes of corruption into policy-making during the administrations of subsequent Democratic mayors. Voters continued rejecting tax increases, bond issuance and support of institutions like the Zoo and the Symphony through the fifties. Organized Crime, gambling and prostitution and payoffs became a normal part of municipal politics after the mid-fifties—but had no noticeable effect on elections as Mayor Schrunk, elected in 1956 was reelected twice after, serving until 1972.[3]
Instead, the implementation of Portland Improvement was led chiefly by Commissioner Bowes, Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean and after 1956, Mayor Schrunk[4]. During the early Schrunk administration the Port Authority began its incremental modernization, a downtown coliseum was built, a modern zoning ordinance was approved and the city entered into industrial development, separating economic development from planning and public works. The focus changed during the mid-fifties (1956) when the first clearly urban renewal projects were set into motion (see below). In 1958 the Portland Development Commission, intended to be the city’s urban renewal agency, was created through referendum Amid this atmosphere, a more Progressive business elite was unable to affect consistent policy influence over economic development or anything else. Business reformers tended to focus on charter reform—and that proved to be a dead end, suffering yet a second defeat in 1966. “After nearly twenty years of effort with the same issues and the same actors, Portland still justified description as a city whose leaders hoped for steady growth and preferred placid prosperity either to machine politics or political reform”.[5]
Portland-Style Urban Renewal
Portland had an active housing program since the 1930’s and hence was sensitive to the on-going debate in Washington on the relationship of housing, slum clearance and physical redevelopment. Portland had established its housing redevelopment agency, the Portland Housing Authority (HAP) whose creation was initially defeated by referendum in 1938, was approved under pressure of massive wartime production-induced population growth in 1941. During the war HAP constructed over 18,000 units, housing more than 60,000 residents. In 1950, however, when temporary war-time housing units built by others was turned over to HAP, the agency’s board of directors became split, bitterly polarized, thus inhibiting HAP’s ability to aggressively respond to the 1949 Housing Act.
The state approved an urban renewal enabling law in 1951[6]. The legislation restricted the exercise of urban renewal to housing redevelopment authorities, and empowered those agencies only with the necessary tools. Perhaps strangely, at that time there was only one housing redevelopment authority in the entire state: the Portland Housing Authority (HAP). So, in considerable internal turmoil, HAP attempted Portland’s first mixed use (housing and commercial) urban renewal project, Vaughn Street, a forty-four block area in an industrial zone one and one-half miles from the CBD (1952). The Vaughn Street project enjoyed support from the Chamber, the Building Trades Council, the League of Women Voters, and the vault-like “City Club”.
The voters, however, did get their memo—and they turned down the project in a 1952 referendum. The issues, the same as San Diego, were resistance to federal involvement and dollars in Portland projects and fear of an increase in taxes. When HAP tried again to revive the Vaughn Street Project in the following year (1953) by rejecting federal urban renewal dollars and using its own funds Vaughn Street residents (predominately ethnic working class Croats) resisted. Their petition to stop the project was accepted by the Mayor and in the interests of harmony, Commissioner Bowes effectively stopped the project in it tracks.
HAP wanted out of the commercial urban renewal business and therefore urged the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Urban Renewal (MACOUR) in 1955. MACOUR wasted little time in coming up with a second urban renewal plan/project: the South Auditorium. Also, to get HAP out of the way, HAP contracted with the City’s Planning Department to implement the South Auditorium urban renewal project. The Planning Department set up an urban renewal division within the department, hired seven professionals including Santa Barbara’s planning director, John Kenward. The City had indirectly taken over responsibility for urban renewal in contravention of state law. To remedy this defect, City Planning went to the State Legislature (1957), successfully engineering an amendment to state law allowing cities, counties, and designated EDOs to conduct urban renewal projects[7]. In the following year (1958) Portland voters approved the creation of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) and entrusted to it responsibility for urban renewal. Finally, in 1960 Oregon voters approved a constitutional amendment which authorized the use of TIF to provide the local match for urban renewal projects (Oregon was the first state to follow California in approving TIF).
Amid all this action, the South Auditorium project went forward—or rather stumbled sideways in a confusing, horribly controversial series of referendums, the injection of additional public (South Portland) urban renewal project, private projects (Lloyd Center Shopping Mall which when opened in 1960 was the largest urban shopping center in the nation), and multiple freeways[8]. The apparently long-standing frustration of east of the river residents resented the west of the river urban renewal projects and through referendums forced the original west side South Auditorium project over to the west side. The South Portland (west side) project was proposed, in some measure, because the federal regional urban renewal director would not approve the South Auditorium project’s move to the east side. The path of two freeways which connected this to the CBD and elsewhere were shifted from the City’s original plan to a new configuration required by the Oregon Department of Transportation (smoother curves). As we discovered in the San Diego case study, urban renewal/redevelopment projects are far from easy. Displacement from these projects was considerable, although efforts were made by agencies to soften the ill effects they proved grossly inadequate. The black majority Albina neighborhood was obliterated, and the majority white (Italian and Jewish) district also suffered greatly.
Most of the above projects were completed by 1960 or shortly after and additional urban renewal projects followed (Portland State College, for example, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, the Mount Hood Freeway another) during the 1960’s (also a major riot). In short, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, Portland participated in a “style” of urban renewal, central city/CBD redevelopment which closely resembled that found on the Eastern and Great Lakes coasts. Like the making of sausage, it got off to a rough start, a rougher interim, and glowing press reports at the ribbon-cutting. As we discovered in the San Diego case study, however, changes in the 1960’s generated a second burst of redevelopment in the early seventies—with the arrival of Portland’s version of Pete Wilson, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt.
Goldschmidt, 32 years old and a one-term city council member, was elected to be mayor in 1972; he served until 1979 when he became Secretary for Transportation in the Carter Administration and from 1987 to 1990 was Governor. Concerned by the 1970 Census results which demonstrated that Portland had suffered from a considerable exodus of its middle class to the suburbs which were exploding. The three suburban counties, Washington, Clackamas, and Multnomah, grew from 822,000 residents in 1960 to over 1,007,000 in 1970—Portland had grown only by 2.7% to 382,619 in the same decade. Goldschmidt, once in office, developed his “population strategy” to halt the exodus and restore the primary position of the central city over its suburban hinterland.
This so-called ‘population strategy’ emphasized public transportation, neighborhood revitalization, and downtown planning. Improved public transportation would improve air quality, enhance the attractiveness of older neighborhoods, and focus activity on downtown. In turn a vital business center would protect property values in surrounding districts and increase their attractiveness for residential reinvestment. … One essential piece of city strategy was preservation of a user-friendly downtown. Business concerns about suburban competition and parking … [led to] a comprehensive downtown planning process that involved public officials, downtown retailers, property owners, neighborhood groups and professional and civic organizations [that] resulted in the [1972] Downtown Plan.[9]
Goldschmidt’s “Downtown Portland” approach brought together business leaders, professionals, and the neighborhoods in a focused strategy achieved through an open deliberative planning process. Instead of approaching CBD redevelopment in a zero-sum manner with neighborhoods, his “population strategy” presented a rationale in which both went “hand-in-glove’. This was cemented by Goldschmidt’s 1974 formation of the Office of Neighborhood Associations which incorporated into city policy-making the numerous neighborhood organizations which had developed since the middle 1960’s. Abandoning the widespread demolition characteristic of urban renewal, his more focused physical redevelopment (Transit Mall and the McCall Waterfront Park) was considerably more sensitive to the residents of affected areas. The key unifying investment was in public transit, and away from the disruptive construction of highways and freeways. Building upon the earlier creation and investment in TriMet, Goldschmidt withdrew the city’s commitment to the Mount Hood Freeway, transferring the federal funds to support a fifteen mile light-rail transit line into a suburb— constructing the Portland Transit Mall and the first leg of the “Metropolitan Area Express”[10].
If timing is everything, Goldschmidt had good timing. His administration overlapped with a larger regional initiative which in 1973 led to the creation of “what was in essence a farmland protection program [that] required local jurisdictions to prepare comprehensive plans in harmony with statewide goals. … One key element was the requirement that each municipality” create an urban growth boundary[11]. Also, in 1978 voters created the multi-functional regional government, Metro, the nation’s only directly elected regional government (at the time)[12]. Also, in 1977 the Oregon state legislature formed a committee to investigate both urban renewal and TIF. The resulting report formed the basis for a 1979 state law which substantially rewrote the state’s urban renewal legislation, injecting considerable state review of redevelopment agencies and their operation, redefined ‘blight’, expanded the permissible uses of TIF (and delinked it from its association with urban renewal local match, and included more reporting and public accountability into “urban renewal”—which, in Oregon from 1980 onward, was what the rest of the nation calls tax increment financing.
Portland (and Oregon) mirrored much of the eastern Big City urban renewal experience—with almost all of the same consequences. Ironically, having done so, Portland managed to arrive at much the same conclusion as San Diego, which did not utilize urban renewal dollars at all. Most of the conclusions presented from the San Diego case study apply, somewhat amazingly to Portland—which leads me to wonder if “urban renewal”, despite its watershed image in the perceived history of American cities, was little more than a “big tent concept” which covered several critical decades in the evolution of the American central city. As this history has tirelessly repeated, the central problem that economic development addressed in the decades leading up to 1970 was confronting decentralization-suburbanization.
That population migration, while apparently occurring in different variations and patterns in the various regions of the nation, was a nation-wide phenomenon that various economic development tools such as annexation, metropolitan planning, CBD redevelopment and central city modernization, neighborhood rehabilitation, and urban renewal was unable to successfully confront. In Portland’s case, despite Goldschmidt’s brilliant strategy, and his popular implementation of that strategy, Portland area suburbanization continued unabated for at least the next two decades. Portland CBD redevelopment continued thru the 1980’s and the opening of Pioneer Place in 1990. Still, in the post-1990 decades, downtown Portland, while not without its deficiencies and criticism, has been highly regarded and has attracted more than its fair share of office-related construction.
[1] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.
[2] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.
[3] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, OR, Oregon State University Press, 2011), pp. 126-131.
[4] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 122-123.
[5] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit. pp. 124.
[6] In 1953 the Oregon Supreme Court, Foeller et ux. v. Housing Authority of Portland upheld the constitutionality of the 1951 urban redevelopment/renewal law.
[7] Eugene formed is urban renewal agency in 1958, Salem was next in 1961. Before 1974 termination of the federal urban renewal programs, Cascade Locks, Cottage Grove, Albany, Coos Bay, Newport, Beaverton, Toledo, Lincoln City and Tualatin formed their own agencies. Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments” a report by Tashman Johnson prepared for the Portland Development Commission on behalf of the Association of Oregon Redevelopment Agencies, 2002, p. 6.
[8] Carl Abbott, Portland in Three Centuries: the Place and the People (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2011), chapters six and seven; also Nina Johnson and Jeffrey Tashman, “Urban Renewal in Oregon: History, Case Studies, Policy Issues, and Latest Developments”, op. cit, p. 2ff and case studies; and Carl Abbott, The New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 147-148; and “A Brief History of Housing and Community Development in Portland, Oregon” http://stevenreedjohnson.com/stevenreedjohnson/civicpdxComDev_files/HousingandCommDevelopment.pdf.
[9] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.
[10] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 149.
[11] Carl Abbott, Portland: Three Centuries, op. cit., p. 148.
[12] Both the urban boundary/growth management legislation and Portland Metro government will be further considered in later chapters.
Ron W. Coan 