The flood that erased Vanport

Vanport was thrown up on the Columbia River floodplain in 1942-43 to house workers at the Kaiser shipyards. At its wartime peak about 40,000 people lived there, and it drew thousands of Black workers from the South into a state whose constitution had once barred Black people from settling at all. The Housing Authority of Portland segregated the development by block and by building.

By May 1948 about 18,500 people remained, roughly a third of them Black - the majority of Black Oregonians. On the morning of Memorial Day, 30 May, with the Columbia running high, the housing authority circulated a notice telling residents there was no cause for alarm: "REMEMBER: DIKES ARE SAFE AT PRESENT." That afternoon a railroad embankment serving as a dike gave way. Residents had about thirty-five minutes; the water went through the development and stood above the rooftops of the single-storey blocks. Fifteen people were killed; the entire city was destroyed.

Vanport's residents had nowhere to go. Portland's realtors, lenders and racial covenants had kept Black families out of most of the city, so those displaced were funnelled into the Albina district - which was then itself cleared in the 1950s and 60s for Memorial Coliseum, Interstate 5 and hospital expansion. The flood is remembered in Oregon as a disaster; the housing policy that made it a permanent dispossession was the deliberate part.