On the Siting of Portland’s Wastewater Treatment Plant: Environmental Racism, or Not?

I heard a statement recently suggesting that one of the reasons the City of Portland built its wastewater treatment plant where it did–at the far north of the city–was that this was where people of color lived. The decision was, therefore, an example of environmental racism, whereby white civic leaders burdened communities of color with urban infrastructure that wouldn’t have been tolerated in white, affluent neighborhoods.

Having read sanitary engineer Dr. Abel Wolman’s 1939 report on the Portland’s sewer system, I knew first-hand the engineering logic behind this decision. I didn’t know enough about the area in which the treatment plant was built to have a perspective on the question of whether or not its siting was an example of environmental racism. With help from the experts at the City of Portland Archives, it was time for some research!

Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant ca. 2018 (Google Maps)

There were three primary engineering decisions motivating treatment plant siting. The first was that it provided the most cost-effective way to centralize waste treatment in a single facility, rather than having multiple facilities throughout the city, thereby reducing long-term operations and maintenance costs. The second was that it was not far from the Columbia River, where the plant’s outfall would be directed. The final reason for this decision was that it avoided the necessity of building a more expensive secondary or tertiary treatment system, which would have been required if the plant’s outfall had been directed to Portland Harbor and the Willamette River. Wolman’s August 1939 “Report on the Collection and Disposal of Sewage” provided the basic layout for a primary sewage treatment facility and interceptor sewer network, one version of which Portland city officials adopted soon thereafter [1]. This was for the plant to be located north of Columbia Boulevard, east of the Spokane, Portland & Seattle (SP&S) rail line, and south of Columbia Slough.

My next step was to find out where the Portland city limit in this area was as of the 1930s and 1940s.  Portland voters approved $12 million in bonds in May 1944 for the city to build-out the plan Wolman outlined (and Robert Moses recommended in his 1943 report Portland Improvement). After a few years of planning and detailed engineering studies, pollution abatement advocates, city officials, and others celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony on the first section of the interceptor system on July 17, 1948–which was a section along Columbia Slough [2]. By this time city officials had purchased land for the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant [3]. As a 1964 map from the Portland Planning Commission shows, however, it was not until December 1950 that the city officially annexed the land [4]. Until this time Columbia Boulevard was the northern boundary of the City of Portland in this area.

I next sought demographic information about this part of Portland. A 1936 Portland Planning Commission map is informative [5].  As shown below, within a mile radius of where the treatment plant would be built in the late 1940s, there were approximately 370 foreign-born white residents and five people of color. This map doesn’t identify white residents not foreign born, but taking just these numbers, peoples of color in this area were 1.3% of the population. Demographics in North and Northeast Portland changed significantly during and after World War II, but not between the time of this 1936 survey and Wolman’s 1939 recommendations. It’s also important to note that when city officials decided upon this site in 1939, the area just across Columbia Slough to the north that would later become Vanport not only did not yet exist, but no one yet had any notion such a development would be built to house shipyard workers who had flocked to the area after the United States’ entry into World War II [6].

Portland Planning Commission, “Public Recreational Areas: A Survey and Plan” (Portland, Ore., 1936), available at http://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/record/16730. Additional graphical elements from James V. Hillegas-Elting.

 

To get a more detailed view of population density in the vicinity of the treatment plant, I turned to a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from 1950. The image below illustrates two things. First, it confirms that the area north of Columbia Boulevard was not within Portland city limits (until December of that year). Second, it shows how sparsely populated this area was, even by 1950: Less than thirty buildings can be seen within the extent of this map (which is about 2/3 of a mile east-west), some of which seem likely associated with the railroad or other businesses.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Portland, Oregon (1924-1950). Additional graphical elements from James V. Hillegas-Elting.

 

To provide some idea of how sparsely populated the area north of Columbia Boulevard was in the late 1940s (excepting Vanport), here is an aerial photo from 1947 showing Denver Avenue intersecting with Interstate Avenue, which continues north over Columbia Boulevard, Columbia Slough, and the Columbia River. The sewage treatment plant site is outside the frame, to the left (west). The eastern edge of Vanport can be seen to the middle-left of the image.

City of Portland Public Works September 1947 aerial photo looking north showing the Kenton neighborhood (bottom), Interstate Avenue (left), Vanport (far left), and Portland Meadows Race Track (far right). City of Portland Archives A2005-001.752, available at http://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/Record/2766737/.

 

As the work of Dr. Karen Gibson (and others) shows, the dominant white culture in Portland has systematically undermined the civil rights of peoples of color. For example, “between 1910 and 1940, more than half the Black population of 1,900 was squeezed into Albina by the real estate industry, local government, and private landlords, who restricted housing choice” [7]. The Albina district, however, was centered more than three miles from where the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant was built. Further, whereas “roughly 23,000 Black workers who migrated to Portland for work in the shipyards [in the 1940s] were restricted to segregated sections of defense housing developments” such as Vanport, this segregation occurred after the treatment plant siting decision had been made.

There is nothing in this evidence to support the contention that race was a factor in Portland city officials’ decision to locate the wastewater treatment facility where it now stands. When that decision was made in the late 1930s, the area was a sparsely populated, but with an overwhelmingly white population. When residents began moving to Vanport in late 1942, the demographics of the area shifted dramatically with the arrival of many thousands of people of color. However, this occurred after city officials had made their treatment plant siting decision.

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Notes

[1] James V. Hillegas-Elting, Speaking for the River: Confronting Pollution on the Willamette, 1920s-1970s (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2018), 95-96.

[2] Hillegas-Elting, Speaking for the River, 115-116.

[3] “Works Begins on Sewage Disposal System Authorized by Portland Voters in 1944,” Oregonian July 18, 1947, sec. 1, p. 14.

[4] Portland City Planning Commission, “Historic Annexation Map, Portland, Oregon, from January 23, 1851,” June 15, 1964, available at http://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/record/6290746. “Bowes Asks Added Area,” Oregonian Aug. 3, 1950, sec. 2, p. 4, and “List Closed on Issues for November Election,” Oregonian Sep. 3, 1950, sec. 1, p. 7.

[5] Portland Planning Commission, Public Recreational Areas: A Survey and Plan (Portland, Ore., 1936), available at http://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/record/16730.

[6] Carl Abbott, “Vanport,” Oregon Encyclopedia, available at https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/vanport, accessed March 30, 2018.

[7] Karen J. Gibson, “Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940–2000,” Transforming Anthropology 15:1 (Apr. 2007), 3–25. See also “Profile: Meet Professor Karen Gibson,” available at https://www.pdx.edu/profile/meet-associate-professor-karen-gibson, accessed March 30, 2018.