What the activitists and other idiots do not seem to be aware of in Maryland is that the KEY BRIDGE is the ONLY route north/south on I-95 through that area for big rigs with HAZMAT LOADS. All other highways in the area go through tunnels.
I've been on it many times, and its loss is seriously impeding commercial freight, which affects everybody. Even paint components are classified as HAZMAT, as are nail polish and many cosmetics, aerosol sprays, some laundry detergents, all fireworks (even New Years Poppers), whipped cream, helium tanks, rechargeable power drills, and many, many more items you see every day in stores. HAZMAT items cannot be carried through tunnels, and every other truck-legal route in the area passes through a tunnel.
This will cause a massive traffic tie up for trucks, as did the collapse of I-5 in California in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. That will delay loads and increase costs, as trucks have to take long detours and use more fuel. Building a smaller bridge to "reduce traffic" is outrageous.
Activists forget about commercial freight (or think they can make is disappear) and expect everybody to cross every bridge in an EV or on a bicycle.
There are some great ideas complete with architectural drawings in the City of Portland Archives that show what a freeway cover should look like. They were the thesis project for one of Portland’s preeminent Landscape Architects, Chelsea McCann (n.e. Cochran) while at U of O.
In good with the caps. As long as it doesn’t mean even more taxes for Portlanders. Boston really benefitted from covering their highway. The whole restoring Black Albina thing is ridiculous though.
As commenters note below, blacks were far from the only victims of the Urban Renewal mania...check out this terrific YouTube video "The Story of Portland's First Great Urban Renewal Project" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1KReJIPmjs)...which, aside from the Jewish community, also devastated cheap housing for, mostly, elderly white men. (If you miss that irony in our age of "affordable" socialized housing, drop me a line).
One of the great mysteries of the black "community" is the desire to, essentially, revive the rollicking good old days of a mob-run black ghetto. (See page 62 of Phil Stanford's magisterial "Portland Confidential" for that story.)
As no less than the city's Charter Commission lamented, Portland is now so integrated--a goal that claimed dozens of black and white lives in the '60s and resulted in the Civil Rights bills--that the commission couldn't find a sufficient concentration of blacks to engineer a set-aside district for them.
Who, in any event, haven't had much trouble getting elected city-wide. (The point at which the prattle about "disproportion" stops.)
This is the city's whose past DA was just convicted in TWO separate federal felony jury trials (both brought by the Biden Justice Department before anyone accuses them of "racism.")
"Multi-story buildings will be built on top of these freeway caps, along with greenery and sidewalks to create community spaces for development and economic opportunities — primarily for black-owned businesses, to make up for last century’s urban renewal that hurt the historically black Albina neighborhood."
/ / /
"Historic Albina Advisory Board member James Posey, co-founder of the National Association of Minority Contractors of Oregon and president of the local chapter of the NAACP, is skeptical of the project."
"Maus writes that Posey wants to make sure black firms and contractors, plus Portland’s black residents, benefit directly."
Ibram Xiolani Kendi may have self-destructed when his grandiose Center for Antiracism Research at Boston Unversity imploded (all that white-liberal-guilt money he raked in produced few, if any, contributions to knowledge), but in Portland, Oregon, the Kendi Principle is more robust than ever.
For those who are unfamiliar with the output of that race-grifting lightweight, Kendi declared in his "How to be an Antiracist" that "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination."
The Kendi Principle, which would have shocked and appalled the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who was assassinated 56 years ago today, is the mechanism behind race policy in the Portland Metro area. What else accounts for patently discriminatory plans, aspirations and commentary such as the passages quoted above?
Portland has skipped the reparations debate in favor of a multi-pronged de-facto reparations program that explicitly aims to favor members of preferred racial and ethnic identity groups at the expense of the majority of voter-taxpayers, the Fair Housing Act and other local, state and federal nondiscrimination laws be damned.
It is enough to make one wish that a conservative legal foundation would sue local government and nonprofits back into compliance. In the meantime, it's important to gather specific facts showing the Kendi Principle in action and include them in written protests to your elected representatives and the local media.
"In addition to expanding lanes to widen the freeway, a portion of I-5 will be “capped” or covered with concrete. Multi-story buildings will be built on top of these freeway caps, along with greenery and sidewalks to create community spaces for development and economic opportunities...."
There are three large faults beneath Portland. The East Bank Fault, the Portland Hills Fault and the Oatfield Fault. (I saw this on a documentary, but it took a lot of effort to find reference to the Portland faults online.) Not to mention the Cascadia Subduction Zone and the other faults around Portland.
Why would anyone think putting public housing on top of a concrete cap over a highway would be a good idea? Maybe the same people who live in those houses on stilts in the West Hills.
The key words are “if properly designed and built.” Based on the state of Oregon’s recent track record, I don’t have confidence that the caps will be properly designed and built. We’ve had too many debacles in this state.
In 2016 and 2017, I attended many meetings of the Joint Interim Committee on Transportation Preservation and Modernization. When there was discussion about tolling, there was always some hesitancy about the technology involved. What kind of technology would the state need to read license plates to charge a toll? Colorado had something in the works. But Oregon?
As more than one legislator would note, Oregon has a history of problems with anything involving technology. Remember Cover Oregon? Before that, there was the Oregon Wireless Interoperability Network or OWIN. And before that, the DMV spent $48 million project to automate its operations. After spending another $123 million, it still didn’t work right.
Former state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose) liked to joke that whenever somebody says IT, the Oregon legislature gets out the garlic and crucifix.
So I can understand why there could be doubts about the structural integrity of those freeway caps. Oregon has had too many screwups.
Most certainly, a cap alone. But a concrete cap with multi-story buildings on top of it? I'm no engineer, but it doesn't sound plausible to me that those buildings would be safe. And even if it would be possible, I would not trust ODOT to be able to ensure it would.
Posey's right. "Albina Vision" is a steaming heap of baloney.
As for congestion, it would be good to get some more lanes on I-5 at the Rose Quarter, but the sad truth is that on the west end of the Marquam Bridge, I-5 in both directons gets squeezed down to two lanes by the ramps to and from the bridge. I don't think it would even be physically possible to change that. Portland is going to be a freight chokepoint forever, or at least until the Marquam gets redone.
If we must restore Albina to a thriving Black community why don’t we also have to restore the Jewish neighborhood in Portland that was razed in an urban “renewal” project in the 1950’s-1960’s? Lots of anti-Semitism in Portland.
It's that the Jews and Italian-Americans in that long-lost neighborhood moved on with their lives. Some black activists can't or won't and they get endless support for that from the Portland area's progressives.
Your point is well taken - this is a disgusting political swampland and a testament to inane profligate spending with, all too likely, negative payback. A train wreck of Measure 110 proportion is almost guaranteed.
If we are asking BS Equity Questions:
Why weren’t poor white people given the same treatment from the perpetually aggrieved when I-205 decimated their homes? They are, without a doubt, the most ACTUAL underrepresented tribe in Progressive Oregon. Attacked as privileged while generationally impoverished.
If memory serves, 3 synagogues were destroyed as part of the I-405 development - nothing from grievance majors for that assault on this historically underrepresented tribe - why is that?
In Portland, there’s something called “Interstate Avenue.” It was Portland and all northbound traffic’s route to the shores of the Columbia and points north.
I-5 paralleled Interstate for precisely that reason, and not because of white supremacy systemic racism. If it had been situated to the east or west within that corridor, blacks still would have been displaced.
I-405 (Stadium Freeway) destroyed St. Joseph Catholic Church, built in 1887, at 13th and Couch. It also took out numerous other historic buildings, many of them homes of old white Portlanders. No one ever claimed the freeway was a targeted attack on any class or group of people. We had to await the 21st century and a former mayor of a small Indiana city to tell us highway construction was all a racist conspiracy.
I applaud your bravery in exposing this uncomfortable truth. Wokism is rapidly losing favor, but the immense damage it has done to our Communities will be with us for decades as we search for sanity in removing this toxic environment from the many unwilling places that have suffered so much and for so long.
Wokeism is not losing favor in Portland. It’s just getting warmed up. Wait until Candace Avalos and Angelita Morillo get into power. It’s time to get the vote out for moderate City Council members and Mutlnomah County commissioners
Oppression Theory is built into virtually every course taught in PPS and in many at PSU - unless citizens actively fight and out the destructive nature of woke politicians and policy - it will not go away.
I used to think that was a right-wing talking point. Then my daughter enrolled at Grant HS. It is worse than you think. Last year, for student body President - a boy ran in the platform that the school hadn’t had an Asian American as president since 2015. Towards the end of the pandemic, students marched against and demonized anybody opposing getting vaccinated - BAC or expulsion. Don’t tell me we don’t have idiot, rabid ideologues being trained to destroy Portland, then Oregon and then America. That doesn’t even include the overt anti-white racism.
Portland has become an intolerant city. With polarization many once accepting liberals have become illiberals. They’re just like the rigid far right Trumpers that they hate.
No, most of them are nothing like you describe. They are people who have used their intellect to assess the real world results of many failed progressive ideas.
Changing one’s mind after reviewing all available data is progressive thinking at its best. Clinging to emotional idealism in the face of failed results is not!
I wish I knew. Portland may be over by their hands. At least 800,000 voters have moved to Portland in the past 20 years, and the vast majority are younger liberals. Their white guilt and acceptance of unacceptable behavior have created the disaster that we see on our streets today 😡
What the activitists and other idiots do not seem to be aware of in Maryland is that the KEY BRIDGE is the ONLY route north/south on I-95 through that area for big rigs with HAZMAT LOADS. All other highways in the area go through tunnels.
I've been on it many times, and its loss is seriously impeding commercial freight, which affects everybody. Even paint components are classified as HAZMAT, as are nail polish and many cosmetics, aerosol sprays, some laundry detergents, all fireworks (even New Years Poppers), whipped cream, helium tanks, rechargeable power drills, and many, many more items you see every day in stores. HAZMAT items cannot be carried through tunnels, and every other truck-legal route in the area passes through a tunnel.
This will cause a massive traffic tie up for trucks, as did the collapse of I-5 in California in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. That will delay loads and increase costs, as trucks have to take long detours and use more fuel. Building a smaller bridge to "reduce traffic" is outrageous.
Activists forget about commercial freight (or think they can make is disappear) and expect everybody to cross every bridge in an EV or on a bicycle.
Have to give Democrats credit for one thing -- put them in charge of anything and they'll turn it into a national embarrassment or disaster.
There are some great ideas complete with architectural drawings in the City of Portland Archives that show what a freeway cover should look like. They were the thesis project for one of Portland’s preeminent Landscape Architects, Chelsea McCann (n.e. Cochran) while at U of O.
In good with the caps. As long as it doesn’t mean even more taxes for Portlanders. Boston really benefitted from covering their highway. The whole restoring Black Albina thing is ridiculous though.
Great column, Pam.
As commenters note below, blacks were far from the only victims of the Urban Renewal mania...check out this terrific YouTube video "The Story of Portland's First Great Urban Renewal Project" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1KReJIPmjs)...which, aside from the Jewish community, also devastated cheap housing for, mostly, elderly white men. (If you miss that irony in our age of "affordable" socialized housing, drop me a line).
One of the great mysteries of the black "community" is the desire to, essentially, revive the rollicking good old days of a mob-run black ghetto. (See page 62 of Phil Stanford's magisterial "Portland Confidential" for that story.)
As no less than the city's Charter Commission lamented, Portland is now so integrated--a goal that claimed dozens of black and white lives in the '60s and resulted in the Civil Rights bills--that the commission couldn't find a sufficient concentration of blacks to engineer a set-aside district for them.
Who, in any event, haven't had much trouble getting elected city-wide. (The point at which the prattle about "disproportion" stops.)
But build a concrete cap we must!
This is the city's whose past DA was just convicted in TWO separate federal felony jury trials (both brought by the Biden Justice Department before anyone accuses them of "racism.")
"Multi-story buildings will be built on top of these freeway caps, along with greenery and sidewalks to create community spaces for development and economic opportunities — primarily for black-owned businesses, to make up for last century’s urban renewal that hurt the historically black Albina neighborhood."
/ / /
"Historic Albina Advisory Board member James Posey, co-founder of the National Association of Minority Contractors of Oregon and president of the local chapter of the NAACP, is skeptical of the project."
"Maus writes that Posey wants to make sure black firms and contractors, plus Portland’s black residents, benefit directly."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ibram Xiolani Kendi may have self-destructed when his grandiose Center for Antiracism Research at Boston Unversity imploded (all that white-liberal-guilt money he raked in produced few, if any, contributions to knowledge), but in Portland, Oregon, the Kendi Principle is more robust than ever.
For those who are unfamiliar with the output of that race-grifting lightweight, Kendi declared in his "How to be an Antiracist" that "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination."
The Kendi Principle, which would have shocked and appalled the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who was assassinated 56 years ago today, is the mechanism behind race policy in the Portland Metro area. What else accounts for patently discriminatory plans, aspirations and commentary such as the passages quoted above?
Portland has skipped the reparations debate in favor of a multi-pronged de-facto reparations program that explicitly aims to favor members of preferred racial and ethnic identity groups at the expense of the majority of voter-taxpayers, the Fair Housing Act and other local, state and federal nondiscrimination laws be damned.
It is enough to make one wish that a conservative legal foundation would sue local government and nonprofits back into compliance. In the meantime, it's important to gather specific facts showing the Kendi Principle in action and include them in written protests to your elected representatives and the local media.
Is a vote important?
Don Benton, a nut case from Clark County, was the deciding 2017 "no vote" on the I-5 Bridge and the Albina Rose Quarter.
That vote - with John Ley's lobbying - has cost us billions.
And we have to repay the millions for the wasted studies to support it.
The " I-5 Bridge"Eqiuity Bridge" will not be built in my lifetime.
"In addition to expanding lanes to widen the freeway, a portion of I-5 will be “capped” or covered with concrete. Multi-story buildings will be built on top of these freeway caps, along with greenery and sidewalks to create community spaces for development and economic opportunities...."
There are three large faults beneath Portland. The East Bank Fault, the Portland Hills Fault and the Oatfield Fault. (I saw this on a documentary, but it took a lot of effort to find reference to the Portland faults online.) Not to mention the Cascadia Subduction Zone and the other faults around Portland.
Why would anyone think putting public housing on top of a concrete cap over a highway would be a good idea? Maybe the same people who live in those houses on stilts in the West Hills.
The Concrete Cap if properly designed and built would withstand an earthquake far better than the existing overpasses and freeway ramps.
The key words are “if properly designed and built.” Based on the state of Oregon’s recent track record, I don’t have confidence that the caps will be properly designed and built. We’ve had too many debacles in this state.
In 2016 and 2017, I attended many meetings of the Joint Interim Committee on Transportation Preservation and Modernization. When there was discussion about tolling, there was always some hesitancy about the technology involved. What kind of technology would the state need to read license plates to charge a toll? Colorado had something in the works. But Oregon?
As more than one legislator would note, Oregon has a history of problems with anything involving technology. Remember Cover Oregon? Before that, there was the Oregon Wireless Interoperability Network or OWIN. And before that, the DMV spent $48 million project to automate its operations. After spending another $123 million, it still didn’t work right.
Former state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose) liked to joke that whenever somebody says IT, the Oregon legislature gets out the garlic and crucifix.
So I can understand why there could be doubts about the structural integrity of those freeway caps. Oregon has had too many screwups.
Most certainly, a cap alone. But a concrete cap with multi-story buildings on top of it? I'm no engineer, but it doesn't sound plausible to me that those buildings would be safe. And even if it would be possible, I would not trust ODOT to be able to ensure it would.
Pamela, excellent comments. Portland is out to lunch!
Posey's right. "Albina Vision" is a steaming heap of baloney.
As for congestion, it would be good to get some more lanes on I-5 at the Rose Quarter, but the sad truth is that on the west end of the Marquam Bridge, I-5 in both directons gets squeezed down to two lanes by the ramps to and from the bridge. I don't think it would even be physically possible to change that. Portland is going to be a freight chokepoint forever, or at least until the Marquam gets redone.
If we must restore Albina to a thriving Black community why don’t we also have to restore the Jewish neighborhood in Portland that was razed in an urban “renewal” project in the 1950’s-1960’s? Lots of anti-Semitism in Portland.
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/jews-in-oregon/#:~:text=In%201958%2C%20Portland%20voters%20approved,institutions%20by%20the%20early%201970s.
https://www.oregonmetro.gov/news/decades-after-difficult-move-distinctive-barbur-blvd-synagogue-considers-future
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2011/12/tales_of_jewish_south_portland.html
It's that the Jews and Italian-Americans in that long-lost neighborhood moved on with their lives. Some black activists can't or won't and they get endless support for that from the Portland area's progressives.
Not just black activists, it is the White Savioirs that are really pushing this “reparations in disguise”.
Good article. I’m all for light rail, pedestrians, bikes AND cars on the new bridge. We do need multi modal transportation.
Jonathan Maus has become very polarized. He just put out an article disclosing his police hate. I like the information he provides in cycling improvements but his shilling for people like Joanne Hardesty and anti police rhetoric is part of the reason we have record traffic deaths in Portland. https://bikeportland.org/2024/04/02/podcast-portland-police-officer-and-city-council-candidate-eli-arnold-385208
Baltimore is a shithole beyond belief. The Wire barely captures it. And this is what progressives seek for Portland and for Oregon.
Seek? I believe they’ve attained it.
Your point is well taken - this is a disgusting political swampland and a testament to inane profligate spending with, all too likely, negative payback. A train wreck of Measure 110 proportion is almost guaranteed.
If we are asking BS Equity Questions:
Why weren’t poor white people given the same treatment from the perpetually aggrieved when I-205 decimated their homes? They are, without a doubt, the most ACTUAL underrepresented tribe in Progressive Oregon. Attacked as privileged while generationally impoverished.
If memory serves, 3 synagogues were destroyed as part of the I-405 development - nothing from grievance majors for that assault on this historically underrepresented tribe - why is that?
In Portland, there’s something called “Interstate Avenue.” It was Portland and all northbound traffic’s route to the shores of the Columbia and points north.
I-5 paralleled Interstate for precisely that reason, and not because of white supremacy systemic racism. If it had been situated to the east or west within that corridor, blacks still would have been displaced.
I-405 (Stadium Freeway) destroyed St. Joseph Catholic Church, built in 1887, at 13th and Couch. It also took out numerous other historic buildings, many of them homes of old white Portlanders. No one ever claimed the freeway was a targeted attack on any class or group of people. We had to await the 21st century and a former mayor of a small Indiana city to tell us highway construction was all a racist conspiracy.
I applaud your bravery in exposing this uncomfortable truth. Wokism is rapidly losing favor, but the immense damage it has done to our Communities will be with us for decades as we search for sanity in removing this toxic environment from the many unwilling places that have suffered so much and for so long.
Wokeism is not losing favor in Portland. It’s just getting warmed up. Wait until Candace Avalos and Angelita Morillo get into power. It’s time to get the vote out for moderate City Council members and Mutlnomah County commissioners
😩
Oppression Theory is built into virtually every course taught in PPS and in many at PSU - unless citizens actively fight and out the destructive nature of woke politicians and policy - it will not go away.
I used to think that was a right-wing talking point. Then my daughter enrolled at Grant HS. It is worse than you think. Last year, for student body President - a boy ran in the platform that the school hadn’t had an Asian American as president since 2015. Towards the end of the pandemic, students marched against and demonized anybody opposing getting vaccinated - BAC or expulsion. Don’t tell me we don’t have idiot, rabid ideologues being trained to destroy Portland, then Oregon and then America. That doesn’t even include the overt anti-white racism.
Portland has become an intolerant city. With polarization many once accepting liberals have become illiberals. They’re just like the rigid far right Trumpers that they hate.
No, most of them are nothing like you describe. They are people who have used their intellect to assess the real world results of many failed progressive ideas.
Changing one’s mind after reviewing all available data is progressive thinking at its best. Clinging to emotional idealism in the face of failed results is not!
But the Portland progressives aren’t changing their mind. They’re just pushing for more of the same status quo. What’s the answer?
I wish I knew. Portland may be over by their hands. At least 800,000 voters have moved to Portland in the past 20 years, and the vast majority are younger liberals. Their white guilt and acceptance of unacceptable behavior have created the disaster that we see on our streets today 😡
And just like the far left Bidenites that they hate.
My answer to Javier is for you as well 😎