The Vanport Flood: When the River Came for the Second City

The notice went under the doors and onto the bulletin boards of the housing project offices on the morning of May thirtieth, nineteen forty-eight, and it said what it said: the dike is safe, you will have time to leave, you will be warned.

That same afternoon, the railroad dike on the west side of Vanport failed at four seventeen. Within sixty minutes the entire city was underwater.

Vanport had been built in one hundred ten days in nineteen forty-two on a floodplain between the Columbia River and the Columbia Slough, just north of Portland. The federal government built it as emergency housing for the workers flooding into Portland to work in the Kaiser shipyards. At its wartime peak it held more than forty thousand people, making it the second-largest city in Oregon. By the spring of nineteen forty-eight it held roughly eighteen thousand five hundred residents, including approximately six thousand three hundred Black Oregonians who had come to work in the wartime economy and stayed.

They lived in Vanport not by preference. Racial covenants on housing throughout Portland and its suburbs made it legally impossible for Black residents to buy or rent in most neighborhoods. The Housing Authority of Portland had concentrated its Black tenants in Vanport rather than dispersing them across the city. When the dike failed, those residents had fewer options for escape and fewer places to go afterward than the white residents who fled beside them.

The official death toll was approximately fifteen, a number that has been disputed by historians and community members who argue it does not account for those who died in the weeks following of illness and exposure and displacement. The Housing Authority's position was that proper warnings had been issued. The notice on the bulletin board, read again after the flood, became one of the most analyzed documents in Oregon civil rights history.

After the flood, Black Oregonians from Vanport largely had one neighborhood where housing was available to them: Albina, in Northeast Portland, which was already the city's most concentrated Black district. They arrived with nothing. The housing market they were forced into knew it. The prices reflected it.

The site of Vanport is today Delta Park and the Columbia Slough wetlands. There is no formal landmark commemorating what was there. The river that destroyed it left no trace that is easy to find on the ground.

The Vanport Mosaic, a Portland-based arts and history organization, has for years been documenting the community that was lost, gathering oral histories from survivors and descendants. Their archive, at vanportmosaic.org, is the most complete public record of what Vanport was and what happened to the people who lived there.