By Allan Lazo and Andrea Durbin

Lazo is executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Oregon. Durbin is the director of the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

Portland is a beautiful place with a strong economy and long tradition of civic pride and engagement. Those of us who were born and raised here as well as transplants and newcomers can attest to the fact that Portland is growing quickly.

Growing pains manifest in a shortage of housing units, skyrocketing housing costs and displacement of communities of color. So we need to expand our toolbox and the geographic areas in which we can build more housing while also paying attention to the potential impacts on vulnerable communities.

Why is this important? Housing is one of our most fundamental human needs. Today, however, too many Portlanders struggle to find an affordable house or apartment to buy or rent. And the vast majority of them are people of color who have been historically marginalized. Our city abounds with opportunity, but we have a shared history that belies the prosperity our region offers.

As we seek to create a fair and inclusive city, we need to understand our history and how past city zoning and land use plans have had dire and lasting consequences for communities of color today.

The city recently released a report called Historical Context of Racist Planning. It shows that Portland, like many U.S. cities, has a long-standing history of racist housing and land use practices that created and reinforced racial segregation and exacerbated displacement trends. While some of these practices were conducted with discriminatory intent, others resulted in discriminatory outcomes regardless of their intent that continue to perpetuate disparities today.

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For example, numerous communities adopted exclusionary zoning policies that allowed only single-family residences and, by extension, barred lower income residents and communities of color from certain parts of the city. Some neighborhoods also specifically adopted racially restrictive covenants that prohibited homeowners from selling their properties to nonwhite buyers. Banks also played a role in discriminating against communities of color by refusing to lend money to would-be homebuyers in minority neighborhoods, a practice called redlining. The result of these practices can be seen today in the exclusionary neighborhood pattern still visible on Portlands zoning map. Today, single-family zoned land makes up 44% of the zoned city (and 75% of zoned land suitable for housing), yet only 18% of homeowners are people of color.

Along with exclusionary practices, the city and other government agencies engaged in planning practices designed to increase investment in select areas without protecting against displacement. These practices preserved the exclusivity of predominantly white, single-family neighborhoods. They also accelerated gentrification and displacement of people of color by concentrating growth in vulnerable areas.

As a result, these policies and decisions created benefits for white homeowners, whose family wealth grew due to property-value appreciation and tax benefits such as the mortgage interest deduction. Today, single-family zoning patterns in historically exclusionary neighborhoods uphold and reinforce racial segregation in our city, while prolonging the barriers to homeownership for people of color.

Past planning policies and actions have resulted in the benefits and burdens of our city being inequitably distributed, leading to prosperity in some areas and vulnerability to displacement in others. Communities of color, especially African Americans, have been repeatedly burdened, excluded, displaced and otherwise harmed by explicit and implicit racial discrimination and segregation. In the Albina neighborhood alone, roughly 10,000 black residents were displaced from 1990 to 2016.

We can and must do better. It is urgent that we do this work together and do it now. We seek new decision-making and planning processes that address these challenges head on. We commit to more intentional and equitable outcomes, framed in creating justice for frontline communities, those most targeted and impacted. This requires that we confront the historic and structural racism that created deep inequities, which continue to harm people of color in Portland.

How can this history inspire us to learn from a harmful past to work toward racial justice together? We know major changes in land use currently under consideration by City Council were not designed to directly address this history but will provide tools that allow us to address the exclusivity that we see across the city.

We invite you to read this report at https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/79790 and reflect on its significance for our community. Then listen to a City Council work session Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. to hear how our city leaders are using this history to inform future decision-making. Lets write the next chapter of our collective story together.

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Opinion: Learning from a harmful past to work toward racial justice together - oregonlive.com