HOMELESSNESS IN PORTLAND may not be unique to Old Town, but the neighborhood is well known as Portland’s primary homeless district. It’s a neighborhood and a situation that was created more than a century ago by simultaneous forces—economic and social—working in concert. And while the types of homelessness that were prevalent at the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s differed slightly from our modern version, the decisions that were made back then built the Old Town of today.
City of Transients
From its incorporation in 1851 until around World War II, Portland’s early industries, like logging and agriculture, relied on a large influx of low-skilled manual laborers who performed dangerous, difficult work. Most of these workers were young, single men living from job to temporary job.
This transient workforce didn’t sign lease agreements or acquire mortgages. Instead, they lived in smaller, cheaper housing units such as residential hotels.
“If you go back through the history of Portland, we had thousands of single-room occupancy units,” says Ed Blackburn, executive director of Central City Concern. “A lot of West Coast cities did—and that’s largely due to their ports and natural resource industries.”
However, the area now referred to as Old Town (previously known as the North End, Whitechapel, and Couch’s Addition) wasn’t the only hub for low-income lodging and transient labor in Portland. Before the Lownsdale area became populated with buildings like Portland City Hall and the Keller Auditorium, it was a very different sort of neighborhood. Just north of where South Waterfront is today, Lownsdale was brimming with cheap housing, European immigrants, hotels, and saloons. Unlike Old Town, which is still with us, this second low-income district fell victim to aggressive urban renewal policies in the 1950s. New structures like the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building replaced what had once been an affordable, vibrant neighborhood.
