[What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Transportation issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.]
Over fifty years ago, a freeway almost destroyed a large swath of Southeast Portland. Portland said no.
The modern American freeway system is largely a product of development following World War II, and in the early postwar years, highways were popular. Or at least, the idea of them was.
“The initial wave of roadway building was primarily a rural phenomenon,” says Sy Adler, professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Interim Dean, College of Urban Affairs at Portland State University. According to Adler, state legislatures were dominated by rural and small-town interests, and gas taxes were often restricted to building highways. Highway construction, he says, was a way to connect dispersed rural communities to urban centers.
“Getting the interstate highway system going was an urban response to how, at the state level, highways were often a rural phenomenon,” Adler says. He says that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, city governments were generally eager to have highways make inroads (literally) into urban environments.
However, the practical realities of building a highway system soon kicked up resistance.
“The minute freeways started impacting where people lived—either through displacement or because of what its presence did to a neighborhood—that stirred up controversy,” says Val Ballestrem, a public historian whose master’s thesis In the Shadow of a Concrete Forest focuses on the Mount Hood Freeway.
Ballestrem cites I-5 construction as an example. Construction on that highway in more rural areas was, he says, largely uncontroversial. But once it hit the Portland metro area, he says, “There were definitely people opposed to that from the beginning…. There was a lot of letter writing and things like that, but for the longest time it didn’t have any real impact. Until there was a shift on who was in office.”
“For Portland you had two main roads: I-5 and what became I-205.” This, he says, was typical. Cities usually had one highway going through the city center, and another further out on the periphery. The Mount Hood Freeway would have connected these two main roads, connecting the Marquam Bridge to I-205, cutting through Southeast near Powell Boulevard, along where Clinton Street is now. Ballestrem estimates construction would have demolished over 1,700 homes, about 1 percent of Portland’s available housing at the time.
“It speaks to the political power that people can have when they get together and get people in office.”
Val Ballestrem
Notably, the Mount Hood Freeway would not have gone to Mount Hood. It would have gone to Gresham.
“The intent wasn’t to destroy cities,” says Ballestrem, “but the reality on the ground was that you had to acquire land.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, opposing freeway construction and supporting mass transit was a winning issue for a new generation of Portland elected officials.
“Goldschmidt was especially big on prioritizing transit that would serve the Portland Central Business District,” says Adler, who characterizes this era as a major shift in Portland politics. Adler was referring to Neil Goldschmidt, the Portland city commissioner and mayor who would go on to become the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and the 33rd governor of Oregon. (In 2004, Goldschmidt admitted to sexually abusing a 13-year-old when he was in his thirties.)
Ron Buell, who helped run Goldschmidt’s campaigns and went on to found Willamette Week, emphasizes that defeating or firing entrenched political figures who’d been responsible for the initial waves of freeways went a long way to making change possible.
“Neil replaced the whole damn Planning Commission,” he says.
Unlike early opposition to I-5 and I-205, efforts to stop the Mount Hood Freeway succeeded. According to Ballestrem, Adler, and Buell, there was no one single reason for the freeway’s defeat. Popular movements, a new generation of elected officials, new regulations for infrastructure projects, and federal legislation allowing for reallocation of transportation funds contributed to the highway’s demise.
Adler says that freeway resistance in the later part of the midcentury has to be viewed in the context of other popular campaigns, like the civil rights and environmental movements. Those, he says, shared overlapping concerns about displacement, safety, and air pollution, and mobilization for one cause compounded others.
Buell recalls popular resistance to highways during the 1970s: “We had protests on ramps to where they were going to extend the freeway,” he says. “We did a canvas down the route of the Mount Hood Freeway, through Portland and all the way down to I-205,” he says, recounting a door-knocking campaign that included hundreds of homes and businesses.
In the early 1970s, building a highway also entailed much more than it had just a decade or two before. Public input and assessments of environmental impact statements became part of the process.
“Suddenly there was this nexus of things that made future freeways hard to get done,” says Ballestrem. “In some ways they were lucky to get I-205 finished.” Ballestrem notes that the Mount Hood Freeway didn’t satisfy the new regulatory requirements that freeway projects had to abide by in the ’70s.
Buell also credits Goldschmidt for mobilizing local business and labor leaders against the freeway. Historically, he says, those interests had been in favor of large infrastructure projects. That’s because Portland didn’t just give highway funding back to the feds. Recent federal legislation at the time allowed local governments to repurpose highway money to other transportation projects. According to Ballestrem, this was crucial for killing the freeway. Saying “no” meant saying “yes” to a lot of other projects.
The $75 million for the Mount Hood Freeway was repurposed for other uses. One of the most high-profile was a light rail system.
“A MAX line to Gresham was still going in the same direction the freeway would have gone,” says Ballestrem.
Adler emphasizes that the funding didn’t just go to the MAX. It also got spread around the region, including about 140 smaller roadway projects, which was politically useful for city, state, and county leaders.
“That Mount Hood Freeway money ended up in projects all over the place for the next two decades,” says Ballestrem. “It speaks to the political power that people can have when they get together and get people in office.”
Adler and Ballestrem are both hesitant to speculate on what Portland would look like had the freeway been built.
“The state land use program might have moderated the effect of building that freeway,” says Adler. “One can imagine a lot of Washington County-type development: lower density and sprawling patterns out east. It would have also transformed agriculture on the east side.”
After a few moments of hesitation, Ballestrem does say one definitive thing about what the freeway would have looked like.
“It would have been an eyesore.”
