With the announcement Friday of two separate grants that total nearly a half-billion dollars, the U.S. Department of Transportation has made it clear they want to see the “Albina Vision” for the Rose Quarter area become a reality sooner than later.
Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer and senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley announced they have brought home $450 million to construct covers over Interstate 5 through the Rose Quarter, as well as an additional $38.4 million for a complete makeover of Northeast Broadway and Weidler streets to create a new “civic main street” between NE 7th and the Broadway Bridge.
The grant is the largest ODOT has ever received from the federal government and makes good on promises made by these members of Congress in 2021.
Ironically, the $450 million federal grant is the same amount ODOT estimated the project would cost when they pitched it to lawmakers in 2017 as a way to alleviate traffic backups through Portland. Since then the project’s estimated cost has ballooned to an estimated $1.3 billion.
This new money isn’t for the freeway widening portion of the project. Instead, it must go toward a project Blumenauer says will, “heal communities torn apart by destructive federal projects.” Senator Merkley said the project will, “Help to right the shameful wrongs inflicted on historically Black neighborhoods and to make our city a stronger and safer community for generations to come.”
This is the first federal investment into construction of the I-5 Rose Quarter project since planning got underway in earnest nearly 14 years ago.
The grants are from the Biden Administration’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant program and come almost exactly one year after the same program awarded the nonprofit Albina Vision Trust an $800,000 planning grant. US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg must have liked what he saw in those plans and during his visit to Portland last summer.
Friday’s announcement injects new life into a moribund project that had been on life support since just before Buttigieg’s visit and it makes good on a prediction by ODOT staff in 2021 that Buttigieg would be Oregon’s “new best friend.” Now ODOT will use this grant as leverage to encourage state lawmakers to fund the (much less popular and politically dicey) freeway-widening portion of their project as they negotiate what’s expected to be a large transportation funding package in the 2025 session.
Now there’s real money on the table to not just envision what lower Albina could look like if it were restored to its former glory as a vibrant neighborhood that was home to hundreds of Black Portlanders who were displaced by racist planning decisions; but to actually build it. This announcement comes after a string of home runs already hit by Albina Vision Trust, the group that has raised well over a billion dollars and closed multiple real estate development deals since it was first launched in 2017.
The grants are a “momentous leap forward in the longstanding fight to rebuild Albina,” said AVT Executive Director Winta Yohannes.
Nonprofit No More Freeways says ODOT should “construct the caps and lose the lanes.” “Albina deserves cleaner air and affordable housing, not air pollution and endless traffic congestion, and the Reconnecting Communities grant funding should be used to heal this neighborhood without ODOT further harming the neighborhood with air pollution and additional freeway lanes. ODOT’s insistence on a costly project that doubles the width of the highway and likely violates environmental standards is delaying the opportunity to heal this neighborhood.”
Broadway Main Street
The $38.4 million for PBOT will allow them break ground on their N/NE Broadway Main Street and Supporting Connections project. As BikePortland reported last fall, that project would extend and complement other surface street changes ODOT plans to make in the I-5 Rose Quarter project. The idea would be to change what are currently unwelcoming, wide, arterials into what PBOT calls a “civic main street.” At a meeting last September, a PBOT staffer said the project goal is to create a streetscape that would allow someone to, “take a pleasant walk with their young child from NE 7th to Waterfront Park.”
The great news for cash-strapped PBOT is that the grant requires no matching funds. The great news for people who breathe is that PBOT can get started on this regardless of what ODOT does with the freeway. PBOT has said the Broadway Main Street changes could even come ahead of major construction on the Rose Quarter project.