Advocates spar ahead of pivotal Rose Quarter project vote

When people talk about racism and the I-5 Rose Quarter project, they usually talk about how government agencies destroyed hundreds of homes in the vibrant Albina neighborhood where many Black people once lived, in order to build parking lots and a freeway.

But race has simmered under the lid of this project for years as advocacy groups have plant their flags and the Oregon Department of Transportation tries to navigate various constituencies.

In 2020, ODOT disbanded an advisory committee that had become skeptical of the project and hand-picked members of a new one to replace it. ODOT said the move was made to “intentionally center Black voices,” but the folks pushed out felt it was done to silence opposition. In 2021 BikePortland published a guest article by climate attorney Ka’sha Bernard, who attended an Oregon Transportation Commission meeting where ODOT brought in Black construction firm owners to, “say how good the minority contracts granted by the State would be for the community, while a bunch of young white kids got up there in tears proclaiming how their climate fates would soon be sealed.” “I thought ODOT would not stoop as low as to pit Black community members against young environmentalists,” Bernard wrote.

I’ve watched committee meetings where Joe Cortright, the White co-founder of No More Freeways (the nonprofit group that has done the most work to stall the project through lawsuits and community organizing) is vehemently criticized by Black committee members. “I take great offense to some of these comments,” Historic Albina Advisory Board member Leslie Goodlow shared at a meeting in March of 2024. “It’s the paternalistic tone. These people think they’re educating us? Hard pass.” “Joe Cortright’s on here talking about ecological stuff,” another HAAB member said after his testimony. “And I’m with some other people who say: ‘Where was he when they was building all this stuff and they took all this money and gentrified our community with all that money?!'”

That dynamic — where many of the project’s most ardent supporters are Black and many of its most ardent detractors are White — remains to this day.

With a pivotal vote about project funding looming at Thursday’s OTC meeting, No More Freeways put out an action alert telling supporters to demand that commissioners vote to defund the project. With $167 million dedicated to the project, the OTC can tell ODOT whether to begin partial construction, delay full construction, or to stop spending entirely.

No More Freeways says ODOT simply cannot afford to keep spending money on the project while the state’s lack of transportation funding is an “existential emergency.” “We simply cannot afford to let the Oregon Transportation Commission continue to throw good money after bad and allocate another $160 million towards this boondoggle when the state has so many other needs,” No More Freeways writes.

When the group posted their message on Instagram, JT Flowers replied in the comments. Flowers is director of government affairs for Albina Vision Trust, the nonprofit that in many ways controls the future of the project. To be clear, Flowers was writing from his personal account (I’ve reached out to him for comment and have not yet heard back), but his candor and critique of No More Freeways raised eyebrows.

“And gut decades of Black-led work to reconnect Albina via a highway cover and reroot displaced working communities back in the heart of our city? No thanks, NMF,” Flowers wrote. “You folks are starting to veer into a politic defined by green-washed racism rather than justice, equity or true climate consciousness.”

Someone from No More Freeways replied that they are in full support of the highway covers and that there are no current plans to spend any money on them. “Our grassroots opposition has consistently focused on our concern about the doubling of the width of the freeway that adds more car traffic, air pollution and carbon emissions into the neighborhood and makes building caps significantly more expensive and difficult,” No More Freeways wrote.

To which Flowers replied:

“‘Supporting’ the highway covers actually means heeding nearly six years of combined community engagement through which thousands of community members across Oregon (many of them being Black folks whose families, like mine, were displaced by the construction of I-5) collectively pointed towards an imperfect compromise: a partial expansion of the 28th worst bottleneck in the country built alongside an 8 acre highway cover that offers true vertical development opportunity on top of the cap, reconnecting Albina in a generationally transformative way. This is a statewide transportation project, meaning that it only has legs if it can appropriately serve the many competing needs of stakeholders of differing beliefs and ideologies. As someone who is an active champion of transit and an unapologetic defender of a transit-oriented, anti-single-driver-vehicle future in our city, it is still crystal clear to me that this project is not about the expansion of the highway — it’s about the statewide politics that make a restoratively redeveloped future possible for the daughters and sons of Lower Albina. You folks cannot continuously claim to be supportive of the cover while actively undermining the community-driven compromise that made it possible in the first place.”

Based on this comment, Flowers is no longer agnostic about the freeway widening element of the project. He believes it’s better to allow ODOT to move forward adding lanes to I-5 if it means the highway covers — and the Albina Vision — can be realized, rather than risk the entire project.

As if the OTC’s decision Thursday wasn’t difficult enough.

Stay tuned for more coverage.