New Columbia is a housing development in the Portsmouth neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. It was previously called Columbia Villa. It is operated by the city's public housing authority, Home Forward, and is the largest public housing development in the state.
Description
New Columbia is Oregon's largest public housing development. It occupies the northeast corner of the Portsmouth Neighborhood, bordered on the north by Columbia Blvd, on the east by Woolsey Avenue, on the south by Houghton Street, and on the west by Adriatic Avenue. It contains McCoy Park and several pocket parks, such as the New Columbia Pocket Park. It is served by Rosa Parks Elementary School and the Charles Jordan Community Center, which hosts the North Portland chapter of the Boys & Girls Club. As of 2019, the development had 1,847 residents. 47% of those are African-American, 26% are Hispanic, and 23% are white.
History
Early history
The site of New Columbia was originally built as Columbia Villa in 1942 by Home Forward, then called the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP). The Villa was built to house the influx of shipyard workers who came to the area as ship production expanded in response to World War II. The low-density project spread 400 low-rise apartment units over 82 acres with a suburban-style street layout. It would be one of two HAP worker housing projects that would survive after the war as low-income public housing, when the units were converted to low-income housing for veterans at the end of the war. The project maintained a positive public image through the 1960s, being praised for its beauty in a 1962 issue of The Oregonian. However, by 1976, the same newspaper described the area as "an institutional compound".
Rise of crime and city response
The shift in the 1970s has been attributed to changes in public housing regulations, persistent poverty, and the spread of heroin addiction. A Portland Police gang detective reported that in 1987, a resident alerted him to the presence of members of the Californian 357 Crips in the Tamarack Apartments of Columbia Villa, who were later joined by members of other Californian Crips chapters, and began distributing crack cocaine in the area. The arrival of the drug coincided with further decline in living conditions, as was the case in many public housing neighborhoods across the country. The Villa was then the site of the city's first known drive-by shooting in 1988, when local Crips leader Joseph Ray Winston was murdered at a park on North Woolsey Avenue. Three bystanders were also injured in the shooting. The eponymous Columbia Villa Crips are still recognized by Multnomah County as an active Crips chapter.
In response to rising crime in the neighborhood, the City of Portland, in cooperation with Multnomah County and the State of Oregon, initiated a Community Service Intervention Program focused on reducing crime and the fear of crime, and improving the quality of life in Columbia Villa. The CSIP worked to improve communication between social service agencies and changed police approaches to focus on community policing practices. This effort was also assisted by a coalition of resident activists who tasked themselves with rebuilding community infrastructure. The strategy was widely regarded as successful, and was used as a national model for improving public safety in crime-stricken neighborhoods. However, the stigma carried by the neighborhood would remain, with a 2003 article on the area in Willamette Week referring to it as "Portland's ghetto".