At its height, nearly 40,000 people lived in Vanport, including 6,000 African Americans. Vanport was then the nation's largest public housing project and the second-largest city in Oregon.
During World War II, Portland launched a national recruitment campaign that brought 100,000 workers to the city's shipyards. Existing private housing was already scarce, and even more troubling, Oregon's so-called real estate code of ethics restricted the thousands of newly arrived African Americans to only one neighborhood.
So a makeshift community was quickly built on a newly purchased floodplain just outside city limits: the city of Vanport.
