Albina One, as the building is known, would be a residential foothold in an entertainment district dominated by big-ticket events venues, including the basketball arena. A community group, Albina Vision Trust, seeks nothing less than to rebuild a neighborhood where a thriving Black community once stood, before President Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate, a growing hospital and other needs drove 800 homes — largely Black-owned — to be demolished and their residents relocated.
Planners envision public spaces throughout Albina, including a marketplace, a riverfront park and narrow, pedestrian-friendly streets. (Courtesy of Albina Vision Trust)
If it succeeds, Albina Vision could serve as a national model for how cities can begin unraveling 20th century urban renewal that divided or displaced Black communities in many American cities. If it fails, it could serve as a cautionary tale for the limitations of equity-focused redevelopment efforts.
"The landscape in this part of the city reflects the worst of racist land use policies, including urban renewal, and why we have parking lots where there were once homes," said Winta Yohannes, executive director of Albina Vision Trust, the nonprofit formed to carry out the redevelopment.
Portland's Albina Vision, illustrated here, aims to add more than 2,000 housing units, 300,000 square feet of commercial space, and 200,000 square feet of parks and other community spaces in the Albina neighborhood, a largely Black and historically displaced community. (Rendering by El Dorado Inc., courtesy of Albina Vision Trust)
The project has garnered significant support from Portland's liberal-leaning city government and a close-knit group of equity-focused developers and architects. The city has so far kicked in $13 million in affordable housing funding for Albina One — every apartment will be rent-restricted — and $800,000 for planning. A clean energy grant is also in the works; Albina One is planned to have a rooftop solar array.
During a recent City Council briefing, Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty remarked that "It is just so fabulous to see how far the Albina Trust Vision has come."
"We have had a lot of skeptics about this vision, and it's just wonderful watching the process that's creating a plan that is just revolutionary," Hardesty said.
But the larger vision is not without challenges. Remaking the area would take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, and require the cooperation of public and private landowners.
"There is an opportunity to set a national precedent to demonstrate: How do we heal our communities?" Yohannes said.
Land Use and Race
Portland is hardly alone in seeking to redress past land use practices that tore apart Black communities.
Cities around the country are beginning to back equity plans that have long been pushed by activists, said Marc Norman, associate dean of New York University's Schack Institute of Real Estate. Norman also serves as an adviser to Albina Vision Trust.
"Community people and activists have always thought this work was important and asserted it, but what's different is cities are affirmatively helping sanction and fund it and helping activists and communities move forward with it," Norman said.
In late June, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to return Bruce's Beach, a Black-owned beachfront resort that was seized using eminent domain in 1924, to members of the Bruce family.
In Florida, an effort to relocate a sewage treatment plant in a largely Black area of Dade City, near Tampa, was slowed recently when Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed funds for it. Residents have asked for the facility to be moved for decades, The Tampa Bay Times reported.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, has built a museum and "reconciliation park" in the Greenwood neighborhood, site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
In Richmond, Virginia, city and state officials have removed a series of Confederate monuments since 2020, including a 12-ton statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that came down in September 2021. The statues had been erected during times of racial tumult, including in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, to intimidate Black residents, Norman said.
"All of a sudden, this thing that [activists] were fighting against that was unmovable has become movable," he said.
Yohannes said she's been in touch with activists in New Orleans' Treme neighborhood who are considering equity-focused redevelopment.
The role of highway construction has also come into focus. During the postwar period, highways were often routed through largely minority neighborhoods. The U.S. Department of Transportation is rolling out a $1 billion grant program to "help reconnect communities that were previously cut off from economic opportunities by transportation infrastructure." The grants can be used for planning or capital construction.
Highway infrastructure plays a role in Albina Vision, too. The Oregon Department of Transportation plans to build caps over I-5 as part of a $1.45 billion modernization called the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project that will rely heavily on federal funding. The caps would serve to reknit the street grid that was broken by the interstate. Planners are debating how strong the caps should be built to support vertical development on top of them.
Equity-Focused Redevelopment Gathers Momentum
While communities across the nation consider equity-focused redevelopment, Portland is perhaps ahead of the game. Albina Vision Trust has been gathering momentum for years. An official rollout was preceded by 18 community workshops with 563 attendees. Other equity-focused redevelopments have paved the way. A new headquarters for Meyer Memorial Trust, a charitable foundation, was built with 39% of the design team and 55% of the construction workforce drawn from women- or minority-owned businesses or emerging small businesses. The organization even sold off its old art collection to replace it with a more diverse one.
Backers of another major effort, known as the Williams and Russell project, are considering development options for a 1.7-acre vacant block just north of the Albina Vision area in a fast-gentrifying neighborhood. The block has sat neglected for some 50 years, ever since the city's redevelopment agency in the early 1970s razed a commercial building that was home to Black-owned businesses.
Legacy Health now owns the block, which it acquired from the redevelopment agency in 1980. The Portland-based hospital system has agreed to donate the block to a nonprofit development entity that is intent on equity-focused redevelopment that may include affordable rental and ownership housing and rent-restricted commercial space.
The $78.5 million project may include a business incubator for Black entrepreneurs, said Anyeley Hallova, a Portland developer who is Black and whose firm, Adre, has been hired as developer of the Williams and Russell effort.
"It's really a place where Black-owned businesses can launch, grow, be supported," she said.
Dark Side of 'Portlandia'
Although known for craft beer, beards and bikes — a twee local culture lampooned by the TV show "Portlandia" — Portland has a darker history of racism.
Before statehood, the provisional government in 1844 passed a law ordering that Black people who attempted to settle in Oregon should be publicly whipped with 39 lashes every six months until they left the territory. The state constitution in 1857 banned slavery and also prohibited Black residents from owning property. During the 1920s, the state was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity.
Against this backdrop, Albina was home to successive waves of Irish, German, Russian, Scandinavian and Polish newcomers in the 20th century. The neighborhood's Black population boomed during the 1940s, nearly tripling to 4,500 during the decade, as many workers from nearby shipyards settled following a devastating flood of the Vanport area in 1948. Housing discrimination followed, concentrating Black residents in Albina, according to a Portland State University history of the neighborhood.
Starting in the 1950s, a series of major projects led to eminent domain evictions and the forced relocation of Black residents. Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which was completed in 1960 and was the first home of the Trail Blazers, came first, then Emanuel Hospital, now part of Legacy Health, and Interstate 5. The neighborhood was transformed into an events district, with parking lots replacing homes.
Hundreds of houses were destroyed, many of them owned by Black residents. Portland-based economics consulting firm Econorthwest found that the projects destroyed approximately $1 billion in present-day home equity.
What was left was a neighborhood with few residents. At present, the Albina Vision area has only one residential building, Paramount Apartments, with 66 units. Albina One would be its immediate neighbor.
"You can't have a community without housing," Hallova, founder of development firm Adre, said.
The population of the larger Census tract that includes the Albina Vision area more than doubled between 2010 and 2020 to 4,074. The tract had 2,765 housing units, according to the 2020 Census. The homeownership rate in the area was 11%, compared to 54.4% in Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland.
Hallova, who is not directly involved with Albina Vision Trust, said the project is unusual in that it seeks to redress past wrongs with real economic benefits for the Black community, not merely storytelling installations or memorials.
"They are thinking about, how do the benefits of real estate go toward advancing the Black community?" she said.
Rebuilding Black Wealth
Albina Vision Trust is examining how to provide ownership opportunities in the redevelopment so that residents can build equity.
"There is a sense of injury when we say — especially to the historic Albina community — you used to own your homes where you could have shared your generational wealth, and you're being invited back into a neighborhood that is not what it was, but you're participating as a renter," Yohannes said. "We knew the wealth building had to be at the core of how we do this."
Norman, of NYU, has researched mechanisms to build wealth in redeveloping communities and is looking at how to bring those to life in Albina. The disadvantage of homeownership, he said, is that the only way to realize a gain is by selling, leading to more gentrification. He's thinking of smaller-scale investments.
"What would be innovative is thinking about it for people of lower incomes or people who have never invested before," he said. "Even the laws say you have to be a sophisticated investor to even take part in creating wealth."
Investment could take the shape of buying shares in a corporation, limited liability company or cooperative, Norman said.
"If you can spare an extra $10 a month, you should be able to buy shares at that level so you can have fractional ownership in a neighborhood you care about," he added.
The Albina Vision site is also part of Portland's expansive opportunity zones, offering long-term tax benefits to property investors.
As the equity-focused redevelopments have advanced, an ecosystem of sympathetic architects, planners and developers has formed, many led by Black executives — including Hallova, LEVER Architecture principal Chandra Robinson and Colas Construction President Andrew Colas — in Portland's largely white building industry. The city's population was 75.3% white in 2020, Census data shows.
Albina Vision also plans to involve minority-owned contractors and subcontractors early in the development. The idea is they can work on smaller projects at first, and grow their capacity to tackle larger buildings as Albina Vision is built out.
'A Different Future'
Albina Vision remains in an early stage. Albina One went before the Portland Design Commission for an initial hearing in June, and Yohannes led a briefing of the City Council last month. Mayor Ted Wheeler cautioned that the Trail Blazers and other constituents must be brought along, and he urged Yohannes to let the city know soon if there would be a monetary request.
"If there's an ask of the city, if there's a contemplation of a [taxing] district or something else, we need to know sooner rather than later so that we can be productive and helpful partners in that," the mayor said.
After Albina One, Albina Vision Trust hopes to build a linear park along the Willamette River. That plan relies on cooperation from various landowners, including Vulcan Inc., the Seattle real estate firm controlled by Jody Allen, sister of Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder. Vulcan also owns the Trail Blazers.
Chris Oxley, senior vice president of government affairs at the Trail Blazers, said the organization supports the nonprofit's efforts to reconnect the neighborhood to the city.
"It's good for the district, it's good for us as a business and it helps reconnect our interests to the rest of the city in what is otherwise a pretty significant island effect," he said.
Albina Vision's planned park would occupy a narrow strip of land between the Moda Center, home of the Trail Blazers, and the Willamette River that currently serves as a parking lot. During an interview with Law360, Oxley seemed open to transforming that parcel.
"There's likely higher and better uses for it than what it is today," he said.
Another large portion of the Albina Vision site is owned by Portland Public Schools, where the school district has its aging headquarters.
Attractive public spaces are key to Albina Vision's plan. Besides the park, planners envision a marketplace and a woonerf, a narrow, Dutch-style shared street.
Yohannes is clear-eyed that residents will not be returning to 20th-century Albina.
Instead, they'll be starting something new, she said.
"The purpose of our work is not to re-create what was," Yohannes said. "That will never happen. The purpose is to create a different future, and to invite the people who have a connection to the district in the re-imagining so the next generation has a different story to tell about the city of Portland and their lives in it."
--Editing by Covey Son.
Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify the construction workforce of the Meyer Memorial Trust headquarters, and to reflect that Meyer is a charitable foundation.
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