Above photo: A rendering of Williams and Russell Community Development Corporation’s affordable homeownership project.
A community development organization is taking a place-based approach to build and determine eligibility for housing.
In an era when the Fair Housing Act is under attack across the country, a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, has broken ground on a mixed-use development project that will house hundreds of Black Portlanders who were previously displaced by the city’s use of eminent domain.
The $163 million project, on a 2.99-acre site at the intersection of North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue, will eventually be home to former residents and their descendants of Albina. The community in the North and Northeast sections of the city was once home to nearly 80% of Portland’s Black population.
While race-based discrimination is what has led Black people and other communities of color to be more vulnerable to housing instability, race-based affordable housing policy is no longer a reliable option for people because of attacks on programs and projects that seek to address disparities, including fair housing laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, nationality, religion, and other identities. In a recent Next City op-ed, Ryan Curren and Glenn Harris of Race Forward, a racial justice nonprofit, explained how the federal administration’s attempt to establish “color blind” policies is deepening existing disparities in housing assistance.
However, the leaders of Williams and Russell Community Development Corporation believe they’ve discovered an alternative to using fair housing laws to keep people housed, especially those who are most impacted by the current housing crisis.
Azalea Renfield, Ta’Neshia Renae, and Bryson Davis of Williams and Russell are three advocates who have worked exhaustively over the last decade to make this project a reality.
Their theory of change is rooted in reparative development and they’re putting it into practice via Portland’s Northeast Preference Policy. The policy grants eligibility to live in the new community based on a point-based ranking system according to the applicant’s displacement severity. Top priority is given to households that owned property in the Albina neighborhood that was taken via eminent domain by the city government, and to their descendants. All other applicants can receive up to six preference points based on their current or past residence (plus that of a parent/guardian or ancestor) within areas of concentrated urban renewal in North and Northeast Portland.
This place-based policy is not targeting eligible candidates by their race, but instead by their connection to the place of Albina. This program ensures that the most impacted people are the first to be considered for an affordable home, while avoiding all of the mainstream stigma and reproach that comes along with “race-based” policies. More importantly, it makes the ‘place-based’ policy replicable across municipalities.
“What’s so beautiful about reparative development is that there’s still reparations tied to it, but in a way that it can help anybody, any community, any place-based issues that happen to [affect people of color],” says Renfield, CEO of Williams and Russell. “They can use this framework and get reparations in a way that’s kind of covert but it still gets to the message at hand.”
By making the solution place-based, anyone can apply this framework within their own community, making it universal and accessible to any community that has experienced displacement. Renfield believes politicians will be eager to put this policy into practice nationally.
(For more stories about anti-displacement solutions, check out our top stories on the topic here.)
“[Politicians] could say, ‘Well, because it’s place-based, not race-based, I can stand behind this, and I don’t have to feel like I’m getting caught with a target on my back.’ That’s the reason why we’ve been so successful in getting money. Churches and cities are coming to us,” says Renfield, who believes the approach will become part of contemporary policy. “It’s a comprehensive approach that makes sense.”
She’s hoping cities can learn from what she and her colleagues have created.
This policy also means they don’t have to worry about fair housing law violations while systematically bringing longtime Albina residents (and their descendants) back to their community. This place-based policy can be replicated and perhaps used by advocates as an alternative winning solution as the federal administration continues clawing back funding for programs that address racial disparities in higher education, housing, and other sectors.
“When you’re able through something like the preference policy to tie preference to actions that the city did and past harms, you can get those populations that you were targeting because of how racist the policies were from the beginning,” says Davis, president of Williams and Russell.
How They Did It
Renfield and co had zero predecessors when it came to making a project like this happen.
According to Renfield, reparative development is the act of acknowledging and repairing harms that were caused by bad policies like urban renewal. What’s key is letting the people most affected lead the charge, and the way to define those most affected is by the place where the harm was caused, not race.
The organization was able to successfully raise $163 million dollars across private, public, and government dollars for a mixed-use development project that broke ground in February and will ultimately create 20 townhomes, 94 affordable housing units, and commercial space for small businesses.
While the final price of the homes has yet to be determined, all townhomes are eligible for the Portland Housing Bureau’s down payment assistance program. Residents could borrow up to about $135,000 in the form of a forgivable loan. That sum would be forgiven after 30 years.
The down payment assistance will be provided to buyers who qualify under Portland’s Preference Policy, supporting eligible first-time homebuyers and making homeownership attainable.
“We’re looking into this model to be the great equalizer that will help get us away from the ‘us versus them’ mentality. It really is where cities, states, and federal governments and organizations alike are able to put money into a community solution where the solution is presented as place-based, and then the community drives the build,” says Reinfield.
The History
Last year, Next City reported on a historic settlement that returned $8.5 million and land to Black families displaced by a decades-old redevelopment scheme in Portland, which has been historically referred to as the whitest city in America.
In that settlement, 26 families won their suit against the city’s development commission agency, Prosper Portland, for its role in perpetuating the displacement of hundreds of Black residents from Albina, once a predominantly black community in northern Portland.
This land was home to 80% of the Black population in Portland until urban renewal policies of the 1970s forced the community out via eminent domain. Legacy Emanuel Medical Center claimed it needed the space to expand, and yet it never did. Consequently, more than 180 buildings, including homes, businesses, churches, and space for community groups, were demolished. Of those displaced, 74% were Black.
In 2017, before talk of development could even begin, Davis and others formed a working group to demand that Legacy Health give back the stolen land. Later that year, Legacy Health, which owns Legacy Emanuel and other hospitals in the region, acknowledged its wrongdoing and agreed to donate the land back.
By this point, the land was contaminated and would cost several million dollars to clean up. According to Davis, the working group demanded more. They didn’t want just the land back. They wanted their clean land back. In 2024, Prosper Portland agreed to a $10 million forgivable loan that ultimately led to the cleaning and restoration of the lot.
Paul Knauls, a 95-year-old resident who lost his business as a result of the urban renewal-driven displacement, says he was insulted by Legacy Emanuel.
“They gave us no money whatsoever for our displacement but in the atrium of the hospital, they had a list of all the names of the people that they had displaced. Like that’s going to be some type of satisfaction,” Knauls says. “There was ‘Paul Knauls’ hanging right in the atrium on a plaque. You know, no monetary compensation, no discussion…. No one has ever asked me about how I feel.”
Knauls, who has lived in the same home for nearly 65 years, says that before the eminent domain displaced his community, there were 91 Black-owned businesses in Albina. He noted that there were Black people offering services like television repair, plumbing and lawn care.
“We had a very nice neighborhood. You could get almost everything that you wanted in our neighborhood that you needed to purchase,” he says.
Knauls, who was invited to speak at the grand opening of this development project, is happy that the preference policy is going to allow the grandchildren of his once beloved neighbors to come back to where their ancestors lived. But he does not believe the people pushed out will return because they’re older now and some have already moved “15 miles or 20 miles away.”
“They’re not coming back because their doctors are there, their churches are there, their dentists, their pharmacy. Everything is out there where they live. They’re not coming back,” he says.
Knauls believes that the wealth that was lost by all those families is gone forever.
“What the grandchildren are getting ready to enjoy is the fact that they can live in a high rise that’s not theirs and live in a nice area that’s not theirs, where they could have been living in the house that their great grandparents had bought and paid for,” he says, adding that some of them could be millionaires, if it weren’t for the displacement. “Some of the houses are going [for] $600,000, $700,000 in that neighborhood.”
But that does not mean the groups leading this work aren’t going to try to bring them back.
Renae’, deputy executive director at Williams and Russell, says that in addition to helping former residents and their descendants return to the neighborhood, they’re also trying to bring back a specific culture.
“The difference in the community and the culture is so starkly different after gentrification but when you look at census data, more Black people still live in the northeast area. This is where we are. The culture is just not there,” she says. “That’s what we are also trying to bring back. That’s what’s also very important about our build… We’re thinking about all of those bigger things… It has to be beyond development.”
This story has been updated to correct the acreage of the site and the name of the city’s development commission agency.
