Affordable homes coming to Portland’s Albina neighborhood [Video]

PORTLAND, Ore. — After nearly five decades, a block of dirt and dry grass in North Portland is being returned to Portland’s Black community and will become a site with over 100 affordable homes.

The Williams & Russel project looks to create 85 affordable apartments, 20 townhomes for sale and a new hub for Black-owned businesses, all on a block that the city of Portland once seized for an expansion of Legacy Emanuel Hospital that never fully emerged.

“They came in and they demolished everything with the idea that this would be developed, and it just sat vacant for five decades,” said Bryson Davis, president and board chair of William and Russel CDC, the nonprofit behind the project.

In the 1970s, around 171 families were displaced, 74% Black, when the city of Portland condemned the blocksaround the hospital. …