On Christmas Day in 1999, 10-year-old Emmanuel Henreid didn’t open presents. His parents instead drove him and his three siblings to Gresham and told them it was their new home — a move made to keep them safe from discriminatory policing and city policies in Portland’s Albina district.
“That was the last of what I knew of my childhood,” Henreid told Street Roots.
His family is among over 11,000 Black Portlanders forced out of Albina from 1990 to 2010 due to urban planning, gentrification and disinvestment in residential areas, according to a city of Portland report. Thousands more were displaced during previous decades.
Henreid, a fourth-generation Portlander and opera singer who performs as Onry, called the collection of historically Black neighborhoods a “space of home and legacy.” In September 2025, he moved into Albina One, a 94-unit apartment complex for people with historical ties to the area. Some are returning for the first time in 40 years.
Albina Vision Trust — a community-driven nonprofit leading the effort to redevelop Lower Albina — opened Albina One last summer as its first major project in a 50- to 100-year plan. Over the past four years, the organization says, it has secured over $850 million in direct investment for Lower Albina: the district’s 94 acres along the east side of the Willamette River, near the Rose Quarter and between the Broadway and Steel bridges. The nonprofit describes its efforts as the largest restorative development project in the country.
Winta Yohannes, AVT executive director, called the work a “fulfillment of a generational promise” to “reimagine what it means to be a Portlander.”
Beginning in the 1930s, federal redlining maps labeled Albina as “hazardous,” causing lenders to limit mortgages and investment there. At the same time, city policies denied home sales to Black Portlanders in white neighborhoods, pushing them into Albina. The area was home to about 80% of Portland’s Black population by 1960, according to Census data. Despite facing exploitative lending practices, the Black community formed a thriving epicenter with Black-owned music clubs, churches and barbershops. The area became known as “Harlem on the Willamette.”
“This part of the city has both reflected the worst of how we’ve treated each other, and the highest promise for a better way of living together,” Yohannes said.
JT Flowers, AVT senior advisor, said Albina was among the nation’s first fully integrated neighborhoods.
“We made magic here,” Flowers said.
Flowers said many have forgotten about how the city intentionally tried to destroy the area.
Interstate 5, completed in Oregon in 1966, cut through the heart of Albina and established Portland’s largest urban renewal area. Projects like Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Portland Public Schools’ headquarters and what is now the Moda Center bulldozed swaths of the neighborhood and left some lots empty to this day.
Flowers, who lost his family home to the construction of I-5, said AVT estimates Black residents lost over $1 billion in just three generations. The city demolished more than 1,000 homes. Between 1960 and 1970 alone, the city says it displaced around half of Albina’s Eliot neighborhood — 3,000 residents. By 2023, only about 10% of the city’s Black population of nearly 52,000 lived in Albina, as reported by The Oregonian.
AVT strives to “reroot” Black Portlanders in Albina by building an entire ecosystem: energy infrastructure, transit, retail spaces, health care, education opportunities and recreation areas like a waterfront park. The nonprofit’s most challenging narrative hurdle while lobbying is explaining why its effort goes beyond buying land and developing affordable housing.
“We are having to reconstruct everything that was lost here from the ground up,” Flowers said.
In 2015, two dozen Portlanders started to envision Albina’s redevelopment with the community, according to Yohannes. AVT formed in 2017 to steward the project. In 2020, the group outlined plans through 2050.
Centering the people of Albina is part of the effort to heal harm the city “intentionally wrought” upon Black Portlanders, Flowers said. The nonprofit collected feedback from over 1,000 locals to form the bedrock of Albina’s vision.
Flowers said the organization asked: “If you had a 94-acre blank canvas and a paint brush in the heart of the central city neighborhood that you and your ancestors got pushed out of, what would you paint here?”
Displaced from Albina
North and Northeast Portland faced high crime rates in the 1990s, but Henreid said Albina created a community.
“We had individuals looking out for one another,” Henreid said. “Although we did not grow up with money, a lot of our families did the best they could to not let us know.”
He recalled making candy from Kool-Aid and eating vegetables from the vegan, white couple at the end of his street.
Some homes still have front porches designed to bring people together, he said, unlike the back patio. He and his friends would “go camping” on porches in the summer because they had no air conditioning and redlining isolated them from recreation areas.
“If we were in those spaces, it felt like a sundown city,” he said, referring to the many mostly white communities across the country that enforced segregation and forced Black people to leave town after sunset through threats, violence or local laws. Such places were common until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made them illegal. Still, some persisted into the 1980s.
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Henreid called gentrification in Albina the “strategic act of breaking down the Black family,” parallel to police efforts that used crime and gang-related activity to justify profiling Black men and arresting them. Together, gentrification and abusive policing pushed Black families to the outskirts of the city or outside of Portland entirely.
Months before his family moved, Henreid said a local government official came to their home, warning them to leave as fast as possible.
“The police were going to sweep the streets,” he said.
Similar violence continues today, he added.
“We’ve been taught to trust what is whiteness, which is separate from white people,” he said, “and it’s unfortunately come to our demise.”
A first of many milestones
Bulldozing Albina weakened Black generational wealth. In 2023, most people of color couldn’t afford to live in Portland, according to a 2020 Portland Housing Bureau report showing average Black households earned about $3,000 a month — less than half of the $6,400 earned by white households.
AVT expects to generate community wealth through hiring Black-owned businesses and Black professionals during redevelopment and helping them land larger projects. Flowers said he hopes the rest of Oregon will also reap the benefits of Albina’s redevelopment.
“This area of the city is going to be putting thousands of people to work for decades,” he said.
Albina One was built by Colas Construction, one of the only Black-owned general contractors in Oregon, and designed by Chandra Robinson, a Northeast Portland native and one of two licensed Black female architects in Oregon, according to Flowers.
“We will all contribute our part during our leg of the race,” Yohannes said.
While working as a full-time artist abroad, Henreid considered moving overseas permanently.
“I could easily leave and abandon this thing that was home,” he said. But then he thought: “Why not stick around for the fight? We don’t have to leave home to become something — we can do that right here with the grassroots we have.”
After six months struggling to find affordable housing in Northeast Portland, Henreid found Albina One through connections in Portland’s Black community and Instagram. Under the Portland Housing Bureau’s 2014 North/Northeast Preference Policy, which helps people displaced from the neighborhood get first access to new housing there, Henreid qualified to live in the apartment complex.
“It’s one of the best living situations I’ve been in in my entire life,” he said. “Somebody pinch me.”
The residential heart
AVT owns numerous housing units in Lower Albina, including the 66-unit Paramount Apartments: the last standing residential building from Albina’s “golden age,” as Yohannes said. After initially failing to buy the property in 2021, the nonprofit bought its parking lot instead, which later became Albina One.
“Even the misses end up becoming wins if you stay at it long enough,” Flowers said.
To stay ahead of rising property values and outside buyers, the group acquired land fast and worked with area property owners, like Oregon Department of Transportation, Portland Trail Blazers and Portland Public Schools. Flowers said AVT is positioned to be the largest property owner in the Lower Albina district within the next year-and-a-half.
In April, the nonprofit will start an 18-month, city-mandated process to plan redevelopment that will transform the 10.5-acre PPS headquarters into a neighborhood with over 1,000 homes for working-class Portlanders.
“The residential heart” of the redeveloped district, Flowers said, will include an education hub for all ages in partnership with Lewis & Clark College. The school will also provide legal, tax, mental health and counseling services. AVT raised over $75 million toward a $133 million campaign last year in hopes of acquiring the site and three parcels of private property on Northeast Broadway this year, according to Flowers.
Initial construction for the I-5 Rose Quarter Project, a $2 billion project capping part of the freeway, began over the summer. The project is intended to create space for a neighborhood on top of the eventual tunnel and reconnect Upper and Lower Albina. Despite a $400 million cut in federal funds in June, the project’s next phase is set for late 2026 and paid for with state funds, according to Flowers.
The Blazers helped the nonprofit secure Senate Bill 1182: federal legislation making it possible for surplus land from the eventual highway cover to be sold or leased to AVT, Flowers said. Their collaboration aims to reinvest in Albina’s arenas and attractions and ensure the Moda Center renovation supports that vision.
The city supports restoring Albina and seeks to repair decades of harm, according to Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s office. City staffers help with urban design, planning and land use updates.
“(AVT) are presenting a vision and a model that is truly groundbreaking and sets the stage for long-term, community-focused wealth building,” Wilson’s spokesperson, Cody Bowman, wrote in an email.
Redefining the ZIP code
Portland city officials told the organization a new ZIP code may be needed as they anticipate more than 6,000 people to return over the next 15 to 20 years, Flowers said. A Black-led ZIP code, he said, would make history and support generational success.
“When I was born, those five digits were a predictor of adverse outcomes for folks who look like us,” said Flowers, who is raising his son as a fourth-generation Albina-born resident. “The promise of this work is making those five digits a predictor of prosperity and upward mobility that every child born in Albina can claim to.”
The development could help boost enrollment at three of Oregon’s majority Black schools, Flowers added. That includes Jefferson High School — PPS’ least attended high school with 391 students this year, out of 1,351 potential students who live in its boundary, as reported by Willamette Week.
Albina’s redevelopment models how working-class, historically disenfranchised and gentrified communities across the nation can “position themselves in the driver’s seat of their own future,” Flowers said.
Henreid referred to AVT as “trailblazers” and urged the public to get involved.
“Trust the initiative,” he said. “They’re doing just what they said, and I am a product of this beautiful development.”
Yohannes remembered two lessons from Senator Avel Gordly, the first Black woman elected to the Oregon State Senate who passed in February 2026: dream big and “keep pleasing the ancestors,” she said.
“In a relatively short amount of time, this work has moved from being inconceivable to now it’s inevitable,” Yohannes said.
This article appears in April 8, 2026.