In the 1970s, the city of Portland displaced home and business owners in Northeast Portland, claiming the land was blighted and in need of development. Instead, the lot at North Williams and Russell sat vacant for decades. The 1.7 acre lot, seen here on Feb. 27, 2025, is being developed into affordable housing – for rent and purchase – and a Black Business Hub set to be completed in spring 2027.
Kyra Buckley / OPB
A long-vacant block on North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue, which was once part of a thriving African American community in Portland, will finally house people once again. The site was razed in the 1970s as part of an urban renewal project to expand the hospital there. Tomorrow, construction will begin on an 85-unit apartment building, 20 single-family homes and office and retail space for Black-owned businesses. Bryson Davis, chair of the board of the nonprofit behind the project, Williams & Russell CDC, joins us, along with developer Anyeley Hallova, to talk about the project.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A long-vacant block on Portland’s North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue, which was once really one of the epicenters of a thriving African American community, will finally house people once again. The site was razed in the 1970s as part of so-called urban renewal. The plan was to make way for a hospital expansion, but that expansion never reached the site. Tomorrow, about 50 years later, construction will begin on a new development there with apartment units, single family homes,
and commercial space. Bryson Davis is the president of the nonprofit behind the project, Williams & Russell CDC. He joins us now along with Anyeley Hallova, the CEO and founder of the real estate development company Adre. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Bryson Davis: Yeah, great to be here.
Anyeley Hallova: Thank you.
Miller: Bryson, I gave, I don’t know, a one sentence version of this, but the history, I don’t want to neglect it. I want to give it its due. What did this block mean to Portland’s Black community in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s?
Davis: Yeah, it was the center of business. I mean, yeah, it was the center of the community. This is the center of the neighborhood. This is where there were several businesses right there on the corner of Williams and Russell. There were a bunch of houses around there as well, and this was the middle of the Black community at the time.
Miller: This phrase, urban renewal sounds great, if you don’t know history, I guess, at this point. What did it mean in practice upon that block?
Davis: Yeah, no it does, it does sound great, but in practice, especially at this time, you had a lot of tweaking things and labeling things as blights in ways that diminished people’s property values and then they could condemn them, underpay them for the value of their property and move them out. And so it was really a tool that you could use to turn a neighborhood that was composed in a way that you didn’t necessarily want it to be composed and adjust things and move people to other places, and then again underpay them for the things that you take from them.
Miller: Why did this never turn into a hospital?
Davis: I think they gave a big chunk of land to the hospital, a huge area around what was the hospital, and I think it was probably just more land than they ever needed to expand.
Miller: But meanwhile, the homes and businesses had been destroyed and removed.
Davis: Yeah.
Miller: How did this new project come to be? Because that history, as I mentioned, that’s 50 years ago now. How did this new project start? What was the beginning?
Davis: Well, so luckily, the government now, the city government now, is not the same people as the city government then. And the leadership of the hospital is not the same leadership. It’s not even the same organization as the original Emanuel Hospital. And they came together in the mid 2010s, when the city discovered, hey, you were supposed to do something with this land, hospital, and you haven’t. And the arrangement they came to was, why don’t we give this property back to the community, put together a project working group of community members, nonprofit leaders, local activists, to figure out what we should put on the property and then go from there.
Miller: Anyeley, how did you get involved in this?
Hallova: So the William & Russell CDC, which first started off as a project working group, they got together and put out an RFP to developers to solicit proposals.
Miller: A request for proposals.
Hallova: A request for proposals. And in that they labeled four different community priorities, being affordable home ownership, affordable housing, and also catalytic business creation and entrepreneur support. So I put together a team with another developer, being PCRI, which is a local Black led serving CDC, to really go after the project with those community priorities in mind. And we put together a team of the architect, the contractor, all with that goal, and we ended up winning the project.
Miller: Why did you want this project?
Hallova: I was looking at the competition in town and I was thinking, who would go for this project? I wanted to know that the best project would happen on the site. I think the community kind of dealing with the trauma that comes with displacement and gentrification, I wanted to make sure that I put together a team that really could serve the community and think of the community’s priorities first and foremost, and I knew not every developer in town was going to be thinking with that mindset and really thinking about Black leaders in the community being a part of this team in all aspects.
Miller: What in particular were you afraid of? I mean, what did you think might be the outcome if people who had been historically impacted weren’t consulted or if you weren’t the person who was leading this?
Hallova: Yeah, there’s a difference between having lived experience and having theory on community, and there’s also a difference between being embedded in community and planning for a community in which you’re not a part of. And so it was very important that the team members on the project had lived experience,
were a part of community and really were centering community viewpoints in the process, and not profit making or developer-centric interests. We’re really a partner with the Williams & Russell CDC. We’re essentially a development arm of their organization, realizing all the hopes and dreams that they received from the community during the community feedback process.
Miller: Bryson, what did you hear during that process in terms of what people who either had been there 50 years ago or maybe whose family members had or who just who live there now, in terms of what they wanted?
Davis: So, we did several different events, several different engagement things to figure out what people wanted, what people liked, what people really thought they needed on the site. And one of the things that has come up, because it’s a big problem everywhere around Portland, is housing. But people didn’t want just affordable apartments. They wanted some opportunity for ownership. And so that was a big addition to the housing portion of the project.
They also wanted to kind of… The theme was really wealth creation, because what was taken was really the family’s wealth of the people who were underpaid and were displaced. And so entrepreneurial support was a big key thing and so that had to be a part of the project. And another thing that was really lost was having a central place for people to gather, having that community space. And so really building a community space into this project was a big key thing.
Miller: Anyeley, can you describe what this is going to look like and what all is entailed in this?
Hallova: Yeah. And so the project’s called the Williams & Russell Project, but actually it’s three distinct projects within that. One is an affordable apartment building that’s going to be 85 units, family-size units, tending toward the larger size.
Miller: Meaning two or three bedrooms?
Hallova: Three and four.
Miller: Wow.
Hallova: Two, three and four bedrooms. Then there’s going to be the affordable homeownership project, which is 20 homes for sale in a townhouse style development. Four of those units have accessory dwelling units, so the ability to rent them out or create a home office or have a family member stay with them. And then we’re going to have a 30,000 square foot business hub, which is really speaking toward this entrepreneurial support: workforce training, delivering critical business services, and really a one stop shop for Black business origination, support and really to have the community thrive economically. And then…
Miller: So what you’re talking about there is less a business in and of itself, but a place where would-be entrepreneurs can get skills or help to to make their businesses happen?
Davis: Yeah. So there’s a micro-retail space that we’re gonna use for newer retail people, as well as micro-office space. There’s going to be regular size office space for some businesses, but one of the things that we’re really emphasizing is getting in some of these nonprofits that support especially minority-owned businesses in there and have a presence. So you can go there, get help with business financing, get help with business legal, get help with navigating government systems and things like that.
Miller: And then you mentioned, Anyeley, and there’s also going to be commercial-facing businesses there as well?
Hallova: Yeah, so it’s intended to be sort of that in-between, between the entrepreneurial and the nonprofit community, and then also government. And so the idea is that it’s very hard when you’re trying to start a business. I have a small business myself. And you’re like, where do I begin? Where do I start? Where do I find people that respect, honor, look like me, that are going to be in that community to make me thrive? And really, this would, the physical presence of that space rather than it being dispersed throughout the city.
Miller: Bryson, how will you choose who can live there, who can either rent places there or buy these new homes?
Davis: Yeah, on the housing side, because we have the Fair Housing Act and there are legal restrictions on how you can go about selling and renting out homes.
Miller: Something that the city of Portland has had to wrestle with as it tried to work on their sort of their right-to-return housing.
Davis: Exactly.
Miller: It can’t be based on race and they, in their case they found it could be based on people who were forced out.
Davis: Yes, and that is exactly, that led to the preference policy, which is what we’re using for both the rental and the townhomes that we’ll sell, is that we’re trying to address the harm of the hospital expansion, and that directly connects the people going into the homes to that harm.
Miller: Anyeley, I’m curious about the design itself. Did the history of this area play into the way that you’ve thought about the design of this development?
Hallova: So all three projects are on different timelines. For the homeownership project, which is the first to start construction this year, we actually did workshops with potential Black home buyers to really think about the preferences they have for the style of home, size of home, backyard space. What, are those things? Because we didn’t want to build a project to which the community said this is not meeting our needs. And so we actually changed the whole entire design of the town homes based on community feedback that we received.
Miller: How? What was the original idea and how did it change?
Hallova: We really saw that potential home buyers really want larger homes. They want the feeling of a single family home, even though that’s very hard to make affordable now. And so we essentially designed, we went away from like a more condo-stacked unit style to individual townhomes. There was a huge preference on backyards, and so we made sure each home had a substantial backyard and really we took the idea of privacy and single family home feeling and put it into a townhouse development.
Miller: Bryson, do you have your eyes on other parcels in the immediate area right now?
Davis: Well, so the very immediate thing is there’s a section, half block just north of our development, which we are getting as part of the land transfer from Legacy. That is going to immediately come into our possession and is something that we’re about to start looking at potential options for. And then, yeah, we’re in discussions with, there’s that whole area north of the hospital with what would have been, I think it would have been the Mount Hood Freeway. It was one of those failed freeway projects where you have the really unnecessarily long on-ramps to 405. We’re looking at that as potentially another place where we can reconnect the community from there down across that area, and there’s potentially some real estate to develop there. Those are probably two of the… And then we’re also, we’re involved with the CAP project as well, so we’re looking to see if there’s ways that we can connect on the I-5 caps.
Miller: Anyeley, what is the time scale for… This is a major construction project in three different parts. When is it likely to be fully done?
Hallova: We’re expecting all three projects to be finished in the first quarter of 2028, and the first project is expected to be in 2026, the next one in 2027, and then the third in 2028.
Miller: So in three years, all should be said and done and ready for people to move in or do business?
Hallova: Yes. And the reason why the three projects are in a different timeline is really about funding. And so we’ve been fortunate to advance the homeownership part of the project. And so we will be looking and soliciting funding for, to finish filling the gaps for the other two projects.
Miller: Anyeley and Bryson, thanks very much.
Davis: Yeah, thank you.
Hallova: Thank you.
Miller: Anyeley Hallova is CEO and founder of Adre, a real estate development company. Bryson Davis is president of Williams & Russell CDC. He is also a lawyer. We were talking about the new Williams & Russell project. That’s the name of the block and the development in inner North Portland. It gonna have it’s groundbreaking tomorrow.
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