Good Riddance

The city's most audacious (and racist) real estate play looks increasingly twitchy. Will white guilt triumph in the end? Or will the iron rules of economics?

Unless you’re among the dwindling number of TV news-watchers, you might have missed this Big Story on the small screen…

…along with this Oregon Publiic Broadcasting headline (don’t bother with the Oregonian or WillyWeek; they aren’t tuned into that celestial frequency)…

To summarize in street-level English: In the dying days of the Biden autopen presidency, our representatives in Washington¹ passed a pork-barrel measure under something called the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program, which we will refer to going forward as the White Guilt Ghetto Reconstruction Project (WGGRP), which is approximately the sound of $450-million going down the drain.

Under the big, fat umbrella of “equity,” was a scheme by the Albina Vision Trust—a nonprofit in name only—to recreate, somehow, the lost paradise of the segregated Albina ghetto (run for decades by a mobster named Tom Johnson who was making deals to sell off land in the paradise to white power brokers²—thus proving the adage that the black community really ought to fear its “leaders” more than anything else).

To recreate the neighborhood, now that blacks have successfully integrated the city, the Vision Trust wanted the money to put a Lid over the I-5. It was an add-on to the the state’s plan to straighten out the notorious bottleneck—but, hey! Let’s do some real estate speculation on the side!

Biden lost (proving God smiles on the republic); the new administration—unrecognized in Portland—passed the Big Beautiful Bill and buried in it was obscure language…well, you really don’t want to go into those deep weeds. But it would seem that most (if not all) of that pork will be stuffed back into the barrel. Elections, as they say, have consequences.

Barring some sort of political implosion, the Senate will remain under the Orange Dude’s thumb—so our senators will be sitting there sullenly, impotent to assuage white guilt on the top of a widened, perhaps Lidless freeway.³

What no one wanted to say in the latest media freakout is that the $450-million wasn’t nearly enough to build the Lid. Actually, the latest ODOT guesstimate is $2.1-billion (the point-one added since we last looked).

Question: has ODOT ever built anything for what they said it would cost? Drop us a line if you can find one.

Which brings us up to date. If you’d like to continue researching the Vision Trust and the Lid, we’ve written about it here and here and here. It is weirdly amusing what white people will fall for.

In typical fashion, the “big stories” turn out to be rather small when it comes to the details. But then legacy media doesn’t like to get the readers stirred-up.

So let’s delve.

First, who says that the Lid over the freeway—extra-strong so that the Vision Trust can build up to three stories above it—is economically feasible in the first place? Just stop for a moment and ponder: what could the city of Portland do with those $-millions to improve our current street-grid (50-miles of gravel that no one’s interested in paving), shore up (and de-bum) public transit, build bike lanes everywhere, iron out other freeway messes, avoid tolls...instead of leveraging white guilt (over something almost no living human had a hand in creating) for the benefit of a weird non-profit?

And who says that the Vision Trust owns the damned Lid? How come they got, more or less invisibly, “right of first refusal” to become one of the city’s biggest developers? On the basis of only building one garden-variety (and plug-ugly) “affordable” human filing cabinet?

…multiply that by a dozen and there’s the future of Albina—which we remind you—was a community of single-family houses.

Also, note that ODOT says that the Lid…

…will be able to support buildings up to three stories, depending on the final design.

…which means that the massive blue tenement above won’t be on the Lid. What will be up there instead (with 11,700 trucks a day thrumming down below, belching diesel fumes amid the sound of screeching brakes)? The Vision Trust offers colorful—but rather thinly-detailed schematics…

…which, if you look at them closely, don’t actually seem to be versions of the same place. And yet we taxpayers are going to be on the hook for untold…

$-billions

…to build stuff such as a “business training center,” “year-round performances,” “nature as sacred space,” and “close-knit neighborhood.” Note that the renderings show buildings that look rather taller than three stories on the Lid—and that although they’re dubbed “festival streets,” they’re gonna be street-streets, as ODOT makes clear…

…which doesn’t leave much space for three-story whatchamacallits. (Also notice, down there in the lower right corner, the strange wishbone off-ramp going god-knows-where, that will keep our auto-repair industry humming.)

As for the housing cluster, also note that it’s dubbed “collective living,” with “shared backyards.” Which probably explains why councilors Dan Ryan and arch-socialist Sameer Kanal turned out for a looksee with Vision Trust’s gaudy lobbyist, JT Flowers…

…on a bridge over the I-5, with affordables in the background, next to a “festival street.” Socialist heaven!

Ryan’s Instagram site wrote that Flowers…

…was kind enough to tour fellow D2 Councilor Kanal and myself on the 94-acre grounds where the AVT will be restoring the lower Albina neighborhood. This vital project will be welcoming families back into the Albina area and restoring this land back into a walkable and livable neighborhood. For those displaced in the past and future generations, this restoration is going to bring life and abundance back to N & inner NE Portland.

…as if a couple of major arterials (Broadway and Weidler) will ever be “walkable,” except on Sixers nights at Moda, which will fill the new neighborhood with cars.

Which brings us to yet another question that no one, especially those three highly-skilled, experienced, and really-really-smart real estate experts above, might ask.

Do we really need this project?

Well, yes, the Vision Trust sure does—all those bonds to sell (Goldman Sachs must be salivating)! All that power to slide money into developers’ and nonprofit pockets, where it will promptly be recycled to politicians! Landlord to the huddled masses! Jobs for life! No taxes!

But does Portland?

Consider this medley of headlines…

…unless you’ve been on Mars with Elon, you know that this is a city in serious real estate-type trouble: values are in free-fall: an auto dealer from Las Vgas just scored iconic Big Pink for pennies on the dollar; Montgomery Park sold for peanuts, the city five-star hotel is in foreclosure, etc. Been to the Lloyd Center recently?

What will happen when existing Portland neighborhoods start to figure out how much they’re paying (in tax write-offs, subsidies, outright grants) so the hotshots at the Vision Trust can build their own neighborhood, while the existing neighborhoods take it in the shorts? (For example: will there be a homeless “village” in the new Albina?)

It is unlikely—unless you’re a die-hard Portlandia booster—that the city will see a go-go growth spurt anytime soon; the nation is full of middle-size cities that never cleared the launch pads of local Big Dreams. The city government is a mess; voters apathetic, mortgage rates sticky, and the Trump administration is on the hunt for DEI shenanigans…which is, after all, the raison d’être of the Albina project. No one can really cite any other compelling reason for shelling out Big Money except as reparations for the evisceration of a black neighborhood. Along with a whiff of black preferences for all of the tax-supported goodies, 14th Amendment be damned.⁴

Which, we’ll add: Albina wasn’t the only neighborhood raped by the developers in the Urban Renewal frenzy of the ‘50s and ‘60s.⁵

The Vision Trust would like it both ways with its nods to “inclusion”—but the literature and pitches and the JT Flowers act are all black-centric, with wink-winks to what will clearly be preferences for blacks to move to the head of any line. Reminder: Trump has three more years in office. Buckle up!

This kind of sloppy hopey-feeley stuff goes over with political pushovers such as Ryan and Kanal; not so much with the DOJ. The worm is turning on these overtly racist plays in Washington—which, last we looked, has a lot more power than a Democratic Socialist rump in the nation’s 27th-largest town.

If there is one comfort in all this, it’s that two forces of nature—the ruthless real estate market and bureaucratic inertia—will probably call the final shots.

The Metro/County slush-fund for “affordable” housing is just about tapped out. And competing public housing projects are already in the works…

…and the city is quietly upgrading zoning to make it ever-easier for the nonprofits and developers to keep adding to the inventory. These mega-projects may fall victim to real estate’s oldest disease: overbuilding. Plus, each now has its own politically-connected guardians, such as Catholic Charities, Home Forward, APANO, Habitat for Humanity, and others, which have their own lobbyists (not as vividly dressed as Mr. Flowers) and pipelines into the City Hall planning bureaucracy.

Do they want more competitors, or is servicing the needs of the officially poor with tax-free dough just one big happy family?

We predict: many kind words and tsk-tsks will be shed for the folks over at the Vision Trust. But none of the incumbents will do anything. WGGRP is also the sound of wheels falling off.

It’s also worth noting that the Portland Public School Board has yet to see the Vision Trust’s list of fourteen swaps for its massive Prophet Center—which is (even more than the Lid) key to the Trust’s ambitions. The Trust wants the land for something or other (who knows what?), and got another “right of first refusal” to snap it up should PPS move out.

We’ll make a side-bet that the Vision Trust will try to squeak through with another facility that will be much smaller than the Prophet Center’s 10.5 acres of offices, warehouses, and workshops—all built in one massive place to save PPS oodles of money. Pirate media waits to pounce when the Trust finally comes clean.

Will the Vision Trust live up to their hyped media? Development isn’t for the kind-hearted. Pretty maps don’t cut it. Sooner or later rhetoric meets the balance sheet. Media can be besties one day, vicious weasels the next.

The betting window is now open.

1. The third senator from New York, aka Ron Wyden; our senator who won’t say if he’s running again, Jeff Merkley; retiring Rep. Ol’ Earl Blumenauer—all millionaires on the government’s paycheck.

2. For this see Phil Stanford’s magisterial account of Portland corruption, “Portland Confidential,” pages 62-67.

3. Lee Beyer, vice chair of the Oregon Transportation Commission, which oversees ODOT, swears it’ll get built. He’s the legislator who kited the original Lid in a 2017 law that gave ODOT money it can’t seem to figure out if it was spent or not—and which failure caused the 2025 bill to fail.

4. …which doesn’t seem in fashion with SCOTUS these days.

5. …and under the Loretta Smith Doctrine, means that several thousand other children of the displaced are in line for $-millions to make up for their lack of “intergenerational wealth.”