Greasing the Skids

The Portland School Board starts the clock running on due diligence for a Black Excellence Center. Don't worry; it's a done deal.

“The vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.”

—Robert F. Kennedy, on the occasion of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King

Return with us now to the glory days of 2020. Portland is busy destroying its rep as a great American city, mobs loot downtown, BLM calls the shots along with a psychotic excrescence called Antifa, rational whites are gripped by guilt for things their great-grandparents may or may not have done, the federal buillding is under seige…and in the midst of what could only be called a mass hysteria the Portland Public School Board decides to kite a massive $1.2-billion bond issue to finance a laundry-list of school projects including the astonishing sum of $60-million for something called a Center for Black Student Excellence.

Where the “center” would be and how it would achieve the imponderable quality of “excellence” was left to the imagination of Portland voters, who answered the question with 75-percent approval.

The clock ticked; some measure of sanity returned (or was at least replaced by other delusions). The Center sat on the shelf.

In May, a coalition of 38 black organizations ran out of patience and dropped a bomb on the school board…

…and the Board of Education hopped to it. Last week, in a boardroom packed with a cheering, largely black audience, the board voted to go into a period of “due diligence” to buy a pair of architecturally strange-looking buildings called One North…

…actually two buildings with 85,548 square feet of space wrapped around a 14,000 square foot courtyard. Why this one particular building was selected, out of the many emptying office buildings in Portland, in the middle of an office depression…

…was never made clear; the bureaucrats in charge of all of this diligence never told the board why (or indeed how) this building popped to the top of the list. Just one question among many, if you care to read the actual contract between the prospective seller and the board, or delve into the building’s exotic ownership, or consider some of the building’s limitations (10 parking spaces, total for the tenants; no bus stop). We’ll get to the stuff hidden in the deep weeds in a moment…but first:

Did Anyone Around Here Read the 14th Amendment?

Or, for that matter, note who’s running the US Department of Justice?

The idea of a Black Center just for black kids (and the inevitable nonprofits and community groups attached to the cause) might have made a certain amount of white-guilt sense back in the middle of the BLM hysteria, but….really?

This one’s a slam dunk: public money earmarked for racial reasons in an era defined by Supreme Court rulings that, effectively, put the harpoon into these sort of shenanigans. It ruled against racist school admissions, but also made clear that moving blacks (or any other race) automatically to the head of the line (or as a state publication illustrates, giving kids bigger crates to look over a fence depending on their height) is now passe.

No one raised this issue during the school board meeting. If members of the board knew that there had already been an official complaint lodged with the US Department of Education they didn’t say so—even though the letter screamed “lawsuit…”

This is an organization with teeth: One of the trustees of Parents Defending Education is Edward Blum, a superstar of right-wing litigation, whose cases before the US Supreme Court ended race-based admissions at most colleges, limited affirmative action and diversity mandates, and reshaped voting rights law.

The outfit’s six-page letter attacks the premise of the Excellence Center on several grounds, including the case for singling out black students, using the PPS’s own documents…

…only 79.4 percent of black students graduate high school—while this same graphic shows that a mere 61.5 percent of Native American students, 73.7 percent of “Latinx” students, and 78.4 percent of “Multi Racial (Others)” do so. In other words, PPS is failing students of all races and ethnicities, which makes this racially segregated program all the more egregious.

It cites PPS statements that might be a trifle embarrassing in court…

The CSBE’s Guiding Principles reflect its racial focus: it promises to “center Blackness unapologetically,” “ensure that Black students and Black Educators in PPS access empowering activities, services, and relationships,” “ensure that Black students will graduate with a post-secondary plan,” and “emulate intentionality around bringing out the excellence in Black students.”

…and points out that…

The district’s decision to allocate resources to black students, and not students of other racial backgrounds, has created tension in the community. On January 7, 2025, a school board meeting “was upended by a passionate debate over whether to include an additional $40 million for a Native Student Success Center, an idea the board ultimately rejected.”

The letter recounts how the foundation beat up the Los Angeles School District when it tried to initiate a similar “excellence” program…

…its “Black Student Achievement Plan”—against which PDE filed a separate OCR complaint on July 11, 2023. After PDE filed the complaint, LAUSD “dropped race as an official factor” in “decid[ing] which students get extra educational services.”

That may ultimately become the board’s wink-wink/nod-nod fallback—but the winds of neo-segregation are blowing at hurricane-force these days in Portland. Besides, as the school administration’s PowerPoint deck made clear…

The vision for the Center for Black Student Excellence is full of the fingerprints of our community. We couldn’t have done this alone…

…followed by a list of “Co-Designers” fully 56 names long, plus another 84 in the “guiding coalition,” plus another 20 “students,” and 27 “partners.” Almost enough votes to win in one of the city council’s 25-percent elections.

Add to that the coincidence that the building is smack dab in the middle of the Albina Vision Trust’s target area for its real estate ambitions (which we last marveled at here). The Trust is shy about listing exactly what they’ll build in New Albina (or where, for that matter), but a Black Excellence-type Center has always been a gimme.

The district’s point person on the project, Dr. Cheryl Proctor, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction and School Communities, made it abundantly clear that the Trust has the whip-hand in her remarks to the board…

…which leaves one with the feeling that Albina Vision Trust, a development corporation disguised as a 501-c-3, is more than joined at the hip with the school board. And that the fix was in from the get-go.

Our nominee for the prize of “Beating One’s Head Against the Wall” goes to a longstanding critic of the Black Excellence play, John Charles Jr., president and CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute think-tank. He shows up at boring PPS board meetings, delivers warnings about fiscal misfeasance, and is generally ignored. He’s been hip to the Black Excellence scam (not his words; he’s a diplomatic guy) since 2022, when he issued a guide to the weird genesis of the project, which ought to be basic reading for every student of how progressive ideas lurch out of control.

That was just a first salvo in their continued picking at the fabric of the deal…

He sent a letter on Sept. 8 to the Board chair, Eddie Wang, and asked a number of tough questions which, for the record, no one else on the clearly intimidated board had the nerve to ask...

Before the Board agrees to spend more money on this nebulous concept, it still needs to answer basic questions:

• What is the goal?

• Who will be served?

• How much will it cost to operate?

• What will be the financial and staffing impacts on existing PPS schools?

• How will results be measured?

Since Black students are dispersed throughout the 152 square mile district, how will the purchase of one building affect academic achievement?

Wang voted for due diligence. If typical PPS protocols are followed, the letter will go unanswered.

Two days later, Charles wrote…

Elsewhere, the staff report states that “student use will be limited.” If that’s the case, why purchase a new building with new operating costs? The district already has too many schools while enrollment is in decline.

Learning takes place everywhere within the district. Spending $16 million or even $60 million on a new building will likely have no measurable effects on academic achievement for most PPS students.

No answer to that, either.

So what’s the Board getting for its money—beyond paying top dollar in a down market? As the PPS staff memo said…

Other options explored by PPS, working with its commercial real estate broker, did not yield a better, more cost-effective option.

…without listing any of the other possible locations or why they didn’t make the grade; this in a city with oodles of vacant office buildings. I’d be willing to bet that the new owner of Big Pink (on multiple bus and Max lines) would get together for a chummy lunch.

A glance at Portland Maps shows that the two buildings have an assessor’s market value of $12,946,360; the diligent real estate consultants thought the duo worth $15.2-million…but, what the hell. At the board meeting, it got bumped up to $16-million.

The development of One North (as well as an adjacent “Radiator Building,” which PPS isn’t buying) was chronicled in a 2016 issue of the Urban Land Institute’s case studies. If the article is correct, the two buildings took a total (counting “hard” and “soft” costs) of $28,388,000 to build—which is as good a description as you’ll find of the fortunes of the Portland office development game. And why the owners might want to bail out before values plunge even further.

The Land Institute report recounts the genesis of the project in 2004…

Governor Kate Brown says, “What we call young innovators [are] moving here because they want to live here—and then they come here and maybe find jobs.”

Developers Nels and Owen Gabbert and Ben Kaiser noticed that Governor Brown’s young innovators wanted to live in North Portland and set out to give them a place where they would want to work…

A first shot at building condos faltered in 2008; the site lay dormant for three years. Whereupon the most interesting of the backers pops up as…

Inspiration and an equity investment for One North came from Eric Lemelson, an Oregon environmental lawyer, winemaker, and philanthropist.

Lemelson is also the founder and president of the Karuna Foundation—thus the name of the LLC that owns the property. The foundation mostly funds projects in Bhutan on the Indian subcontinent (with two grants also to Lewis & Clark Law School and Portland State University, for work in Bhutan), plus funding for the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative…

Climate change is happening faster and in a dramatically more visible way in the Earth’s cryosphere: the snow and ice-dominated regions around both the North and South Poles, and in high mountains.

Strangely enough, the Karuna Foundation’s IRS form 990 lists its address as a modest house in Niwot, CO…

…with 2023 contributions of $35,504,274. That year, the foundation paid out $31,432,123 in grants.

Hmmmmm.

This might put a phrase buried in section 13 of the PPS contract into question…

Seller believes the fair market value of the Property exceeds the Purchase Price and Seller desires to make a charitable contribution to the Purchaser of any value in excess of the Purchase Price. Seller shall obtain a qualified appraisal to determine the actual amount no later than sixty (60) days following Closing.

…charitable contributions are tax-deductible, as any foundation founder knows. We can’t wait for due diligence on the clause, which seems odd, since PPS doesn’t need any contributions: it will have $44-million of bond money left over after One North is purchased.

Finally, there’s the matter of the tenants. The buildings have not been a smash hit, tenant-wise, and there’s language in the documents that says occupancy is around 29-percent. There are nine tenants—among them Instrument Marketing, Inc. a web-advertising firm; Resource Innovations, Inc., a “woman-led purpose-built” clean energy consultancy; YBA Architects PC; and—last but far from least, the political powerhouse, 1803 Fund…which, yet another coincidence, is allied with the Albina Vision Trust and which got $400-million from Nike mogul Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, to invest in North Portland's Albina neighborhood.¹

One doubts any of the tenants will be getting any eviction notices. And, not to worry: Dr. Proctor and other witnesses at what passed for the board’s hearing assured the members that the leases would offset any costs to the strapped district for revamping and maintaining the property. The idea of PPS as a landlord should chill the heart of any prospective tenants.

Final thought:

This “due diligence” stuff is for show; the deal’s been cooked. The cavernous square-footage will be occupied by many of the people who were cheering at meeting, oufits such as BStrong Learning, and Everyday Grinds, and Global Movement Network, and Word is Bond, and SAMO, and Black Women for Peace, and Team Safer II, and Self Enhancement, and Black Educational Achievement Movement Village—they’ll get space to do…whatever to the diminishing number of students rattling around in those two cavernous buildings.

The fix is in.

Which might be the ultimate lesson dispensed by the Black Excellence Center.

1. The only thing the Albina Vision Trust has built is the $66.7 million “Albina One” social housing project; most of the funds came from various city, state, and federal tax breaks and funding.