Pay Up, Y'all!

The bottomless reservoir of white guilt turns the wheels of an amazing real estate hustle. First of two parts on the Albina Vision Trust.

I am addicted to Instagram. It is, for better or (probably) worse, an essential part of my morning ablutions, getting the cerebral circuits firing with a thumbscroll through its parade of weirdness, folly, madness, violence, political lies, scams, gadgets, animals killing each other, airplanes crashes…

…and, occasionally, I am rewarded by the appearance of one of our most fascinating local Instagram stars, JT Flowers, whose liquid voice croons “y’all” in the service of one of the most audacious real estate/development plays in the city’s history: the Albina Vision Trust.

Flowers is the Trust’s director of “gov. affairs and comms,” and the PR face of the Trust’s all-female leadership team¹which, as its website proclaims, aims at nothing less than…

The Albina Vision Trust (AVT) is a community-driven non-profit 501(c)(3) created to buy back land, rebuild community, and reroot Black legacies and Black futures in the heart of Portland’s central city.

..and these are the people who will do it…

If they look a little young, perhaps even naive—well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Their spokesman and deal-cutter with a variety of Progressive Machine™ pols is a fascinating dude, with a biography that’s chock-full of upward mobility and the unique American talent for reinvention.

His online biographies say he “grew up” in Albina. Whether his old home got demolished is left to your imagination. Notably, instead of attending nearby Jefferson High, he entered a “language immersion program” at downtown’s Lincoln High (the high school is red in more ways than its paint job). Jefferson’s web page interviewed him back in 2017, along with a photo of his family’s house in Albina (no address given)…

His life story puts his y’all “street” Instagram persona into perspective: local basketball star recruited by Yale University; segue to a couple of years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship; advisor at a center for sub-Saharan African refugees in Morocco; a Truman Scholarship for budding public servants; intern for Congressman Ol’ Earl Blumenauer; consultant for a progressive pressure group “We the Protesters—Campaign Zero;” public lands coordinator for environmental activists Oregon Wild (which helped lock up Oregon’s “virgin” forests); board chair of another Albina-reparations nonprofit, Williams and Russell CDC; board member at Trimet; proficiency in English, Spanish, French, Arabic.

Along the way, after he, “…had let go of the idea that I was going to play in the NBA, I knew that ship had sailed,” he took a shot at musical stardom…

…with his 2021 project, “Steel Rose,” described thusly, with an eerie prefiguring of his Albina crusade…

I make shit for the kids like me, the people that've been swallowed up whole by the world around them and forced to search for that raw peace within themselves. That's what my music's about—not having anywhere else to go.

It’s a strange framing for, if nothing else, the story of a black kid from a tough part of a tough town who made it out, moved steadily upward…and then wound up trying to recreate the neighborhood he transcended by leaving it behind for other neighborhoods in other cities.

It’s not the first irony we will encounter in dissecting the Albina story.

Flowers has hit it big in his current persona, as the PR voice and deal-cutter of the Trust. Every breathing member of the progressive machine—look about you for the result of their decades in total power—is giddy with support for the Albina Vision Trust’s exercise in “restorative redevelopment.”

Flowers’s relentless pitches on Instagram—complete with drone photography and emoting atop the Moda Center—is pounded home with a kind of “street” persona, heavy on the “y’all” vernacular, in a variety of costumes, some of which have a kind of gangsta style.

Here’s the basic pitch :

The closing-the-sale line is simple (and, as we’ll see, simplified): “The thriving Black neighborhood of Albina was destroyed through decades of racist urban planning.”

To make up for this racial crime, the Albina Vision Trust faces a series of knotty problems. The I-5, Moda Center, and Veterans Coliseum aren’t going anywhere. So the Vision Trust was left with cutting a deal with the Portland School District for its 10.5-acre headquarters/service complex…

…a deal with so many what-ifs that the mind boggles. The other fallback: constructing a cap over the expanded I-5 freeway, upon which the Trust will…and here it gets a bit vague…

…reroot Black legacies and Black futures in the heart of Portland’s central city. Our work intentionally connects place, wealth, joy,² and culture, transforming what we build, how we build, and who we build it for.

On these vague promises the Albina Trust has raked in a ton of public money…

Which isn’t chump-change, y’all. Although, if there’s any certainty in the government/real estate matrix, it’s that the $-millions will grow metastatically. Which it already has, as The Oregonian reported a few days ago…

…though construction is scheduled to begin this summer, the project is far from fully-financed. In fact, the state might have to secure more than $1 billion in additional funding to ensure the project can eventually be completed, according to data from the Oregon Department of Transportation.

This came hard on the heels of yet more ODOT bad news…

In 2017, Oregon lawmakers passed a transportation package that was expected to generate $5.3 billion. Eight years later, revenue forecasts show funding has fallen short of projections, leaving the Oregon Department of Transportation with an ongoing budget crisis. Audits have revealed that ODOT is failing to meet accountability measures set up in the legislation, and many of its projects are behind schedule and over budget.

Why are we not surprised?³

That’s because the Albina Vision Trust is merely the latest player in a chaotic, self-interested, good ol’ boy (now good ol’ girl?) history of corruption, scams, hustles and development “weasels”⁴ on that woebegone patch of Portlandia. It’s a history that would be grimly amusing if not for the fact that Other People’s Money (yours) is being flashed around by people who think they can tinker with the esoteric, opaque, unpredictable dog-eat-dog market—real estate development. Which, let’s remind ourselves, barfed up Donald J. Trump.

Albina Vision Trust’s jump to the head of the restoration line ignores the fact that many other Portland neighborhoods were bulldozed to make politicians happy. Different neighborhoods; different races.

Students of Portland highways may remember that New York parks czar Robert Moses was commissioned by Portland city fathers after World War II, as Wikipedia tells it…

…to envision a program of public improvements that would begin after the end of World War II to provide employment for returning soldiers.

Moses presented the city with a spaghetti bowl of 14 freeways. One—in a display of an Easterner’s ignorance about Portland class politics—was going to be rammed through the Laurelhurst neighborhood.

Before a civic revolt in the late ‘60s ended construction of the east-west Mt. Hood freeway along Powell Bvd, 1,750 homes and one percent of the Portland housing stock were demolished. The homeless tents, bum-blockers, tangled brush, de facto parking lots bordering the street are an enduring remnant of the aborted project.

The buildout of I-205 beginning in 1967 took out 1,448 properties, both businesses and homes, in Portland. Residents of Maywood Park incorporated in a futile effort to stop the bulldozers; 87 homes were torn down anyway. A trench now bisects the east side at what used to be 95th St., forming one of the city’s most enduring psychological boundaries.

The I-405 project slammed through downtown’s west side creating the Stadium freeway, destroying 282 homes, 138 businesses, 131 apartment buildings. Approximately 1,100 households were displaced.

Also unmentioned: The city’s “Urban Renewal” mania targeted local “slums” for demolition and expropriation. For example, the massive “South Stadium” project in the go-go ‘60s replaced what was then “affordable housing” for elderly men (mostly white, unfortunately) and a thriving Jewish neighborhood, including two synagogues and a legendary delicatessen,. They were replaced with grim, modernist slabs (some of which are having problems with occupancy). The toll: At least 1,573 residents were relocated, including 336 families, 289 businesses; 445 buildings were demolished.

So what’s the toll for Albina?

Here it gets interesting: Even the Vision Trust does not give an exact number of homes taken by various government programs in the three-decade assault.

Government officials carved up the neighborhood, demolishing thousands of homes to build Interstate 5, Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the sprawling, 10.5-acre Portland Public Schools (PPS) headquarters facility.

Here’s what’s documented:

1. Veterans Memorial Coliseum (1950s)

   Approximately 450 homes were demolished to make way for the Coliseum, which opened in 1960.

2. Interstate 5 (I-5) Construction (1960s)

   The construction of I-5 through Central Albina resulted in the demolition of about 330 homes, with approximately 25% located in Lower Albina.

3. Emanuel Hospital Expansion (1970s)

   Between 1971 and 1973, the Portland Development Commission demolished an estimated 188 properties, including 158 residential units, for a planned hospital expansion that ultimately did not materialize. This project displaced 88 families and 83 individuals, with 74% of the affected households being black.

…which leaves one to ponder the displacement caused by the construction of the Portland Public Schools complex (the term “headquarters” barely hints at the project’s mass). And there is no source that can attach a number to that displacement. Even the Vision Trust, which has made acquiring the PPS property the keystone of its pitch, doesn’t mention any hard number for all the homes that sat atop the PPS’s 10.5 acres. The best total they can present is the vague, “thousands.”

Overall, the worst that can be said of Portland is that the city was an equal opportunity destroyer. And so, this being Portland, it comes down to race: The city had it in for happy, “thriving” Albina.

Which we’ll get to…

But first, dear readers, here’s your homework assignment before we explore further: tune into YouTube and watch a documentary masterpiece, “What Happened to This Neighborhood?” by Stephen Poole, aka “Steve the Historian.”

Here’s a taste…

Our first indication that, history isn’t simple. And sometimes it lies.

Next, Part Two: The premise, promise, and performance.

1. Weren’t women moving into leadership power positions supposed to create a wonderful new world? How’s that working out in Oregon?

2. “Joy,” besides being a rather mushy term, is not a notable characteristic of any Portland neighborhood we have encountered. We suggest substituting the word, “secure.”

3. According to the Tax Foundation’s new booklet, “Portland’s Weirdly High Taxes,” “Portland residents face some of the highest taxes in the country. City, county, regional, and state taxes on individual and both net and gross business income combine to create a crushing tax wedge, yielding some of the highest marginal rates on wage income nationwide.” And this year’s machine-run legislature has enacted 33 new taxes.

4. The favorite sobriquet of Jack “Bojack” Bogdanski, whose blog is on hiatus.