Albina Vision Trust’s JT Flowers on push to transform Portland’s Albina neighborhood
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — It is a major undertaking that will transform North and Northeast Portland’s Albina neighborhood again.
Albina was the traditional heart of Portland’s Black community, especially after the Vanport Flood of 1948 displaced Black families from the City of Vanport, which attracted Black laborers to work at the Kaiser Shipyards during World War II.
The construction of Interstate 5, Memorial Coliseum, a planned expansion of Legacy Health Emanuel Hospital and gentrification pushed many of those families out of the Albina neighborhood, but there’s a major effort underway to bring that energy back.
The Albina Vision Trust is a major stakeholder of nearly half a billion dollars in federal money — so what will this transformation look like?
Albina Vision Trust Government Relations and Communications Director JT Flowers joined Eye on Northwest Politics and says thanks to the federal grant money and money OK’d by the Oregon state legislature’s short session — “Well over a half billion in total investments,” he says — the organization can now work to acquire the 10.5 acres campus that is currently Portland Public School headquarters, which Albina Vision Trust aims to create “more than 1,000 units of housing for working-class Portlanders who will be able to move back into the neighborhood that they were pushed out of,” and then cap Interstate 5 to build the neighborhood again.
The federal grant money will allow for the project to “build a highway cover that’s seismically graded to support development on top of it, that means when you are walking through that neighborhood, biking through that neighborhood, going out to experience things in Lower Albina, you won’t even realize that you’re walking on top of a freeway,” Flowers says, adding, “What we’re talking about is restitching the fabric of community that was severed and destroyed through decades of major capital construction projects that were intentionally built through the Black community here in Portland.”
Flowers also talks about the 1803 Project, which received $400 million from Nike founder Phil Knight in 2023, and how they are collaborating together.
Watch the above video for the full interview.
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