City Council Approves and Increases Central Albina Settlement

UPDATE: The Portland City Council voted unanimously Thursday evening to not only approve a settlement with a group of displaced Black Portland residents and their descendants, but to increase the amount from the proposed $2 million to $8.5 million.

Councilor Loretta Smith made the motion to amend the settlement agreement.

“We have a new council today,” Smith said. “We have new ears. We have new eyes. Our response must be deliberate, comprehensive and rooted in fairness and justice, so that both sides feel like they engaged in good faith negotiations.”

“When our attorneys bring us a settlement, I typically trust their careful balancing of our legal responsibilities and the limitations of what is possible,” Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney said. “And I generally would not amend that. But this case calls for us to do something different, not just legally but morally. So I want to thank our colleague, Councilor Smith, for putting forward a proposal that helps us do more for these plaintiffs today.”

The settlement amounts to $327,000 per plaintiff, before attorneys’ fees.

Editor's Note: This story was updated June 6, 2025 with the new settlement amount.

Diane Nguyen of Legal Aid Services of Oregon called the resolution "a remarkable testament to these 26 individuals' commitment to honoring the dignity and hard work of their displaced elders."

The lawsuit was filed in 2022 seeking redress for the 158 residential and 30 commercial properties that were demolished in the early 1970s in the name of removing urban blight and expanding Emanuel Hospital. Of those forced to relocate, often with little to no compensation, 74% were Black.

Adding further injury to the displaced, the hospital expansion never occurred and many of the area’s former residents saw their old homes demolished only to become parking lots or vacant lots.

Erasing Community

The city had already displaced hundreds of families from the lower Albina area in the 1950s to make way for an I-5 expansion, following a common trend in American urban planning that used a growing interstate system as rationale to divide or decimate Black and Brown neighborhoods. The practice was so widespread that Pres. Biden included $20 billion in his 2021 infrastructure bill to reconnect neighborhoods devastated by roadway projects.

But as the plaintiffs attest, this practice was still in use in Portland in the 1970s.

The lawsuit states the effort was part of a "conspiratorial effort to rid Central Albina of its predominantly Black inhabitants."

“Black residents were robbed of their investment and inheritance,” the lawsuit reads. “Many of them went from a self-governing neighborhood with ownership and control to becoming a renter class forced to look outside of themselves to solve their problems. The displacement and demolition of Central Albina severely compromised the community’s ability to control their own destiny. It eradicated plaintiffs’ political power, and worst of all, it fractured families.”

The 26 plaintiffs are part of the Emanuel Displaced Persons Association 2, and filed the civil rights lawsuit against the city of Portland, Prosper Portland -- which at the time of the displacements was known as the Portland Development Commission – and Legacy Emanuel Hospital. Legacy Emanuel settled with the plaintiffs last year for an undisclosed amount.

The Emanuel Displaced Persons Association 2 (EDPA2) plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from the Oregon Law Center, Legal Aid Services of Oregon and the firm Albies & Stark.

What Was Lost

Central Albina was a flourishing community of Black residents and Black-owned businesses. Black and white photos of the since-razed properties show well kept homes in architectural styles that remain popular and in demand today. Attorneys calculated the estimated value of each plaintiff’s family home, finding that the majority would be worth more than half a million dollars in today’s real estate market.

As documented in the suit, the expulsion of Albina residents served to re-traumatize many families that had managed to purchase homes after fleeing VanPort during the 1948 flood, like plaintiff Juanita Biggs' grandparents, who had come to Oregon after surviving a previous flood and sawmill fire in Louisiana in 1927. They resided at 3233 North Vancouver Avenue, and Biggs’ grandfather died shortly before the forced move.

“While they were forcing (my grandmother) out they were telling her they were going to get her a better home and stuff like that, but it was nothing like where she had been living,” Biggs said. “The neighborhood was rat-infested, the foundation cracked and water was running into the basement. That thing was just falling apart.

"All the hard work that my grandparents did, their dreams, our dreams, all of that was just taken away.”

Many plaintiffs described the safety they enjoyed growing up in close-knit neighborhoods, and the security of living in a home often owned by their families, and in many cases paid off. Because so many of their neighbors lived, worked and worshiped in the same area, there was a sense of resilience and a resourcefulness made necessary by red-lining and racist lending practices.

“Because we couldn’t get loans, if you didn’t have real, real solid support behind you, you were destined just to disappear into the dust,” plaintiff Bobby Fouther said, recalling his childhood in the house that used to stand at 3222 North Gantenbein Avenue.

Plaintiff Connie Mack said her parents had paid off their home at 2732 North Kerby Avenue and were planning to invest in a second house with a G.I. loan when they were forced to move. Instead of building on the family’s wealth, her parents lost a huge asset and were forced to use the investment money to buy a house across town.

“It was tough being one of three Black kids in a school,” Mack said. “It was hard for me trying to find a place to fit in. And I think that reflected on a lot of my life as I grew up, and it affected me in the long run.”

The destabilizing impact of the forced relocations went far beyond real estate concerns. Claude Bowles remembered the pride his grandfather had in the stately family home at 223 North Cook Street.

“My grandfather would tell me, ‘I want you to hold onto this house, to just make sure that we had something to show for it, all of the hard work.’

"The home was paid for,” Bowles said.

His grandfather emphasized that Bowles should also keep the home as a safe landing pad for his sisters, should they end up in bad marriages. Instead, Bowles watched as his grandfather not only lost the home, but had to put off retirement to afford an inferior house outside of their beloved neighborhood.

“I remember being moved out of that 3,000-plus square foot house into a 966-square-foot, two-bedroom home as a small kid,” Bowles said. “My dad owned the tavern around the corner from my grandfather’s house. That was destroyed…(My grandfather) was 60 years old, he was eligible to get out of there and retire at 62, the house paid for. I remember him having to hang onto that job and work more years, in order to pay the new mortgage on this smaller home.”

There are recurring themes throughout the plaintiffs’ stories: Emanuel representatives using intimidation tactics to force families to abandon their homes, usually without compensation. Survivors and descendents recall the hospital and city’s urgency in clearing families out of their houses for the supposed expansion, only for the houses to sit empty for years or even a decade before being demolished.

Plaintiff Donna Marshall’s parents fought back against demands they vacate their family home at 2740 North Vancouver Avenue, as well as their property at 247 North Fargo Street where they located their family construction business. The court ruled against them, and the family resettled on Northeast 107th Place – but only after winning a discrimination lawsuit against the sellers of that property, who had removed the house from the market after finding out the Marshalls were Black.

Historic Corruption

Some former Central Albina residents said they were told they were being relocated due to a planned veterans hospital, and only later found out the project was actually an expansion of Emanuel.

Since then, evidence of a deeper collaboration between the city and Emanuel has surfaced: A 1962 study by the Portland Development Commission concluded that Central Albina was "blighted," a vague term with clear racist implications in the part of the city where about 80% of Black Portlanders resided. This designation would allow the groups to take advantage of what were at the time new federal urban renewal grants.

“The study was a critical step in furtherance of a conspiracy that had developed between Emanuel, the City and (the Portland Development Commission) sometime in the late-1950s,” the suit alleged. “In the absence of a preexisting secret agreement between defendants, Emanuel would not have begun to acquire and destroy properties in Central Albina before the study was conducted and long before the City had been authorized to use the tools of urban renewal to complete the destruction of the Albina neighborhood and the displacement of plaintiffs’ families.”

Under the terms of the settlement, the city will also recognize a yearly Descendants' Day, starting this year. The city will also support plaintiffs in any grant applications to finance a documentary about the Central Albina displacement.

“What does matter is, now this information is out there for the general public,” Fouther said. “You’ve got to pay restitution. What you do in the dark comes to the light. Well, here we are – the light.”