After history of loss, Portland’s Albina district builds back

Paul Allen Jr.’s favorite thing about his new North Portland neighborhood is that it’s also his old neighborhood. He grew up here in the 1990s and early aughts, playing basketball with his dad at Overlook Park, hanging out with his siblings and cousins on his grandma’s porch on Emerson and Rodney and attending elementary school at Boise-Eliot, now Boise-Eliot/Humboldt.

These days, his two kids attend the same school: Amani in fifth grade and Amari in fourth.

“I love Boise,” Allen, 32, said of his former school. “It has the same energy.”

But Allen, who worked for years in construction and as a security guard and recently transitioned to an office job for a small nonprofit, said he can’t afford the market rate rents in the historically Black Albina district that three generations of his family have called home. So when he heard about a city policy that would give him priority access to move back to his childhood neighborhood at a subsidized rate, he signed up…

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Photo by Mark Graves