The Beatrice Morrow Cannady building opened Thursday, November 8, 2018, in Northeast Portland. It's the first affordable housing development to open under the city's preference policy, which is intended to provide housing for people with historical ties to the predominantly black neighborhoods targeted for urban renewal. (Elliot Njus/Staff)

Dozens of longtime Portlanders whose families were displaced by city-sponsored urban renewal in North and Northeast Portland will soon move into the Beatrice Morrow Cannady building, which opened Thursday.

The $26.7 million building, at 3368 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., is the first affordable housing development to open under the city's preference policy. The policy is intended to provide housing for people with historical ties to the predominantly black neighborhoods targeted for urban renewal in the beginning in the 1960s.

Its 80 apartments, most of them with two or more bedrooms, will be rented to families making no more than 60 percent of the area's median income -- $49,000 for a family of four in 2018.

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Demand far exceeded the building's capacity, city officials said. They received more than 1,500 applications over the course of two weeks for the building and a second project, the 51-unit Charlotte B. Rutherford Place under construction on North Interstate Avenue.

"The units we've built here, they're beautiful," said Bishop Steven Holt, who chairs a committee overseeing the city's affordable housing plan in North and Northeast Portland. "But they have to be just the beginning."

The Beatrice Morrow Cannady building -- named for an African American journalist and civil rights activist in Portland -- sits on land turned over to the affordable housing nonprofit Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives Inc. as an olive branch from the city shortly after the 2013 dustup over a proposed Trader Joe's a few blocks north.

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The Trader Joe's proposal became public when the Portland Development Commission voted to sell a nearly 2-acre site at Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard and Alberta Street to Majestic Realty Co. of California for just over $500,000 -- $2.4 million less than the site's appraised value -- for the grocery store.

A few weeks later, the previously little-known nonprofit Portland African American Leadership Forum released an open letter accusing the city's development commission of promoting gentrification while failing to address the displacement of black and low-income residents.

The ensuing blowup made national news, and protests prompted Trader Joe's to pull out. The project eventually moved forward with Natural Grocers as the anchor tenant at the site, and the city committed $20 million -- later increased to $96 million -- to create affordable housing in North and Northeast Portland.

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Meanwhile, Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives Inc. has embarked on an effort to build 1,000 homes for displaced residents of North and Northeast Portland, most of which would be for purchase rather than rental.

"This is being done in an effort to prevent historic community residents from the volatility of displacement, which this community has experienced more of than any other place I'm aware of," said Maxine Fitzpatrick, the affordable housing nonprofit's executive director.

Beatrice Morrow Cannady building went up on the former Grant Warehouse site, once home to a private stash of improperly stored chemicals that cost more than $1 million to remove. The city acquired the property in 2004.

It sat empty until 2015, when Portland Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Dan Saltzman announced the city was turning the site over to Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives. The announcement came as the city finalized the deal for the Natural Grocers development.

The Portland development firm Gerding Edlen was a development consultant for the building, which was designed by Carleton Hart Architects and built by Colas Construction. Nearly a third of the construction work went to minority and woman-owned businesses, according to Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives.

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-- Elliot Njus

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