In 2013, Portland officials anticipated the day when they'd celebrate the opening of a Trader Joe's on a prominent corner in Northeast Portland.

After the proposal famously became a gentrification flashpoint and the local disagreement made national news, Trader Joe's pulled out.

Despite the outcry and the harsh national attention it drew, the project moved forward with only minor changes in the end. On Wednesday, a Natural Grocers store opens on the site at 5055 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. instead.

But some of those involved say the unexpectedly intense controversy marked at least something of a turning point, though it remains to be seen whether the city will follow through on some of the promises made in its wake.

"The city is realizing that it must treat North and Northeast Portland similar to how it would treat another neighborhood in the city," said Maxine Fitzpatrick, the longtime director of the housing nonprofit Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives Inc. "It has to seek community voices."

The Trader Joe's proposal became public in 2013, 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 half a million dollars — $2.4 million less than the site's appraised value.

A few weeks later, the previously little-known nonprofit Portland African American Leadership Forum released an open letter accusing the development commission of promoting gentrification while doing nothing to mitigate the displacement of black and low-income residents. Black residents made up nearly three-quarters of the neighborhood's population in 1990, but that share fell as housing costs rose, and today the neighborhood is majority-white.

The letter demanded more community outreach on the deal, which had been reached in private and the anchor tenant of which — Trader Joe's — was not announced until the day the commission approved the sale. The nonprofit also sought an affordable housing component on the site, saying the specialty grocery store would only raise housing costs.

The city defended its decision as an effort to address a "food desert" not served by many grocery stores in an area with a relatively high poverty rate. Officials said at the time that a housing development wouldn't be feasible on the site.

The blowup did cause the city to publicly acknowledge its role in promoting gentrification that caused the displacement of black residents, and the Portland Development Commission since launched an effort to change its image.

The agency began calling itself Prosper Portland last year, in part an effort to move past the agency's history of supporting development that pushed out minority communities and low-income residents.

Kimberly Branam, who took over as the agency's executive director in 2016, said the agency would also devote $32 million in urban renewal funds toward economic opportunities for black residents and others who hadn't benefitted from the city's previous investments in the area. That funding, she said, was a direct result of community activism that grew out of the grocery store site.

"More broadly, it also taught us as an organization about how we need to engage with our community partners," Branam said. "We need to really define and be explicit about and commit to the community benefits."

At the grocery store site, the agency is also reserving half of the retail storefronts for local businesses whose rents will be subsidized. Natural Grocers has committed to hiring a workforce that reflects the diversity of the community, as well as making community space available at no cost.

The city also devoted $20 million toward affordable housing in neighborhoods nearby, and the city held a series of public forums to develop a five-year plan for investing the funds, which were intended to help residents with generational ties to north and northeast Portland neighborhoods.

But a report issued this month found that funds intended to promote homeownership had reached far fewer families than intended, in part because home prices had climbed too high. Applications for subsidized apartments, meanwhile, far outpaced the number of units available.

Cyreena Boston Ashby, the former executive director of the Portland African American Leadership Forum, said it's too soon to tell whether Prosper Portland had changed for the better as a result of the controversy. (The nonprofit's current leaders could not be reached.)

Ashby said there was still no mechanism for the public to hold the agency to account for the impact of its work.

"You can't say that you want a city to be prosperous but not manage the unintended consequences," she said.

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com

503-294-5034

@enjus