Black-Owned Businesses and BIPOC Construction Professionals See New Era

Standing before the newly completed Albina One housing development, elected leaders marked the grand opening of 94 new affordable units by declaring a new era in restorative redevelopment. 

“Albina One is a living testament to the power of community taking action, for digging in and holding hands and refusing to take no for an answer, and building forward towards a more resilient future for us all,” U.S. State Rep. Maxine Dexter said. 

Colas Construction president and CEO Andrew Colas“This is a homecoming for me,” Mayor Keith Wilson said. “My family grew up in Portland. They grew up in Albina. My mother went to Boise Elementary, I was born at Emanuel. This once was the most vibrant community in Portland. Unfortunately decades of so-called urban renewal, including the construction of the I-5 in the Rose Quarter, left lasting scars in the neighborhood…My job today is to flip that script.” 

Alongside effusive praise from elected officials, members of the project team offered their technical and personal observations to drive home what a remarkable and precedent-setting achievement the project is. 

As co-emcee for the opening event, educator Nichole Watson, said, “Think about the community balconies with the million-dollar views our babies get to have, of the city we love so much.”

BIPOC Workforce

Colas Construction oversaw the design and building of Albina One. The Black-owned family business was founded by Haitian-born Hermann Colas Jr., and his son, the company’s president and CEO Andrew Colas, spoke about the challenges of seeing the project through during the pandemic: When the cost of the project was first estimated in 2020, plywood cost about $38 a piece, he said. In 2023, that cost had ballooned to nearly $96.

Perhaps even more pronounced was another industry hazard that Colas is all too familiar with. 

“When you are a group of people that have a grand vision, that come from a community that isn’t supposed to have grand visions, there’s always a double standard,” Colas said. “I’ve seen it my entire career…and that double standard plays out in a lot of different ways: It can come out in the media, where they’re questioning the cost of a project, and why’s it so expensive? But they’re not actually digging into the details of the project. They’re not looking at how this incredible group of people from Albina Vision Trust found funding sources to make this one of the first all-electric buildings, so that the operational efficiencies of this building over the long-term are actually much less than most projects.”

The electrical work, he noted, was done by the Black-owned Affordable Electric, Inc. 

Another challenge was that some subcontractors had never worked on such a large project. 

“Their suppliers had never worked with them on a project this big, so what do suppliers do? They say you have to pay cash on delivery. Well when you’re delivering a project like this, that’s a million dollars. What do most companies do? They say, well, you’ve got to put that money up.” 

“What does our accounting do? They put the money up for them, they meet with those distributors and suppliers, and they make them understand: ‘If you want to work with us again, you’re going to give them the line of credit that they deserve so that they can do this on their own.’”

Addressing History

Albina One opens amid an eventful couple of years for Black Portland residents who have suffered from the city’s legacy of racism and displacement, specifically in North and Northeast neighborhoods. 

Chandra RobinsonIn June, the city council settled with 26 former Central Albina residents and their descendants over racist "urban renewal" policies that led to homeowners' forced removal, often with little to no compensation, in the name of making way for an Emanuel Hospital expansion that failed to materialize. The council voted to increase the settlement amount from $2 million to $8.5 million.

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.

Since its founding in 2018, Albina Vision Trust has become the largest restorative redevelopment nonprofit in the country. In March of last year, AVT secured $450 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program, to fund the foundation’s work on the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project. 

‘Afro Deco’

At Saturday’s grand opening, Andrew Colas pointed out that 38% of the construction work on Albina One was done by Black- and Brown-owned businesses, and 64% of the craftspeople working on the development were Black, Brown and women. 

That included Chandra Robinson, whom Watson identified as one of only two Black women architects in the state. 

Robinson emphasized that the project was focused, first, on creating the best apartments possible – a place where kids would be proud to bring their friends after school. She said she took inspiration from the amenities she enjoyed while growing up in affordable housing, like safe outdoor spaces to play.

“There’s solid surface counters, beautiful casework, undercounter lighting, beautiful windows, a really nice HVAC system that brings in fresh air so kids don’t get asthma living inside the apartments,” she said. “There’s this plaza for kids to play in, but there’s a north courtyard that is well enclosed and feels really safe and comfortable for little kids. There’s a laundry room here with a window so you can look out and see what your kids are doing.”

Robinson noted the design was inspired in part by AVT Executive Director Winta Johannes’s suggestion they consider Afrofuturism as a guiding concept.

“Afrofuturism is about all of us continuing to grow and advance and prosper, and that’s what Albina Vision Trust is about,” Robinson said.

“It’s about generational wealth, it’s about prosperity, it’s about abundance and it’s about reclaiming this area that is for all of us.”

The design was important, Robinson added, “so that when you look at the building you can really tell that it is different and it is intentional.”

Kayin Talton Davis, an artist who is also an AVT staff member, designed the motif seen on the side of the building and integrated throughout the building’s interior.

“The design you see looks like a leaf pattern, it looks like growth,” Robinson continued. “It’s people and it’s plants reaching up to the sky and growing, because there are Black spaces in the future. 

“Academically when you think about this design, it looks a little bit Art Deco. But what you might not know is that Art Deco is actually Afro Deco, because Art Deco motifs came from Yoruba furniture designs. So this is actually Afro Deco.”

To Robinson, Albina One represents a different kind of architecture. She hopes it inspires the creation of more expressive buildings in the city, where design considerations might include aesthetic features that represent the cultures of those who live and work inside. 

For more information about Albina One, visit www.albinaone.com.

In an earlier version of the story, Andrew Colas was misquoted as saying “What does the county do?” when the correct quote was “What does our accounting do?” We regret the error.