After 50 Years, A Black Woman Developer Is Reclaiming Land Taken From Her Community

By Kimberly Wilson, Essence magazine

For more than fifty years, a lot in North Portland sat empty after the city seized it from the Black community through eminent domain. 

Anyeley Hallová is the one finally building something on it.

As founder and CEO of Adre, a Black women-owned, Portland-based B-Corp, Hallová is developing that 1.7-acre site into 20 homeownership opportunities, 85 affordable rental units, and a 25,000-square-foot Business Hub for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Developing a site that sat contaminated and ignored for half a century came with challenges that delayed the project for years. Her team uncovered severe contamination during development, which triggered a nearly $8 million cleanup before construction could begin. “At its core, this is about returning the land to the community it was taken from,” she tells ESSENCE.

She is one of the vanishingly few Black women even in a position to say that. Black developers make up just 0.4% of the real estate industry in this country, and Black women developers are closer to 0.1%.

“That number tells you everything about who the system was built for and how much persistence it takes to operate within it,” she says.

Learn what led to her action.

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