Challenging But Righteous

A settlement had already been negotiated with the plaintiffs—descendants of Black residents who had been displaced in the 1950s and ’60s from Albina, a once-bustling Portland neighborhood, to make way for a hospital expansion that never panned out. Portland’s city council, and Prosper Portland, its economic and urban development agency, agreed to each pay the plaintiffs $1 million. The ordinance just needed a vote to approve the council’s portion.

J. Ashlee Albies, with Portland’s Albies & Stark, had been in rooms like this before. She was expecting that to be the end of it. But then her clients began to testify.

One walked the council through a financial analysis of the generational wealth families had lost—not just the land and the homes, but the compounding of decades of equity, inheritance, and opportunity. “It was an astronomical number,” Albies says. “Hundreds of millions—a stark contrast to the money on the table.”
The council took a recess. When they came back, they had raised the figure, unanimously, and on their own, to $7.5 million—for a $8.5 million total payout.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Albies says, “I still feel emotional about it. I was sobbing. It was the most amazing experience of my professional life.”

The lawsuit against the city of Portland and Prosper Portland was, from the start, what Albies calls “a challenging legal argument, but a righteous one.” Chief among the legal hurdles facing the plaintiffs: the statute of limitations. Getting past it required invoking the discovery rule, which starts the clock based on when plaintiffs first learn of an alleged conspiracy, not when it actually occurred.

So the clock was reset to when Portland State University’s urban planning department produced a report that overlaid geographic information system mapping to synthesize decades of public data—census records showing where Black residents lived and in what concentrations; property deeds; acquisition records for the hospital; wealth and demographic trends data. All of it stacked on one map.

“Our clients always knew it was [racist policies],” she says. “Putting that in context of the larger pattern of conduct by the hospital and the city—the pieces of this puzzle fit together in a way they had not seen before.”

Albies heard of the case during COVID after a representative with Emanuel Displaced Persons Association 2, a community organization made up of Albina survivors and descendants, reached out. She connected them with Legal Aid Services of Oregon, who prepared the case for court along with the Oregon Law Center. As they were getting ready to file, Albies formally joined the case and led negotiations. The class consisted of the association and 26 individuals.

“I found them so inspiring,” Albies says. “There was so much joy and love and strength within them.”

Along with the money, the settlement included a permanent exhibit at Keller Auditorium, along with seats at the table for its renovation and design committee, and hiring preferences for 10 years for displaced descendants; letters of support from the city for grants to fund a documentary about the displacement; free license to use a Martin Luther King Jr. heritage site; a transfer of various plots of land; and a Descendants Day proclamation.

“If you don’t learn your history, you’re doomed to repeat it,” Albies says. “All of the non-monetaries came from our clients wanting a greater stake in what was going on moving forward.”

Albies became interested in civil rights law as an undergraduate after a friend was wrongfully incarcerated. “I was a middle-class white girl from New Jersey who didn’t understand how something like that could happen,” she says. “Now, having practiced for 20 years, I understand. It’s almost designed to happen.”

She finds herself drawn toward protest cases, impact litigation, and the relationship between law and mass organizing. The current political climate, if anything, has intensified those tendencies. “We’re seeing an administration that is very hostile to anything that’s related to equity and promoting the issues of fairness and dignity for all,” she says. “That has a chilling effect. But we’re stronger when we act together, and resistance is a big part of making the world how you want it to be.”

In that council chamber, Albies watched what good governance can look like. “Council members took seriously that they were harmed by the legacy of the city’s conduct, and offered a community-based solution,” she says. “These people and their harm was seen.” 

A Team Effort

Attorneys who worked on the case, Albies says, included Ed Johnson, Steve Walters, Grace Badik and MariRuth Petzing from Oregon Law Center, with Loerit Perez as their paralegal; and Diane Nguyen, Shelby Smith and Rebecca Morgan from Legal Aid Services of Oregon, with Leon Simo as their paralegal. “My paralegal was Lisa Boucher,” Albies says.