Sent packing

Russell St. ‘sheriff’ evicted; group forms to fight back

By jennifer anderson

The Portland Tribune, Aug 17, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (9 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Legally blind from glaucoma, Rudy Callier sits outside the Northeast Russell Street duplex that’s been home for 14 years. After being evicted, he’s scrambling for new housing — a chore that activists say has become increasingly common for blacks in Northeast Portland.

Rudy Callier spends most of his time on a white cushioned chair outside his duplex on Northeast Russell Street, watching the world go by.

Watching in the general sense, anyway. The 59-year-old is legally blind due to glaucoma. He can make out movement and dark or light colors, but otherwise uses his leopard-spotted cane to tap his way around the same blocks he’s walked for the past 14 years.

“They call me the Sheriff of Russell,” said Callier, a large man who wears a straw hat and maintains a pointed sense of humor despite the hardships in his life.

From his perch on his “throne,” as he calls it, he’s felt the effects of gentrification up and down Russell Street.

Most of his older, most of them black, neighbors have moved out – either through eviction or because they couldn’t afford the property taxes anymore – and a new set of whiter residents has moved in across the street, into the row of gray and white condominiums with neatly manicured patches of grass.

Now Callier is being displaced as well, because the owner of his home is selling the property. He received his 30-day eviction notice by mail July 18, and after having a neighbor read it to him, was stunned to realize he has until Monday to move out.

“I feel like I’m just old garbage, set out on the curb,” he said. “It’s so frustrating and depressing.”

The private building owner, Bill Wainwright of Portland, told the Tribune: “Rudy’s been a good tenant. It has nothing to do with that. It’s simply because the building is being sold.” Wainwright said he doesn’t know what the new owner has in mind for the property.

Callier guessed his home will be knocked down to make way for more condos. The market value of the 1912 building is $225,910.

Both he and a recently formed advocacy group that is backing him think the situation is a slap in the face to the black community, which slowly has migrated out of North and Northeast Portland due to similar circumstances.

Many have moved to outer Southeast Portland and other areas with plentiful apartments, more affordable real estate and lower property taxes.

“This type of disrespect continues to happen in our community,” said Willie Brown, executive director of the Black Citizens Coalition of Portland Neighborhoods. “We are now a people that are nomad. We’re trying to reunite people here. That is our main objective.”

Housing gets a cash influx

City leaders said they are doing what they can to limit the negative effects of gentrification.

Last fall, the City Council approved a policy requiring the Portland Development Commission to spend 30 percent of the money it raises in urban renewal districts on affordable housing within each district. The amount is unprecedented nationally, city leaders said.

For the Oregon Convention Center urban renewal district, which extends north to Russell Street, that means spending at least $7 million on affordable housing for families over the next five years. The program will be monitored by the city and the PDC every year.

Brown and the other members of the black coalition have heard plans like this come out of City Hall before but said they haven’t seen or felt any tangible results. Brown wants to hold it accountable.

He’s no stranger to city politics. Until May, he was executive director of the city’s Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods but recently decided to leave after he felt the PDC wasn’t listening to the community about a planned development at Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard and Beech Street.

Forthcoming clinic sparks ire

Construction of a three-story Planned Parenthood clinic is slated to begin there in early May, but Brown and other neighbors don’t welcome it, mainly because it will provide abortion services.

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