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.

She had been circling the decision for years before she finally launched Adre in 2020. She had just finished the Meyer Memorial Trust headquarters, an equity-centered project, and completing it made her ask herself why she kept treating equity work as something she did on the side. “I realized I did not want to go back to solely market-rate development,” she says. 

“I had always known the kind of work I wanted to do, but I had not yet been in a position to fully do it. That was the moment I decided to stop treating equity as my volunteer job and make it my daily work.”

Getting here required years of work across three degrees and multiple disciplines. She studied environmental systems at Cornell, city planning at MIT, and landscape architecture at Harvard, and together they gave her a clear understanding of how development actually works from the ground up. Before Adre, she led development of the first mass timber high-rise permitted in the US. With that resume, she could have gone in a lot of different directions. “The credentials opened doors, but at a certain point the question shifted from what is available to me to what is mine to do,” she says. “The most meaningful use of that experience was to bring those pieces together in service of communities that had historically been excluded, and to do it on my own terms.”

Hallová says most people do not actually understand what a developer does, and she believes that is intentional. The process starts with the land, figuring out who owns it, what the history is, and what it’s going to take to get it ready before anything can be built on it. That part alone can take years. Then comes raising capital from multiple sources at once, including public agencies, philanthropic funders, and mission-aligned lenders, all with their own timelines and requirements. Adre has an 85% success rate at raising grants. Then comes design, permitting, construction. 

“The barriers have been about access to knowledge, capital, relationships, and who is trusted to lead,” she says. “That is exactly what I am working to change.”

Part of that meant building a firm where at least 30% of every dollar spent on development goes to BIPOC and women-owned businesses. To date, Adre has directed $13.1 million to BIPOC, women-owned, and emerging firms, and Adre tracks exactly where every dollar lands. “If you are developing in Black and brown communities but that capital is still leaving through the same channels, you have not changed the outcome,” she says. “You have only changed the address.” She says the industry’s response has been less about resistance and more about curiosity, with other public entities and private companies asking how they are doing it. “BIPOC and women-owned firms have always been qualified. They simply were not getting the calls.”

Her portfolio right now also includes Prismid Sanctuary, a $7 million project she’s co-creating with five-time Grammy winner esperanza spalding that will be the first Net Zero, Black and Indigenous community-designed and owned facility in the Pacific Northwest. The two met through Portland’s arts community, and the project grew from there. What makes Prismid different is that architects didn’t drive the design. The community did, through community design workshops that started in 2022 and are still ongoing. “When art and development share equal ownership, the vision and the process are co-created, resulting in a place that reflects what the community actually needs,” Hallová says.

She also wrote A Kids Book About Real Estate Development, the first of its kind, and is finishing a course called Development for Community, due out later this year. She sees them as part of the same work. “I was thinking about the version of me that didn’t know this path existed,” she says of the book. If she could leave a young Black girl with one thing, it’s this: “That there is a version of her future where she is not just living inside someone else’s decisions. She is the one making them.”

The lot in North Portland that sat vacant for half a century is finally being rebuilt with the community it was taken from in mind.

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