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During its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day brunch on Jan. 19, Urban League of Portland announced it had vacated its longtime headquarters in the Eliot neighborhood last year because the building had become uninhabitable.
“This is the first time we are publicly acknowledging that the Urban League of Portland is no longer able to operate out of Urban Plaza—and it’s heartbreaking to say out loud,” Mike Schmidt, the league’s general counsel, told attendees. “After four decades of uninterrupted services, that continuity came to an end in 2025 when the building became uninhabitable due to severe disrepair.”
Urban League, a nonprofit that provides housing and services primarily to Black people in North and Northeast Portland, left the office space on the first floor of the building at 10 N Russell St. in early 2025. Around that same time, it began whittling down the number of services it was offering out of Urban Plaza due to concerns about the building’s condition and security issues, including break-ins.
What Schmidt did not address at the annual brunch was the underlying tension: that the building itself is owned by another historically Black-run nonprofit, Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives, and that for years Urban League has sought to regain ownership of the building.
Urban League purchased Urban Plaza, the home of its office and services for decades, in 1985. But the league entered financial distress in the early 2000s, and PCRI agreed in 2006 to buy the building to save it from repossession by the lender. PCRI allowed Urban League to stay in the building, and once the league regained its financial footing, the nonprofit began paying rent to PCRI for office space. Meanwhile, PCRI managed the 24 affordable apartments in the building’s top floors and rented to low-income tenants.
In 2024, due to the building falling into disrepair, PCRI moved out all of the apartment tenants. Schmidt tells WW that the building had become uninhabitable at that point to Urban League’s employees, too; it suffered flooding, pest infestations, squatters moving into the vacant apartments, thefts, and occasional break-ins.
The two nonprofits disagree about the sale discussions that took place in recent years and the details of those discussions.
PCRI general counsel Ernest Warren says it offered to sell the building to Urban League in 2024 for between $2 million and $3 million, and the league counteroffered “about half a million.” He says the PCRI board swiftly shot that offer down. “You shouldn’t disrespect the hand that fed you,” he says.
Schmidt says Warren’s account is inaccurate. He says that, in fact, PCRI offered in early 2023 to sell the building for $3.6 million, which Urban League rejected.
“We were prepared then and now to pay $2 million,” Schmidt says, “roughly equal to what the asset is appraised at.”
Schmidt, who became the Urban League’s general counsel after a single term as Multnomah County district attorney, produced a drafted sale agreement between the two nonprofits dated March 2021 that shows the Urban League offered $2.1 million for the building nearly five years ago. (Those talks also fell through.) He also produced a 2023 appraisal, commissioned by Urban League, that valued the building at just over $2 million. Another appraisal, commissioned by PCRI in September 2022, valued the building at $2.4 million.
Underpinning all of this is a fundamental disagreement over what had been agreed upon two decades earlier between the two nonprofits when PCRI came to Urban League’s aid.
It was always Urban League’s understanding, Schmidt tells WW, that PCRI would transfer the building back to the league when it achieved financial stability. “The parties had a good-faith, informal understanding—often described as a handshake agreement—that Urban Plaza would ultimately return to Urban League once the organization regained stable financial footing," Schmidt says.
Warren says that’s a “mischaracterization,” though he concedes that it was always the hope of PCRI’s former executive director, Maxine Fitzpatrick, that Urban League would eventually regain ownership.
“I know under corporate law that Maxine does not have the power to make that call. That call has to be made by the board of directors,” Warren says. “It has to be proposed in a written resolution, studied and voted on.”
In summer of 2025, the two nonprofits agreed to enter mediation. The two entities accuse each other of inexplicably backing out of mediation just weeks before it was set to begin. After that, talks stalled.
Warren says he doesn’t understand how the two nonprofits’ relationship “regressed into something that was so acrimonious,” and adds that, at least from his point of view, “the door is always open” for a sale.
Now, Urban League appears to be taking its frustration about the building semipublic.
“We want to be back in our historic home,” Schmidt said at the brunch, “but there are currently no funded plans in place to renovate and reopen the building.”
Schmidt tells WW that if Urban League were to regain ownership of the building, “the goal would be to reopen again as soon as we could in order to resume serving the public in that location,” including rehabbing the affordable apartments.
